"Best-Designed German Books Prize," 2007.

Japanese artist Mariko Mori (*1967 in Tokyo) has maintained a consciousness for the unity of the material, spiritual, and technological world. Her latest work, Tom na H-iu, a four-and-a-half-meter-tall glass sculpture, also blends ancient rituals with twenty-first-century technology. The monolith was inspired by Celtic menhirs, the mythical point of transition for the soul into a new life. Computerized LED rays illuminate the work in various colors, a reference to the real-time appearance of neutrinos detected by the Super Kamiokande, the Japanese neutrino detector.

This extraordinary publication offers a retrospective of Mori’s oeuvre, and is the first to present the complete Beginning of the End: Past, Present, Future, a photographic cycle produced over a period of eleven years, in which Mori presents herself as a time traveler in a Plexiglas capsule at significant symbolic locations, from Giza to New York to Shanghai.

Exhibition schedule: Albion Gallery, London, October 9–December 22, 2006 · Groningen Museum April 29–September 2, 2007 · AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, October 4, 2007–January 27, 2008