Manami Uetake’s practice examines the possibilities and limitations of approaching the memories and lived experiences of others through photography, video, and text. Central to her work is the notion of touch — understood both as a physical gesture and as a metaphorical attempt to move closer to experiences and subjectivities that can never be fully accessed or fully translated. Her works explore how intimacy, distance, and imagination shape the ways in which lives are remembered and narrated.
Manami Uetake understands her practice as a process of layering fragments, images, and memories. Her works approach lived experience not as something that can be fully reconstructed, but through fragile traces in which intimacy, distance, and remembrance become visible. In doing so, her practice resists the disappearance of individual histories, turning instead to absences and material remnants through which memory is continuously reconfigured.
These questions are further articulated in her recent artist book, The end’s approach comes over my mind as clouds cover the light (2024). Developed following the death of her father — a figure with whom she shared physical resemblance while experiencing emotional distance — the publication reflects on the fragmented nature of personal memory and familial knowledge. Drawing on haiku poems, domestic interiors, dust-covered objects, and family archives, the artist approaches identity as something continuously reconstructed through images, material traces, and acts of remembrance. By bringing together the first and last photographs taken during their shared lifetime, the work considers photography not as a tool of preservation alone, but as a medium through which absence, proximity, and the limits of understanding become visible.