For her first solo exhibition in Belgium, Hisae Ikenaga presents a selection of existing and new works. The title Anatomies of Use refers to the subtle displacements that structure her practice: shifts of function, status, and meaning. Industrial and domestic objects are appropriated and reconfigured, their use suspended, their familiarity unsettled. Forms appear stabilized, as if halted after transformation, revealing tensions between use, form, and memory.
Ceramic works extend this reflection through the figure of the cylinder, borrowed from industrial lamination tools and transposed into pottery. The motif becomes form, matrix, and trace of gesture. In a new video in collaboration with film director Paula Onet, Soft Dissection, artisanal and medical gestures intersect, opening an ambiguous space between workshop and laboratory. Through these displacements — from tool to object, from gesture to image — Ikenaga constructs an archaeology of the present, where each form becomes trace, sculpture, and question.
About Hisae Ikenaga
Born in Mexico City in 1977 to a family of Japanese origin, based in Europe for more than twenty years and currently living in Luxembourg, Hisae Ikenaga has developed an artistic language that unfolds at the intersection of design, archaeology, and surrealism. She studied art theory and visual arts in Mexico, Kyoto, Barcelona, and Madrid. Her work reveals a fascination with the afterlife of manufactured objects: their programmed obsolescence, their capacity for transformation, and their potential to host new forms of life. Each sculpture embodies a tension between the industrial and the handmade, between the cold logic of production and the fragile warmth of the human hand.
