Movie: Wrong Happy Hour is a video version of a live event and performance of the same name that took place in various locations including JTT, New York in 2014, Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, Mendes Woods, Sao Paulo and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo in 2017. Aki Sasamoto transforms a gallery space into a bar. Lights are strung from the ceiling, doubling as power cables that connect to an espresso machine placed on one of two shelves running lengthways along the parallel walls. Here, the detritus of the bar sits as an aftermath of a long night. Empty beer bottles, a lone bar stool, a metal bin, a broom and an A-frame sandwich board. There is an electric coffee grinder and large metallic fan as well as a microphone and mirror. All these items are used by the artist in various conventional and non-conventional ways. At times she can be seen entering the large bin and using the long broom handle to push herself around the space like rowing a cumbersome boat. The microphone is used to pick up the sound of the fan, generating a hushed, bass-toned white noise. The power cables recede behind and through the rear wall that is always in view. There is a narrow slot in the wall that functions as tiny doorway and the artist occasionally disappears from view into an unseen backstage area. Throughout the 30-minute video, Sasamoto periodically speaks into the microphone. Sometimes riffing from the suggested topics written on loose leaf paper sheets that blow away after reading, and sometimes offering impromptu anecdotal accounts of past interactions with people. In totally, she is ruminating on ideas of romance, control, escape, human relations and ideas of authenticity. The back wall is frequently drawn on as a kind of visual counterpart and working-through of these vocal sentiments. Before long, we see that the power cables connecting everything are rigged through pulleys to accommodate the movement of the rear wall. In time, this wall moves toward the entrance of the space, like a giant waste disposal technology, pushing everything in front. The bottles cascade into the bin, the wall sweeping away all in sight as the artist demands that we ‘go away’. Only in the movie version, the artist is alone. The architecture and atmosphere of invitation and conviviality is turned inward to become a solitary private space; one that we are increasingly made to feel we are imposing upon. This becomes a rumination on the public’s desire to see the personal become public in the space of art, and perhaps an insight into the politics and private toll this takes on such a relational exchange.