Mariko HORI
about the artist
Mariko Hori is a Japanese-Dutch multidisciplinary artist working across installation, performance, and socially engaged, research-based practices. She is based in The Hague, the Netherlands, and occasionally in Belgrade, Serbia.
She is also a vocalist for the Tokyo-based experimental band Information, and the initiator of Soro-sorO, an international experimental event platform.
Initially trained in architecture, Hori’s practice is shaped by a fascination with atmospheric qualities—those intangible elements that resist replication, such as a sense of existence, shared understanding, and something in between. These elusive qualities form the conceptual foundation of her work. Through installations and collages, she explores how space communicates, and how notions of existence and relation are sensed not as fixed conditions, but as something continuously forming, dissolving, and reconfiguring.
Hori’s practice deliberately unsettles the boundaries between things and what happens between them. She creates spaces where the ephemeral becomes perceptible, and where relations that often remain unnamed can be sensed. Rather than isolating things into separate entities, her work attends to the subtle continuities through which they affect and shape one another, inviting reflection on the layered and fluid nature of existence. Navigating her Japanese-Dutch identity, her work is deeply personal yet universally resonant. This in-between state allows her to question fixed notions, and to perceive uncertainty not as a lack to be filled, but as a generative emptiness, where contradictions may coexist, and where new forms of understanding may take shape.
Water has become central to her recent thinking. She approaches it as material and metaphor, as something that archives history while continually eluding clear definition. Through water, Hori reflects on how lives, materials, and actions that appear separate are continuously shaped by one another, and how what happens in one place can extend into worlds we cannot fully see. She attends to what escapes immediate recognition: rust shifting in its own time, dust gathering traces of passage, or quiet forces that announce change.
Across her practice, Hori creates spaces that ask us to slow down and notice what usually remains at the edges of perception. Familiar materials, processes, and environments are shifted slightly out of place, allowing other connections and possibilities to emerge. Rather than offering a fixed interpretation, her works leave room for uncertainty, contradiction, and things that cannot yet be named. They open a space between what is felt and what is known, where something beyond language may begin to take shape. In this space, attention becomes a way of staying with what is still unfolding, even in fragile times.
She is also a vocalist for the Tokyo-based experimental band Information, and the initiator of Soro-sorO, an international experimental event platform.
Initially trained in architecture, Hori’s practice is shaped by a fascination with atmospheric qualities—those intangible elements that resist replication, such as a sense of existence, shared understanding, and something in between. These elusive qualities form the conceptual foundation of her work. Through installations and collages, she explores how space communicates, and how notions of existence and relation are sensed not as fixed conditions, but as something continuously forming, dissolving, and reconfiguring.
Hori’s practice deliberately unsettles the boundaries between things and what happens between them. She creates spaces where the ephemeral becomes perceptible, and where relations that often remain unnamed can be sensed. Rather than isolating things into separate entities, her work attends to the subtle continuities through which they affect and shape one another, inviting reflection on the layered and fluid nature of existence. Navigating her Japanese-Dutch identity, her work is deeply personal yet universally resonant. This in-between state allows her to question fixed notions, and to perceive uncertainty not as a lack to be filled, but as a generative emptiness, where contradictions may coexist, and where new forms of understanding may take shape.
Water has become central to her recent thinking. She approaches it as material and metaphor, as something that archives history while continually eluding clear definition. Through water, Hori reflects on how lives, materials, and actions that appear separate are continuously shaped by one another, and how what happens in one place can extend into worlds we cannot fully see. She attends to what escapes immediate recognition: rust shifting in its own time, dust gathering traces of passage, or quiet forces that announce change.
Across her practice, Hori creates spaces that ask us to slow down and notice what usually remains at the edges of perception. Familiar materials, processes, and environments are shifted slightly out of place, allowing other connections and possibilities to emerge. Rather than offering a fixed interpretation, her works leave room for uncertainty, contradiction, and things that cannot yet be named. They open a space between what is felt and what is known, where something beyond language may begin to take shape. In this space, attention becomes a way of staying with what is still unfolding, even in fragile times.