There’s a category of installation that is only half-present when nobody is operating it. The objects are there, the room reads as an artwork, and the thing that makes it work is a person doing something specific at a specific time. Documenting it is hard. Touring it is harder.
XYZ, at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, is a survey of an artist who has built a twenty-year practice inside that problem. It opened September 17, 2026 and runs to January 17, 2027 — Aki Sasamoto’s first solo exhibition at a European institution, curated by Roberta Tenconi with Tatiana Palenzona, organised in collaboration with Kunsthalle Wien.
The title is four jokes at once
XYZ means, simultaneously:
- the last three letters of the alphabet, implying a list that continues past its end
- the three axes of the Cartesian coordinate system
- in quantum physics, variables describing the probability of a particle occupying a position
- “eXamine Your Zipper” — the American euphemism for telling someone their fly is open
That range is not decoration. It’s an accurate description of how Sasamoto’s work operates: mathematics and embarrassment in the same gesture, treated with equal seriousness.
What’s in it
The exhibition unfolds as a sequence of installations, sculptures, videos and performances built around connection, the complexity of relationships, and how social norms press on the body and on memory. Found objects do most of the structural work — Sasamoto’s practice sits on the common ground between sculpture and performance, using her own body as the tension between the two.
The best-known piece here is Wrong Happy Hour (2014), first performed at JTT in New York. It starts as a happy hour: people drink beer, they chat. Sasamoto built a bar with two parallel counters and, wearing periscope glasses that distort her vision, works through an interaction with bottles and objects. Then she begins moving the mobile wall from behind. The counters function as rails, the lights are rigged to a pulley system and get dragged towards the exit, and eventually everybody is pushed out into the street.
The piece came out of her observation that the after-work drink is a quasi-religious ritual for New Yorkers. It ends by evicting the congregation.
Go while she’s there
This is the practical note, and for this show it’s the whole planning decision.
Sasamoto will be at the museum through September and October to activate all the works that require it, Wrong Happy Hour included. On October 22 she is in conversation with Massimo Bernardi, director of MUSE in Trento.
After October, a substantial portion of XYZ is an exhibition of objects that were recently doing something. HangarBicocca’s scale — a former industrial building that swallows most shows put into it — will suit the sculptural material fine. But a bar rigged to a pulley system, standing still, is documentation of a work rather than the work.
If you can only get to Milan once between now and January, get there before November.
Related Reading
- Aki Sasamoto: An Artist Walks into a Bar — Art21 “New York Close Up” (YouTube)
- Aki Sasamoto — Pirelli HangarBicocca
- Guida alla mostra: Aki Sasamoto — Pirelli HangarBicocca
- Wrong Happy Hour — Aki Sasamoto
- The Essential Works of Aki Sasamoto — ArtAsiaPacific
- Aki Sasamoto is Feeling Stretched — Art21 (YouTube)