Tell me you love me -- Tokyo works
TELL ME YOU LOVE ME
Exhibition, performance, and film
Tokyo Arts and Space Project, Hongo
Tokyo, Japan
1 July – 6 August 2023
residency: 2022
Snelling’s project began during her 2022 residency at Tokyo Arts and Space, where she researched Tokyo’s love hotels and male host clubs as architectures of intimacy, performance, and fantasy. Inviting participants into themed love hotel rooms, she conducted interviews, often in disguise, about relationships, desire, and identity, producing a short film alongside photographs, installations, and sculptures. She also filmed interviews with the male hosts in Kabuki-cho, later incorporating these into small scale versions of the host clubs.
Returning in 2023 for the exhibition and performance, Snelling collaborated with Tokyo-based shibari artist Hajime Kinoko, who used props from her love hotel project to bind the artist, turning her body into a living sculptural form. The project as a whole examines how spaces designed for staged encounters shape emotional experience, revealing the fluid boundary between performance, intimacy, and everyday life.