I Invited Myself

Curatorial Advisor: Elise Butterfield

I Invited Myself, vol. I was presented at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. Read the curatorial statement.

I Invited Myself, vol. II was presented at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in 2023, with different iterations in the Winter, Spring, and Summer. Read the curatorial statement.

I Invited Myself, vol. III: A Body is on view at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia until December 9, 2023. View the list of works in the exhibition and read the curatorial statement.

I Invited Myself, vol. III: Duets is on view at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia until March 24, 2024. View the list of works in the exhibition and read the curatorial statement. View news coverage on 6abc Philadelphia.

To be set in an art gallery and other spaces. Eiko Otake’s I Invited Myself is a multi-volume installation which features choreography of place, movements of both performer and viewers, along with projections of selected video and film works created by Eiko over the last 40 years.

Unlike audiences to cinema, literature, music, and visual art works, the audience to contemporary performance work often experiences one newly created evening-length piece. Those audiences who saw the artist’s earlier works have an understanding of her trajectory, but younger or new audiences might not.

Eiko Otake’s I Invited Myself is not a legacy project or a retrospective; however, its objectives are to display Eiko’s trajectory as visual landscape for her performances. By doing so, Eiko hopes to contextualize her current body for diverse generations of audience now and in the future. Eiko has already experimented with this idea in February 2022 by occupying the gallery of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she had access to 31 projectors and many connected gallery rooms. This iteration, I Invited Myself, vol. I, was co-curated by Eiko and Elise Butterfield.

In the next iteration after Chicago, Eiko created and edited more media works and choreographed spaces at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center in 2023. I Invited Myself, vol. II is presented in El Pomar Galleries from February 3–July 30, and the contents of the exhibition change with the seasons. The co-curators of I Invited Myself, vol. II are Ryan Platt and Katja Rivera. During the exhibition, there were three convenings—one for each season—which gathered scholars, artists, colleagues, and curators to engage in public lectures, conversations, and performances.

I Invited Myself is the beginning of a larger sustained experiment; one that might last 10 years as Eiko looks back on her multidisciplinary career while continuing to challenge and question her forms for the present moment.