Haru Chikei | Mako Idoko: Onna no Sakuhin—Autobiography of a Video Artist
An overview of Mako Idoko's retrospective exhibition focusing on video art and feminism.Summary
This article discusses a major retrospective of Mako Idoko at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. As a pioneer of video and feminist art, Idoko uses video to dissect how roles such as daughter, wife, and mother are assigned to women and internalized through family, mass media, and social institutions.
Her work explores the distortions within the private sphere of the home, exposing the power dynamics that define individual bodies and desires. Influenced by her time in the US during the 1960s and the Women's Liberation movement, her films critique the standardized representations of women produced by mass media through unconventional editing and visceral imagery.
The exhibition, subtitled "Autobiography of a Video Artist," traces Idoko's career as she deconstructs the structures that shaped her—family, institutions, and media—transforming personal bodily experiences into profound social critiques.
(Source：artscape)