Departing from an approach based on fixed images, Hanako Murakami (1984, Tokyo, Japan) considers photography less as a technique than as an act of vision. She explores situations in which the gaze no longer merely perceives: it acts, alters, displaces.
The works gathered here share a common tension: they emphasize alternative modes of image generation – ways of bringing the visible into being that are fundamentally different from known, industrial, or commercial processes. By deconstructing photography’s conventional frameworks, Murakami sketches a reinvention of the medium, somewhere between speculation, science, and a heightened sensory impulse.

In Imaginary Landscapes, early twentieth-century photosensitive materials – never used since their manufacture – react upon contact with the developer. The images that emerge no longer represent the world: they transform it into autonomous forms, hovering between pictorial abstraction and inner vision.
In Possibles (Thermography), heat – rather than light– becomes the matrix of the image. Reviving a 19th century process once imagined and then abandoned, Murakami envisions here a kind of photography that never happened, but might have.

Other works explore the transformative powers of vision itself. In Burning Gaze, a sequence of film excerpts builds a contemporary visual mythology in which the gaze acts as a burning force, threaded with fiction. In Exposure, an electron microscope reveals in real time the effects of light on a sensitive surface: the gaze literally imprints its trace, like an irreversible optical burn. Finally, The Gaze Becomes Gesture overturns the notion of passive vision: using an eye-tracking system, a simple cup placed on a table begins to move – set in motion by the very eyes that look at it. Seeing becomes doing.By reactivating forgotten techniques or inventing new forms of interaction using cutting-edge digital devices, Hanako Murakami is not engaging in a nostalgic archaeology of the medium. She reinvents photography as gesture, as speculation, as sensory force, as a way of coming into contact with the real – through an unexpected kind of poetry, capable of opening a field of possible forms for the visible.