What follows. What forms the backdrop of our lives. What constitutes the limits of every space we enter and even the interior space of our thoughts. This deadly environment of racism and transmisogyny we move through is only one subject of the photo series by Aoi Fukuyama titled Needlepoint, which touches also on questions of memory, distance, and permanence.
In the twenty-five images which make up Needlepoint, included here alongside a conversation with the artist, the needle is another recurring figure, drawing our focus to the point where its sharp end pierces the undefined, ambiguous background. The needle looms in the air, its immediacy takes us out of the moment. But at least the needle can be known, whereas we lose ourselves in the exquisite tension between where we stand and what lies beyond our next step. Here the needlepoint emerges also as anxiety, as the tension of being torn between existing in the present and what may happen in the future; the needlepoint of uncertainty that hangs before our eyes.