Shoji Kato: Mountains and Valleys

This art book is a presentation of an artwork and a translation of its exhibition (all three having the same title) at Hippolyte gallery in the autumn of 2017.

This book includes the photographic, textual and voice-over parts of the work – they are disjointed and shuffled elements taken from 39 geometrically incarnated public monuments standing in different countries and different contexts. The uncoupled elements yield ambiguous distances that give rise to doubts and new insights.

Featuring exhibition views and texts contributed by Taru Elfving, Maaretta Jaukkuri, Mika Savela and Elina Vainio, this book offers unsettling cross points of observation on the places of the human psyche in relation to the power of ‘geometrical foldings’ and to metaphorical mountain and valley origami foldings.

It is an invitation to imagine the entwining of money, matters, modes, motivations, marks and memories – to imagine how moments and movements are inseparable – and how those solid and fixed objects are both in sync and out of sync with something soft, subtle and vital.