The Polaroid occupies an important place in Nobuyoshi Araki’s (b.1940) practice. Marking a departure from his straight Polaroids, the spliced Polaroid composites offered here were first executed in 2015, following a retinal artery obstruction that left him largely unable to see out of his right eye. To create these works, the artist cut his Polaroids in half and then spliced two different halves to form a composite that is the same size as the original Polaroid. While recurring subjects such as nude, bondage and flowers are represented, Araki offers us only partial images – a glimpse of a nude is juxtaposed with a sliver of a flower, a sky or a still-life. Blurring the border between reality and fiction, these Polaroid composites are a window to Araki’s unbalanced vision of the world around him.
The series title Arakiri is a pun on the Japanese word ‘hara-kiri’, which literally translates to belly (hara) cutting (kiri), referring to the ritual of taking one’s own life practiced by the samurai class in feudal Japan. In this body of work, however, it is Araki himself doing the cutting, invoking ritualistic connotations.
