< Rinko Kawauchi
At the edge of the everyday world
Rinko Kawauchi
Oct 19, 2024 - Feb 16, 2025
Arnolfini, Bristol (UK)
Celebrating over twenty years of extraordinary practice, internationally acclaimed Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi will be showing at Arnolfini as part of Bristol Photo Festival in Autumn 2024, marking her first major UK exhibition.Kawauchi’s photographs often focus on finding beauty in the ordinary moments of everyday life. Her work is characterised by a poetic, dreamlike quality that imbues mundane scenes and objects with a sense of wonder and transcendence.

Centred around the series M/E - letters which stand for both 'Mother' and 'Earth' and 'Me' - the exhibition moves between explorations of the natural world's fragile beauty
to the gentle rhythm of domestic scenes, capturing the connections and continuity of life on this 'planet we call home'.

Kawauchi began shooting M/E in 2019, drawing upon images shot on location of Iceland's volcanoes and ice floes and Hokkaido's snowy landscapes, alongside scenes of everyday home life from the COVID-19 pandemic, inviting visitors to reconsider what we think we know about the workings of human life and our relationship with nature.

At the edge of the everyday world highlights the small, personal movements within our lives that go on to create larger, universal journeys, bringing together photographic prints, text and video works trom atect M/h and earlier seminal series Amersuchi and AILA, alongside the film installation Illuminance, an eternally unfinished work revealing Kawauchis astonishing oeuvre.

A showcase of Kawauchi's photobooks, which encompass over thirty titles, creates a further journey through her long career, exploring her work through both imagery and text.

Kawauchis poetic photography finds a lyricism within our ordinary lives, grounded within explorations of care, identity and environmental sustainability - which also lie at the heart of Arnolfini's programme - inspiring audiences to reconsider our fragile relationship to the universe, ecology and time, whilst drawing micro and macro connections between the everyday and protound moments that constitute our lives.

At the edge of the everyday world is part of Bristol Photo Festival an international biennial of contemporary photography. The exhibition and publication are kindly supported by The Japan Foundation.