Lecture Saeri Kiritani, Artist in Residence at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Saeri Kiritani is a Japanese artist living/working in NYC. She works within the mediums of performance and video, which also take the form of documentations that are transformed into wall-based works.  Her works deal with the psychological distance, or alienation, between the superficial and the archetypal, both of which operate through a symbolic framework that is translated by exploring the contrast between comforting and disturbing events.   Some of her works are created initially for the public sphere, where they occur on city streets, subways, and in the country at farms, etc., so that they can claim the intellectual focus and social exception to an overt and abundant commonplace.

Saeri studied art and humanities at San Francisco State University, painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and painting/mixed media at the University of Pennsylvania.  She has had solo exhibitions at several museums and galleries including the City Museum (Split, Croatia), The International Center (New York City), and the Inform Gallery (Kanazawa, Japan).  Her selected works have been exhibited in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC., the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, The Project Biennial of Contemporary Art in Bosnia, the Croatian Association of Artists Museum, the Louvre Museum in Paris and various group shows at galleries in the US, Europe and Japan.