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 Amsterdam, 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 might evolve in the future.
Hori’s practice deliberately blurs boundaries: between presence and absence, nature and artificiality, self and other… She creates spaces where the ephemeral becomes perceptible, 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, to perceive uncertainty not as a lack to be filled, but as a generative emptiness, a space where new kinds of perspectives may take shape.
Water has become central to her recent thinking. She approaches it as material and metaphor, as something that holds memory while continually eluding definition. Through water, Hori reflects on how the human and the more-than-human are entwined, and how our actions extend through worlds we cannot fully see. Her interest reaches toward the small, the slow, and the often overlooked: rust shifting in its own time, dust gathering stories, subtle forces that reveal change long before it becomes visible.
Across her practice, Hori creates spaces that invite quiet attention—places where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and where viewers are encouraged to linger with uncertainty rather than 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 might evolve in the future.
Hori’s practice deliberately blurs boundaries: between presence and absence, nature and artificiality, self and other… She creates spaces where the ephemeral becomes perceptible, 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, to perceive uncertainty not as a lack to be filled, but as a generative emptiness, a space where new kinds of perspectives may take shape.
Water has become central to her recent thinking. She approaches it as material and metaphor, as something that holds memory while continually eluding definition. Through water, Hori reflects on how the human and the more-than-human are entwined, and how our actions extend through worlds we cannot fully see. Her interest reaches toward the small, the slow, and the often overlooked: rust shifting in its own time, dust gathering stories, subtle forces that reveal change long before it becomes visible.
Across her practice, Hori creates spaces that invite quiet attention—places where the familiar becomes unfamiliar, and where viewers are encouraged to linger with uncertainty rather than 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.