Performative in its origin, NaoKo TakaHashi’s wide-ranging practice incorporates installations, books, films, drawings and sculpture sometimes in collaboration with other artists and musicians. Her work deals with issues of translation and confusion of identity played out through language, exploring spaces, both physical and social, to reveal the ambiguities and inconsistencies of communication and social identity.



Her practice is both challenging and immensely moving, often combining vocal or textual narratives with interventions into, or representations of, social and cultural environments. TakaHashi frequently incorporates different media into work, representative of her interest in the tensions of communication through language, and often plays with the scale of the work evoking the personal and the intimate within the vast complexity of society.



NaoKo TakaHashi was born in Nigata, Japan in 1973. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. She has exhibited and performed widely in the UK, Europe and the Middle East including Tate Modern, the Palais de Tokyo, the Whitechapel Gallery, the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, Riso Museo d’arte Contemporanea Della Sicilia, Palermo, Nikolaj Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, Copenhagen, Bozar, Brussels, Darat Al Funun, The Khalid Showman Foundation, Amman, Jordan, Al Ma’mal Foundation for contemporary Art, Jerusalem, the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art, Greece, and in the first major trilingual biennale in North Africa, the 3rd AiM International Biennale, Marrakesh.