Image: HangarBicocca, Milan
Pirelli HangarBicocca will inaugurate ‘XYZ’, the first solo exhibition by Aki Sasamoto in a European institution, on Wednesday 16 September 2026 from 7 pm. The exhibition opens to the public the following day, running from 17 September 2026 through 17 January 2027 at the Milan venue, with free admission. Members of Pirelli HangarBicocca will be able to see the show in preview on 16 September from 5 pm.
Curated by Roberta Tenconi with Tatiana Palenzona, ‘XYZ’ presents more than two decades of Sasamoto’s interdisciplinary practice. According to the institution’s announcement, the artist’s work brings together science and intuition, mathematics and feeling, absurdity and seriousness, and the everyday and the extraordinary. The exhibition is described as a path that places sculpture, installation and performance in close relation, with attention to human and social relationships, memory and emotional experience.
Sasamoto, born in Kanagawa, Japan, in 1980 and based in New York, works at the boundary of performance, sculpture, installation and video. Pirelli HangarBicocca says she creates environments and situations in which people and objects interact, exploring the relationship between body and space and aiming to involve audiences on multiple sensory levels. Her use of everyday objects, often altered or distorted, is presented as part of a tragicomic staging that challenges conventional modes of perception and extends the possibilities and limits of sculptural and performative language.
The title ‘XYZ’ is itself presented as a key to the exhibition’s structure. The museum says it refers at once to the coordinates of a Cartesian system, the last letters of the alphabet and variables still to be determined. That open framework is echoed in the exhibition’s sequence of installations, sculptures, videos and performances, which is intended to operate as a field of relations rather than a fixed linear narrative.
The exhibition also brings together works from different moments in Sasamoto’s practice, maintaining the autonomy of each work while setting them in dialogue. In the institution’s account, this approach produces a system of meanings in continuous transformation and encourages visitors to reflect on the present and on the many possible trajectories of contemporary life. The show is also identified on the museum’s website as a future exhibition in the Shed.
Pirelli HangarBicocca describes ‘XYZ’ as the artist’s first institutional exhibition in Europe. The website’s artist text adds that Sasamoto’s practice draws on disciplines including dance, mathematics, social psychology, meteorology and eco-behavioural sciences, and notes her studies in dance at Wesleyan University and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University’s School of the Arts. The institution also lists prior solo projects at venues including Studio Voltaire in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Para Site in Hong Kong, Queens Museum in New York, The Kitchen in New York and SculptureCenter in New York.
The Milan exhibition will be open Thursday to Sunday from 10.30 am to 8.30 pm. It remains scheduled through 17 January 2027.
