Takasaki – A handshake could hardly be warmer and more comprehensive. As a greeting, the woman, who is a local celebrity here, offers one of her two broad fingers and the muscles of the hand as a kind of floor on which one can place one’s hand. She then places the other finger on top of it in an encircling movement, like a clam. “Does it feel soft?” Asks the Japanese photo artist Mari Katayama and smiles. It does. And you immediately understand how this woman makes her body parts, which other people would see as a handicap, the center of her art.
There isn’t just the left hand, which consists of just two fingers. For autographs, Katayama places them on a piece of paper, draws a silhouette around it and writes her name on it. But even more noticeable are their legs, or the absence of them, in the place of which there are two prostheses. The viewer also encounters this physical peculiarity in her works. The often erotic photos make you wonder at first, perhaps accompanied by a brief shock. But you quickly get warm with the sight, begin to like it, to admire it.
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