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 blurs boundaries: between presence and absence, nature and artificiality, self and other… 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 that connect them, 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 human and more-than-human bodies are entangled within larger systems, and how actions extend through 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. In this way, it is not considered in isolation, but as one point within an expansive and unstable network of relations.
Across her practice, Hori creates spaces that invite quiet attention—places where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and where viewers are encouraged to remain with ambiguity, without the urgency to define or resolve it. Her works open a gentle dialogue between nature and society, between what is felt and what is known, allowing these boundaries to soften and dissolve, and offering intimations of how care and imagination might sustain the ways we continue, 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 blurs boundaries: between presence and absence, nature and artificiality, self and other… 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 that connect them, 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 human and more-than-human bodies are entangled within larger systems, and how actions extend through 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. In this way, it is not considered in isolation, but as one point within an expansive and unstable network of relations.
Across her practice, Hori creates spaces that invite quiet attention—places where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and where viewers are encouraged to remain with ambiguity, without the urgency to define or resolve it. Her works open a gentle dialogue between nature and society, between what is felt and what is known, allowing these boundaries to soften and dissolve, and offering intimations of how care and imagination might sustain the ways we continue, even in fragile times.