AIT ARTIST TALK #75 "Indefinite ways of actual seeing"
"Indefinite ways of actual seeing"
AIT is pleased to host the artist talk by our current artist in residence from the Netherlands, Charlott Markus, with the support of Mondriaan Fund. Markus is staying with us in Japan until April 4th.
A Sweden-born, Amsterdam-based artist, Charlott Markus started her artistic career by making various still-life photographs, pursuing the trajectories of the remnants that our society left behind. Yet her recent artwork still traces two-dimensional components but over time, her practice enhances spatial configurations to construct installations with more stories to tell beyond still-life photographs. It can be described as 'extended still-life', the artist explains where she explores possibility and its limit to create untold narratives and meanings. Her research touches down on the hidden stories of found objects and how they are constructed and transformed. Markus for example, employs old and used fabrics such as curtains to bring us the experience in transcendence of time, while immersing our imagination through many objects and materials in her multi-layered installation.
To excavate "Unseen" and "Hidden" subjects in her artwork is great pleasure, when viewers are encouraged to walk from various directions to approach, even from behind. However, the props such as curtains and partitions are almost paradoxically seen in her installations, as the spatial structure with those props questions existent perspective and challenges our spontaneous action to see. Her artwork gently invites us to sense the emotional bounce between consciousness and unconsciousness, and suddenly such action through the artistic experience becomes emphasized.
At this talk, Markus will speak about her previous artworks, and the recent involvement in the research upon the Japanese textile (Boro). The event is part of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2019, with the theme, The Art of Transposition that compositing an art exhibition, screenings, and symposia alongside. We look forward to welcoming you.
Please register through the following link to save your seat.
AIT SLIDE TALK #36 "Alternative Art Education for Social Changes in Japan and Hong Kong"
"Alternative Art Education for Social Changes in Japan and Hong Kong"
AIT is pleased to host AIT SLIDE TALK #36 titled "Alternative Art Education for Social Changes in Japan and Hong Kong" on July 25th.
This public talk specially introduces Yoshiko Shimada, a Japanese contemporary artist, and we are also excited to be joined by Asia Art Archive (AAA), one of the non-profit organizations leading in Hong Kong and beyond that Shimada recently joined their residency program in this year.
Since 2010, Shimada has been continuously engaging her research on Gendaishicho-sha Bigakkō that was initially established in 1969 and continued until 1975 as an alternative art school in Tokyo during the aftermaths of the student movement by Gendaishicho-sha, the publishing company known for their radical criticism. The founder Kyoji Ishii envisioned the school as "A movement to change the world by changing the way the world is perceived." Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Akasegawa Genpei from Hi Red Center, and Nakamura Hiroshi, Kikuhata Mokuha from Kyushu-sha, and a forerunner of Japanese Conceptualism, Yutaka Matsuzawa taught at the school.
During her time in Asia Art Archive, she came across a similar form of alternative art school, "創建実験学院" which was established in 1967 riot aftermath and last one year from 1968.
Shimada shares her perspective, and ongoing research mainly focused on alternative art education and her most recent findings in Hong Kong, to bring up discussions with some fundamental principles of Bigakkō and how those artists formed them during that period, which may be still relevant today when we consider about alternative art education.
Susanna Chung, Head of Learning and Participation from Asia Art Archive will give a glimpse of the various programs they organize from digital archiving to the educational program that they have been engaging. She will share the recent dramatic development in the landscape surrounding arts and culture in Hong Kong with more new art institutions such as the recently opened Tai Kwun Contemporary, and M+, the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, anticipated to open soon, and how AAA responses to the changing cultural ecology through collecting, creating, and sharing of knowledge around recent art in Asia.
This public talk will be a fruitful opportunity for anyone who is interested in art education over the times in the changing society. Through Shimada's presentation around Gendaishicho-sha Bigakkō with experimental pedagogy and how AAA is observing the current state with fast pace in Hong Kong, the discussion will be brought up how we stand on the history of alternative art education and its future in the changeable social landscape.
We encourage all to join us.
On this particular occasion, AAA and AIT will also host a roundtable to discuss current changes in the social environment that both organizations are experiencing in Hong Kong and Japan, and how alternative art education would foster our community to grow within. The talk, "Alternative Art Education for Social Changes in Japan and Hong Kong" would be a fruitful opportunity for Japanese audience to reflect the history around the topic and its string extending to the current state in alternative art education we see today.
