In Yuko Mohri’s large-scale installations she reconfigures and recontextualizes everyday objects, household utensils, and disparate mechanicals to explore ideas of automation, control, and nonhuman agency. Harnessing the conditions of coincidence, chance, and fluctuation, her projects—many of which adhere to the philosophy of “no boundaries”—are inspired by the experimental 1960s-era Fluxus movement as well as avant-garde composers such as John Cage. 

Two of her recent bodies of works, Moré Moré (Leaky): Variations (2022) and Decomposition (2021), were brought together in “Compose,” her presentation in the Japan Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Building on earlier photographic series of patchwork repairs in Tokyo metro stations, Variations comprised networks of hoses, bottles, buckets, sponges, and pumps that catch and channel rainwater from the building’s oculus. For the installation Decomposition, meanwhile, she passed electricity through pieces of fruit placed on old domestic furniture; the current was then converted into sound that changed pitch as the electrical resistance fluctuated. Subject to the weather and natural processes of decay, Mohri’s installation became an autonomous, self-contained ecosystem that reacted to, and channeled its immediate surroundings, constantly shifting according to the conditions.