Born in Sendai City of Miyagi Prefecture in 1986. Completed a masters course of photography of the Graduate School of Art and Design, Musashino Art University in Tokyo in 2012. She won the 23rd Miki Jun Award for her Known Unknown in 2022. She studied under photographer Hiroshi Yamazaki, who is known as a pioneer of conceptual photography. She has engaged herself in photo projects that intertwine the visible and the invisible, interpreting memory and identity as being correlated with social events and living conditions. She is currently based in Tokyo.
Her major exhibitions include Anonymous Danes held at Nikon Salon in 2024, Known Unknown held at Nikon Salon in 2021 and 2022, and also at Gallery TURNAROUND in 2022, and HOME works 2015 at Tokyo Wonder Site Shibuya in 2015. She also showed her photographs at group shows such as Shashin wa Kataru (Photography Speaks) in Vol. 3 of the “Kotoba to Image (Words and Images) exhibit series — Takashi Kuraya & Iwauko Murakami, held at Kanzan Gallery in 2017.
Iwauko MURAKAMI
- Contact person :
- Iwauko Murakami
- Position :
- Artist / Photographer
- Link :
- https://murakamiiwauko.com/
Last update : 09 Oct. 2024
Works
Known Unknown
In this project, I just asked women to show me their natural looks and acts as usual as if I was not there. In each image, she never shows her face, and she is never looking at you. The observer and the subject are absolutely disconnected.
When historical, dominant directions between "seeing" and "being" are disrupted, we will see how we can find "hers" on the photographic surface, whose visibility and invisibility would go hand in hand addressing individuals of us today.
Untitled Origami
Liana, Latvia
In this project, I asked someone to write down their narratives lying in their mind and memories in which animals live. I folded the animals according to each story with specific materials, a sheet of paper on which animals are described. Then, I photographed them together.
This project provides anonymous and unknown animals with literal bodies and connects them to photographic works. It enables us to share invisible ideas.
HOME works 2011
This project serves to consider and see what happened in my mother's house after the great earthquake on 11th March in 2011. The house was located in a city near the center of the shock. Fortunately no significant damage was left on the house; however, I had been suffering strong feelings which were hard to express.
After two months, I tried to face that and launched the project to see continuous events and a real experience of my own with all my grief and gratitude to our life. I had looked, heard, imagined, and recorded as photographs with anxiety and relief for a year. I do not want to "make sense" of those days, but through this project, I have accepted them as they were.