Ittah Yoda

Biography

Ittah Yoda is the artist duo of Kai Yoda (Swedish-Japanese) and Virginie Ittah (French), who met at the Royal College of Art in 2013 and built a practice around symbiosis, a close, long-term collaborative process in which each partner's strengths, and those of the specialists and craftspeople they work with, contribute to and benefit from the whole. Their sculptures typically originate as digital 3D forms, which the duo then translates into organic materials such as blown glass, wood, and natural fiber through collaboration with traditional artisans, moving away from an earlier practice using resin and chemical pigments for ecological reasons. A pivotal development in their work involved custom AI software, developed with an engineer using funding from the Centre National du Cinema, trained on roughly 200 3D shapes to generate new sculptural forms that were then 3D printed, molded, and hand-blown into glass by local artisans, a process the duo describes as going beyond individual authorship toward something that feels like it emerges between or beyond them. Residencies have played a central role in their practice, including research into plankton and symbiosis systems at the Institut de la Mer in Villefranche-sur-Mer, which informed their interest in the Symbiocene, a proposed post-Anthropocene era of mutual support between humans and non-humans. Their work has been exhibited at institutions and galleries including Galerie Poggi, the Bally Foundation, Collection Lambert, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lyon, and PODIUM in Hong Kong, and has moved through residencies across France, Indonesia, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, accumulating materials, pigments, and forms that continue to evolve across their body of work.