Te quiero mucho     Help me to play alone     Sobremesa       Kaoru Katayama is a Japanese artist who has lived in Spain for the last seventeen years. She explores issues related with her status as a foreigner and the fact of belonging to two different cultures. As a cross-border artist her current discourse has gradually veered more toward the idea of (non)communication. Te quiero mucho is the title of her first one-person show at Galería Tomás March, and also the title of one of the previously unseen pieces presented here. Katayama makes uses of the video performance format to analyse themes of emotional instability. By choosing a setting ripe with unforeseen and unprogrammed events with a view to registering the performative situations that arise, Katayama centres on the diverse moods of the people appearing in them. These works posit a debate on differing forms of behaviour and the possibility or impossibility of communication, whether cultural or not. The core works on view at the exhibition are: 1). Te quiero mucho, 2009 (video projection) 2). Help me to play alone, 2009 (video projection) 3). Sobremesa, 2007 (video) 1). TE QUIERO MUCHO Video projection USA 2009, DVCPRO HD 1080 24p, NTSC, 16:9, Colour, Stereo, 4’02’’ Synopsis The video is recorded in a bar called Jalisco in the centre of Los Angeles whose clientele are mostly Mexican and Chicano gay men. The notable Mexican macho atmosphere that pervades the bar suddenly mutates to something more tender when the norteña song Te quiero mucho strikes up. 2). HELP ME TO PLAY ALONE Video projection (2 channels) Spain 2009, AVCHD 1080 24p, NTSC, 16:9, Colour, Stereo, 5’13’’ Synopsis An amateur classical musician plays Air, the main melody from Bach’s famous Orchestral Suite no. 3 in D Major, on the same violin with which he has been practicing twenty years. Beside him is a radio-cassette playing the same music performed by a baroque chamber orchestra, which he uses as musical accompaniment, not unlike a karaoke. 3). SOBREMESA Video Spain 2007, DVCPRO HD, PAL,16:9, Colour, Stereo, 2’57’’. Synopsis Julio and Salud are a Gypsy couple married for 38 years. Recorded in their living room as they sit around the table with an after-dinner coffee, the video shows the couple beating out the time to soleá. After years of playing together, the couple dialogue with each other through these bars. The artist has deliberately eschewed the whole virtuoso and spectacular side of flamenco and intentionally taken the action to Salud and Julio’s own home setting.