What Distance Holds: An MFA Thesis Exhibition Featuring video installations by Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen
Sarasa Kikuchi and Rui Shen invite viewers into the contemplative textures of fluid identity, invisible labor, and immigrant guilt, exploring what remains amid absence with innovative aesthetics and immersive strategies that invite viewers to linger and feel.
Sarasa Kikuchi — 13 Hours Ahead
Six-channel spatial cinema
Thirteen hours separate a mother in Japan from her daughter in the US. In Kikuchi’s immersive six-channel installation, that gap becomes something one can feel in their body: two lives unfolding in parallel, connected, yet never quite touching. Through quiet domestic scenes, layered soundscapes, and a fractured screen arrangement, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to love someone you can only reach across time zones. It holds space not only for the immigrant who left, but for the parent left behind — a perspective rarely given its full weight.
Rui Shen – Elsewhere
Video Installation
Shen considers the continuous becoming of identity. The moment one tries to answer who they are, something shifts. Shen’s installation uses a single word, I, — the most personal word in any language — to meditate on the essence of becoming.
A fan stirs the suspended surface of horizontal screens upon which projections of “I” form and dissolve. They gather, briefly cohere, then scatter again. The quiet circuit demonstrates how alive it is, always moving, always just beyond the labels we reach for.
What Distance Holds Opening reception: April 22, 2026, 5 – 7 PM at 25 Avery Street, Boston
On view April 21 – May 10 · Tuesday through Sunday, 11am – 6pm
Free and open to the public.
April 21 @ 12:00 pm – May 10 @ 6:00 pm