Stories Around

* * *

Proyectos Ultravioleta presents a solo booth by Akira Ikezoe, featuring a selection of recent paintings from his ‘Stories Around’ and ‘Chart of Darkness’ series, alongside the stop-motion animation ‘Clam and the Sun’ (2025), originally commissioned for the 16th Sharjah Biennial.

What binds these bodies of work is Ikezoe’s commitment to exploring interconnectedness, not through cause-and-effect, but through resonance, metaphor, and intuitive relation. Across both media, elements that might seem unrelated—plant and machine, body and mineral, ancient myth and speculative future—interact with one another in strange but meaningful ways. This echoes the often-invisible links that structure our world: ecological, spiritual, atomic, and cultural. Ikezoe’s work reminds us that the world is not only built from rational systems, but also from unseen patterns of kinship and interdependence.

Together, the paintings and animation build a unified symbolic ecosystem. Where the paintings offer more playful and more reflective associations, the animation sets those metaphors into motion—reminding us how myth and imagination can be tools for survival, understanding, and coming together in an age dominated by isolation and lack of connection. The booth becomes a space to reflect on how all things—living and inert, past and future, invented and inherited—are bound together in ways we may not always see, but which art can help reveal and point towards new ways to feel.