Yuko Mohri: In Concert: Barbican Centre, The Curve, London

Japanese artist Yuko Mohri will transform The Curve with a major new exhibition, In Concert. Through her multidisciplinary practice, the artist stages dynamic installations in dialogue with spaces and their atmospheric conditions. Mohri’s multi-sensory commission features new works that invite visitors to reflect on the radical potential of permeability and repair.

In Concert marks the Barbican’s 20th year of commissioning artists for The Curve, a cornerstone of the Barbican’s Visual Arts programme since 2006.

Grounded in DIY aesthetics, surrealist assemblage, experimental music and an enduring fascination with the flow of energy, Mohri’s sculptural practice combines ordinary objects with what she terms ‘unstable elements’, including magnetism, humidity, air, water and gravity. Channelled through circuits engineered by the artist, these often invisible and variable forces become triggers animating otherwise static materials—from umbrellas to feather dusters, kettles to xylophones—creating outputs of light, sound, motion and scent in continuously transforming installations.

Mohri’s exhibition for The Curve has been shaped through the artist’s site-responsive process during a residency at the Barbican. Having attended a rehearsal of the London Symphony Orchestra, Mohri was struck by the Concert Hall's proximity to The Curve, which wraps like an ear around the Hall and is porous to its sounds. In Concert speaks to the sonic element of Mohri’s practice, while also sharing an affinity with the Latin word ‘consertare’: to mend, bind, or fasten together, referencing the idea of repair at the heart of Mohri’s work, and resonating with the Barbican’s current renovation as part of its Centre-wide Renewal programme.

Opening the exhibition is a new iteration of Mohri’s ongoing Decomposition series . Visitors are met by a sculptural assemblage of streetlamps connected to ripening fruits, reflecting the entwined lifecycles of natural phenomena and human-made structures. Salvaged from the Barbican and repaired by Mohri, the lamps' pulsing light transmits the changing moisture levels of the fruits through sensors plugged into them. Their decomposition is also converted into sound via a feedback loop influenced by the live electronics of 1960s experimental composers John Cage and David Tudor. Impacted by time, entropy and fluctuating heat and humidity, the fruits' imperceptible biological processes orchestrate a continuously transforming visual and sonic composition in the space. Elsewhere, Mohri draws attention to the inherent porousness of The Curve—converted from a liminal corridor into a gallery—by using its changing airflow as the trigger to activate the lamps. Modulated by fruit and air, the Barbican lamps are given a second life in an ecosystem evoking Buddhist philosophies of transience and renewal.

In the final section of the gallery, visitors will encounter a large-scale installation of Mohri’s ongoing Moré Moré (Leaky) series, an homage to the repairs improvised by Tokyo’s subway employees to contain water leaks caused by aging architecture and earthquakes in Mohri’s native Japan. Temporary and incidental, these repairs are assembled by staff out of readily available objects, from traffic cones and buckets to plastic sheets, tubes, and household items. Paired with musical instruments, the objects move, shake and emit sounds, activated by chain reactions triggered by dripping water to surprising, humorous and anthropomorphic effect. Juxtaposed against the Barbican’s brutalist concrete architecture, these fragile and precarious compositions celebrate informal and anonymous acts of repair. Together, they become a collective, kinetic and sonic body, alternately out of sync and in improvised concert.

The exhibition's public programme will feature a performance by Yuko Mohri and Christian Marclay on the 8th of October 2026. Further details and tickets will be released via the Barbican website closer to the time.

Yuko Mohri said: “It has been a privilege to be in dialogue with the fascinating space of The Curve and explore its porous relationship with the Barbican, in the heart of the city of London. During my research in the spring, I went beyond the visible space of the gallery, which runs along the outer wall of the Concert Hall and emerged from the ‘negative space’ of its architecture. I delved deep into the inner workings of the Centre and explored behind walls and vents, peaked into hatches, went down into subterranean levels filled with infrastructure, visited storage and meandered through the depths of the car parks. I encountered old fixtures, disused materials and objects in storage, waiting to be recycled during the Barbican’s renovation. Much like the unseen layers of the building, which sustain its monumental architecture, these elements have over time supported the daily lives held by the Centre. I am excited to respond to The Curve, a site so closely linked to acoustic experience, by orchestrating the imperceptible elements in the gallery with elements from behind the scenes of the Barbican.”

Photo by Thomas Adank / Barbican Centre.