Artists in residence

INTERVIEW

Your career path before being in residence at the Cité internationale des arts?

“We met in London at the Royal College of Art in 2012 and started working together before we were a couple.

It all happened quite quickly and organically after that. Coming from very different mixed backgrounds, we found it interesting to confront and collaborate our ideas in exhibitions. It was following the advice of a gallery director during an exhibition in Bucharest in 2016 where we presented our first work created as a couple, that we decided to stop our respective careers in order to concentrate on our artistic duo.

The announcement of Brexit triggered the desire to leave again, Berlin was thinking as a matter of course where its calmer life and fewer economic constraints would allow us to work in depth on our artistic identity as a duo. After three years of hard work and more or less successful tests, we presented our solo exhibition in Tokyo in 2019, which set the guidelines for our identity as a duo.

Working mainly with the medium of sculpture and virtual reality forming our installations, we see our practice closer to the process of a painter than a sculptor where we create our own colors and shapes that do not refer to existing reality. Since then we live between Berlin, Tokyo and Provence.”

A few words about your upcoming exhibition in the Petite Galerie?

“The exhibition at the Petite Galerie during our residency at the Cité internationale des arts is a real chance for us to work for the first time with a French institution and French art professionals such as Loïc le Gall who wrote some words for this exhibition. We feel that this new dialogue takes our work and understanding to a higher level that allows us to develop new and stimulating directions.

For our first solo exhibition in Paris, we wanted to develop the process of immersive installation through direct contact between the public and our works.

We wanted to work with this space with its unique location and architecture and create a different reality through the color of the walls, the soft and thick carpeting all in pink flesh tones. This in order to bring an atmosphere and a feeling of well-being and serenity to the spectator embellished by the sound of virtual reality spinning tirelessly in a loop. We have also developed a new system of structures and sculptures on rails that the spectator can move around the gallery. The direct contact, the touch with the work is something primordial in our practice and the location of the Petite Galerie was ideal to develop our work in this direction”.

BIOGRAPHY

Ittah Yoda is an artistic duo formed by Kai Yoda (Japanese–Swedish) and Virgile Ittah (French-Italian-North African), who alternate between living in Berlin, Provence and Tokyo. Hailing from diverse backgrounds as an artistic duo, they have developed their artistic identity through digitally enabled cross-cultural creative collaborations. Focused on a strong interest in the unconscious, insecurity, and anxiety, the therapeutic relation between Virgile Ittah and Kai Yoda leads to a potential new understanding of the self through re-enactment of the trauma and repetitive patterns of behaviours. Questions are raised such as: Is it possible to fuse multiple unconscious in order to create new collective forms?

Through this collaboration, real and virtual forms are created that attempt to connect with an archaic heritage of humanity, and a collective unconscious universally present in an individual’s psyche. They seek to develop primitive models through forms non-existent in reality to a collective experience, irrespective of their origins in the context of a contemporary multicultural society. By highlighting the performative dimension of their installation through the active participation of the public, Ittah Yoda attempt to create a new reality under a rhizomic network of connections between the work and the viewer, bridging the virtual and physical realities, forming new landscapes and the world to come.

Recent residencies include the VR Incubator residence with Sws and Format C in Podstrana (HR). Recent exhibitions include Body alights – a fragmented memory (solo) at Sprout Curation in Tokyo (JP), Augmented Sunrise Beneath The Skin at Gr_und, Berlin (DE), European, Foreign & Domestic at Averard Hotel, London (UK), Lightness at White Rainbow Gallery, London (UK), and I think mango you say salmon (solo) at Annka Kultys Gallery, London (UK).