Spinning is a poetic portrait of artist Ai Ozaki’s personal experience of relocating from Japan to the Netherlands for a two-year artist residency. This visual diary draws on daily footage captured across the seasons to reveal both the shifting landscape around her and her own inner transformation.
From sunburned skin to the tender act of raising silkworms, Ozaki reflects on the porous boundaries between body, memory and environment. In a state of transition, neither fully shed nor cocooned, she uses words and images to touch the blurry spaces of becoming, seeking a connection that is loose, flexible and quietly strong.
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Ai Ozaki
Director
Ai Ozaki (she/her)
Director
Tokyo (Japan), Amsterdam (Netherlands)
Ai Ozaki is a Tokyo-based artist who investigates the ways her body interacts with ‘the Other’. For Ozaki, ‘the Other’ encompasses not only other people but also all living things and even her own self. Her practice centres on imagining communication with these “close yet so far incomprehensible beings and things”.
Her work is deeply rooted in themes such as ‘sex, human nature’ and ‘eating, food, living’. These themes arise from the universal experience of having a body, as well as personal observations, including her parents’ work with pixelation, which led her to perceive people on screen as “like animals”. Ozaki finds the behaviour of animals and living things to be a “microcosm of life,” connecting her art to a “big rhythm”. Her artwork is directly informed by her daily life – her body, cooking and conversations with friends – as she explores how personal experiences, emotions and images can connect and be shared across different times and cultures.
Ozaki is a graduate of Tokyo Zokei University and was a Resident Artist at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten.
Part of Between Breath & Lens: A curation of international short films
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