自主性を取り戻す時間

Un moment pour me réapproprier mon autonomie

Installation view at CAN - Centre d'art Neuchâtel (CH)

Exibition text by Jack Pryce for "Un moment pour me réapproprier mon autonomie" (2025)

How do we measure the labour rooted in creative acts, and who is permitted the luxury of separating "work" from "art"? in her newest installation, Anna Kawahara (based in Lausanne) transforms these questions into a physical, almost architectural inquiry. The work titled 自主性を取り戻す時間 / Un moment pour me réapproprier mon autonomie (2025), neither stage nor sculpture but a quasi-choreographic device, presents two interwoven realities. On the frond side, a monitor loops phone footage of the artist embroidering during her paid shifts at a gelateria and museum, a performative act turning both places of work into a makeshift studio. On the rear side, that same partially finished textile accurately lists her monthly expenses and income in her own handwriting. This budgeting is no merepro: for the past decade, Kawahara has avoided conventional planners, instead writing and refining her financial details and calendars by hand in notebooks. Here, she embroiders those details for all to see.

This oscillation between process and product evoles the feminist interventions of the 1960s and '70s, where craftbased practices were frequently mobilised to challenge gendered hierarchies of artistic production. Yet Kawahara's gesture is neither nostalgic nor purely political. Embroidery here operates as a mode of living: portable enough to be paused and resumed in interludes. The Japanese saying 合間を縫う (loosely translated to "make good use of spare time") hovers over her lobour, underscoring how quickly each moment becomes a challenged resource in late capitalism. Michel de Certeau's L'invention du quotidien (1980) has guided Kawahara's thinking over the pasr year, especially regarding autonomy and the subtle tactics individuals employ to "take back" their lives under capitalist pressures. Although her work speaks to precariousness, Kawahara does not position herself as a victim but rather declares a hopeful insistence on perseverance. Even while revealing her budgetary constraints and, by extension, her reliance on multiple forms of labour, she suggests that humour, collaboration, and transparency can forge new solidarities.

Few artists readily disclose their day jobs in exhibition spaces, yet Kawahara hopes this project will encourage a dialogue with others to speak openly about the economic realities of creative work. Visitors may perceive this work as an honest autobiogtaphy, a personal glimpse into the balance between art-making and economic obligatios. By transforming embroidery, a historically feminine craft, into a critical tool of self-reflection and resourcefulness, Kawahara offers a modest but powerful vision of how artistic production might both inhabit and transcend the capitalist structures it relies on. If 自主性を取り戻す時間 / Un moment pour me réaproprier mon automonie functions like a mirror, it does so not just for artists but for anyone who grapples with the pressures of making ends meet. The structure's two sides are not just literal surfaces but conceptual edges, reminding us that behind every act of making lies the labour of living and neither activity can be understood in isolation.