When Documenta was looking to assemble a new finding committee for the artistic director of its 2027 edition – following the mass resignation of the previous panel in the continuing fallout over antisemitism allegations faced by the organisers of the 2022 exhibition – Kataoka will have been regarded as a safe pair of hands to approach. The director of Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, which this year finished celebrating its 20th anniversary with the group show Our Ecology: Toward a Planetary Living (with 34 artists including Tetsumi Kudo, Cecilia Vicuña and Ali Cherri) and exhibited a survey of the late Louise Bourgeois and Theaster Gates’s show Afro-Mingei (one installation imagined a hybrid of Black and Japanese cultures), has become the go-to for prize juries and committees internationally. This year she advised the curators of the Bangkok Art Biennale, which opened in October, and will soon select the winner of the Ars Fennica, Finland’s biggest art prize. Back in Japan, she stewards the National Center for Art Research and recently found the time to curate a commercial show at Okura Museum of Art as part of Art Week Tokyo.