Dior Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents 2026
- Photography
- Guest program
Inside the exhibition
A Closer Look at Her Work
Sensing the existence of an unknown, invisible and ever-changing dimension, she has developed a strategy whose fundamental tenets she lays out clearly: “By moving between dematerialization and re-embodiment, I continue to measure my distance from the unknown. My practice is consistently grounded in a distinctive framework of thought that seeks to examine the structures and fluctuations of the invisible.”
© Akari Takenobu
Akari Takenobu seeks to understand and capture that which is hidden beneath the surface of the visible. A determined artist and genuine ghost hunter, her work involves getting acquainted with the fleeting entities she has glimpsed since childhood through paranormal experiences: “I explore the boundary between my own existence and what is often referred to as “invisible others” — spirits, ghosts, or presences that cannot be directly perceived. What separates us? One possible distinction lies in materiality the possession of a physical body.”
© Akari Takenobu
It is precisely in this in-between realm that Takenobu creates a surrealist-inflected beauty. By reconfiguring the real, she questions the limits of perception and explores a meaningful interspace by shifting the boundaries between the visible and the invisible: “By destabilizing these frameworks — and at times deconstructing the form of the self itself — it may be possible to introduce unexpected fractures into the fixed appearance of reality.”
© Akari Takenobu
Photography as a medium remains central to Takenobu’s work, in dialogue with collage and installation, which round out what she calls “pseudo-experiences”. The first step involves photographing her own body, transforming it into an image and stripping it of its materiality. She then cuts this image into pieces that she reassembles, subjecting her body to what she refers to as a “simulated death”.
© Akari Takenobu
The scattered fragments are reconstructed into a form resembling a human figure, yet it is no longer identical to the original self. What emerges is visible yet immaterial — an image that exists without physical substance. Using my own body as material, I attempt to generate something that leans closer to the invisible than my living self does. It oscillates between reality and the unknown.”
© Akari Takenobu