Artist Talk: Mami Takahashi in Conversation with Zachary Cahill
Artist Talk:
Mami Takahashi in Conversation with Zachary Cahill
2:00pm-3:30pm
Check-In at 1:30pm
Free with RSVP
Join us at the International Museum of Surgical Science for a conversation between exhibiting artist Mami Takahashi and Director of Programs and Fellowships at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, Zachary Cahill.
This talk is a part of Mami Takahashi’s exhibit Soft Evidence, opening at the IMSS on March 6th.
Mami Takahashi is a multidisciplinary artist from Tokyo who is currently a resident of Chicago. Using poetry, performance, visual art formats, and urban intervention, her practice explores the complexities of being an immigrant woman living in the US. Previous exhibitions and performances have taken place at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; San Francisco Art Institute; The International Museum of Surgical Science; The International Museum of Art; Southern Alberta Art Gallery, Canada; Gwangju Folk Art Museum, Korea; Instituto Municipal del Arte la Cultura, Mexico and Toriizaka Art Gallery, Tokyo, among other venues. She holds an MFA from Portland State University and a BFA from the Joshibi University of Art in Japan. Takahashi is a recipient of the Ford Family Award for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art residency.
Zachary Cahill is an interdisciplinary artist who has lived in Chicago since 2005. In recent years his work has taken a decisive turn from parafictional nation building towards the genres of fantasy and fairytales. His artwork has been featured in solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Regina Rex, New York; The Smart Museum of Art, Chicago; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and he was included in the 8 th Berlin Biennale. Cahill has published a novel, two books of poetry, and self-published a graphic novel. He is Director of Programs and Fellowships at the University of Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry, where he is also the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Portable Gray, an arts and ideas magazine put out twice a year by the University of Chicago Press. A monograph on Cahill’s art, Zachary Cahill’s Composite Art: A Study of the Poetic Illuminations, by Dr. Jacob Henry Leveton is forthcoming from Mousse.
This project is partially supported by a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events.
The International Museum of Surgical Science acknowledges support from the Illinois Arts Council Agency.
About Soft Evidence (March 6 – May 31, 2026):
Soft Evidence is a solo exhibition by Mami Takahashi that brings together video, textile-based installation, performance documentation, and collaborative works to explore how women’s bodies communicate, resist legibility, and carry memory within everyday life. Rooted in attentiveness rather than spectacle, the exhibition considers the body as both a site of expression and a surface onto which social expectations, histories, and perceptions are projected.
Developed in collaboration with women-identifying participants living in different U.S. cities, the exhibition draws from informal, everyday actions rather than scripted narratives. Participants were invited to record short videos of their bodies—partial views, gestures, and routine movements—capturing how they inhabit space in ways that are both visible and vulnerable. These works appear alongside Takahashi’s own performance-based videos, forming a layered conversation between individual experience and collective presence.
In the front gallery, the collaborative videos are shown together with two earlier works by the artist, Writing Myself and Cage Mentality. In Writing Myself, Takahashi writes in Japanese on clear film until her body is gradually obscured, creating a visual tension between self-expression and erasure. Cage Mentality documents a durational performance in which she constructs a restrictive structure around her body using string, revealing both the comfort and constraint of enclosure. These works frame the body as a communicative tool that is never fully under one’s control, shaped by repetition, discipline, and external interpretation.
Textile-based installations composed of inherited household fabrics and kimono materials extend these concerns into the domestic sphere. Accumulated through generations of women in the artist’s family, the fabrics embody care, labor, and quiet persistence. Layered, folded, and woven into the exhibition space, they function as material traces of lived experience—objects that hold memory without explanation.
Moving from the galleries into transitional space, a subtle auditory element introduces another register of presence through layered voices gathered over time. Rather than operating as testimony, these fragments exist as ambient traces, emphasizing proximity and attention rather than narrative clarity.
The exhibition concludes with documentation of Who Knows (2024), a performance by Spiral Body previously presented at the International Museum of Surgical Science. In this work, Takahashi’s body shifts between audience member, performer, and concealment, reinforcing her ongoing inquiry into visibility, displacement, and relational identity within public space.
Across its varied forms, Soft Evidence proposes that meaning often emerges through restraint—through what is partially hidden, quietly repeated, or left unresolved. The exhibition invites viewers to slow down and consider how bodies hold knowledge not through declaration, but through presence, endurance, and care.