Aki Sasamoto’s XYZ opened to the public at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan on 17 September, activating the exhibition through three performances staged across its first day. Running in the Shed until 17 January 2027, the project is the Japanese-born, New York-based artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe and brings together installations, sculpture, video and performance from more than two decades of work.
The title sets out the exhibition’s method. XYZ can mark the final letters of the alphabet, three-dimensional coordinates or variables used to locate a particle; it can also stand for the discreet American reminder to check an open zipper. Sasamoto turns those meanings into a system that is precise without becoming closed, moving between measurement, embarrassment, memory and physical comedy.
Coordinates for bodies and objects
Conceived specifically for Pirelli HangarBicocca, the exhibition connects autonomous works through graphs, diagrams, lines and rotating mechanisms. Everyday objects become partners rather than props. They redirect bodies, impose rules and create collisions between logic and intuition. The result is neither a chronological survey nor a conventional stage: it is an environment in which sculpture stores the possibility of action, even when the performer is absent.
That possibility became visible on opening day. Sasamoto presented Sounding Lines with catch or be caught at 11 a.m., Secrets of My Mother’s Child at 4 p.m. and Centrifugal March at 7 p.m. The sequence made performance part of the exhibition’s public beginning, not an accessory added after installation. Each work tested how gesture, sound and movement can change the meaning of a material arrangement.
Earlier this year, a Studio International review of Sasamoto’s Grilled Diagrams in London described an artist who used utensils, ingredients and the audience’s placement to build a narrative in motion. An Art21 profile likewise follows her ability to move between improvised performance and carefully engineered objects. XYZ expands that tension to the scale of a twenty-year survey. Awarded the Calder Prize in 2023, Sasamoto now leads graduate studies in sculpture at Yale, a position that reflects how fully her practice crosses inherited disciplinary boundaries.
A system built to keep changing
The Shed gives the project an unusually charged container. Built in the 1920s for locomotive and agricultural machinery production, the low brick hall retains the rhythm of an industrial workshop. Sasamoto’s mechanical and diagrammatic language meets that history without illustrating it. Instead, the space becomes another variable: a coordinate through which bodies, objects and stories can be recalculated.
The institution now lists XYZ as a current exhibition, while Artforum’s Artguide and Abbonamento Musei independently record the Milan presentation. Those confirmations matter because the work is built around activation: the first day did not merely open a display but established the exhibition as a live, changing system. Sasamoto’s objects may appear measured and diagrammed, yet their meaning remains contingent on who enters, how they move and what happens next.