Over the decade, AIT organizes its educational program, MAD (Making Art Different) with a variety of topics around arts and culture in Japan and beyond. We are also overseeing the current state around alternative art education, especially when "Aternative Art School Fair" to introduce new and existing schools here at AIT this past spring. The series of discussions with Yoshiko Shimada and Asia Art Archive would bring us continuous exploration and examination to deepen our knowledge in alternative art education.
An artist and art historian Yoshiko Shimada graduated in 1982 from Scripps College, USA, and received her PhD from Kingston University, London, in 2015.
Her artwork explores the themes of cultural memory and the role of women in the Asia-Pacific War. Her works have been exhibited both nationally and internationally.
In recent years Shimada has been researching post-1968 art and politics in Japan. She has curated exhibitions such as 'Anti-Academy' (John Hansard gallery, Southampton, UK, 2013), 'Nakajima Yoshio Syndrome (Atsuko Balouh, Tokyo, 2015), and 'From Nirvana to Catastrophe' (Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo, 2017), for which she wrote and edited the catalogues. She is currently working on Matsuzawa Yutaka archive in Nagano, and serving as a director of the Matsuzawa Yutaka Psi Room Foundation. She lectures on Japanese art and politics of the 1960s and 70s, and art and feminisms in Japan at Tokyo University College of Arts and Sciences.
Initiated the Learning and Participation Department at Asia Art Archive in 2007, Susanna Chung has worked extensively to make art accessible and lead the cultural learning strategies, projects and partnerships in Hong Kong and across Asia, including India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Myanmar. She is currently Head of Learning & Participation and Programmes Manager, overseeing the planning and production of all programmes across the organization. Chung has participated as a speaker and a moderator in a number of art education forums; including Worlds Together (2012), a conference organised by the Tate Modern, the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre and the British Museum. In 2016, Chung was selected as the International Fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme (2016/17) in the United Kingdom.
AIT ARTIST TALK #73 "Low Relief / Unreal Estate"
"Low Relief / Unreal Estate"
AIT is very pleased to present the artist talk by Marina Višić and Ksenia Galiaeva, both based in the Netherlands. Višić is a current residency artist at AIT until April 7th in collaboration with the Mondriann Funds. Ksenia Galiaeva is also the artist who participated in the same residency program for 3 months back in 2012. These two artists will each share their stories with slides about the current and previous works and projects and welcome public audience to take a Q&A afterwards.
Through her artistic practices, Marina Višić investigates how a variety of textures and movements can be placed into the landscape of the moving image. Staging is important, as is the scale of the images and their relation to the body. Her research at AIT is based on a various references concerning Japanese aesthetics, for instance, from Junichiro Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows and the films of Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. In her talk, Višić will give an introduction to her work, followed by the motivation of her research here in Japan.
In turn, Ksenia Galiaeva has been photographing her parents in the paradisiacal surroundings of their Russian summerhouse for 20 years. With her project, 'Unreal Estate', Galiaeva explores the ways in which memory can be influenced and guided and which part of it plays in perception. Galiaeva describes her work as 'autobiographical fiction', a tool she uses to construct her own life story. Galiaeva considers self-dialogue through visual images the basis of all her work.
Even these two artists work in a various fields of mediums, both of their artistic practices examine and evoke our perception towards visual experiences through their works and projects.
At this public talk, Višić and Galiaeva will talk about their works and projects with slides to introduce further, and look into deeply how their residencies would reflect on their future career as well.
On 24 November 2017, at AIT, visiting associates of ESTAR(SER) will offer a brief introduction to its past and present work, and present ongoing research into the history of the Order of the Third Bird (including a discussion of recent reinterpretations of the mysterious objects known as the MacGinitie Goggles). A number of ESTAR(SER) publications will be on hand, and several "protocols" for sustained attention inspired by those in use by the "Birds" will be made available. Experimentation will be encouraged.
New research, recently come to light, suggests that the eleven pairs of "Ganzfeld effect" goggles found in the so-called MacGinitie Collection of the W-Cache may have been used by associates of the Order of the Third Bird across the twentieth century as part of a heretofore unknown symbolic ritual of self-preparation. Did these individuals, with their focus on the proper way to look at works of art, collectively soil (and then cleanse?) various eyeglasses and protective eyewear in an intimate performance of their ambition to "see anew"? The evidence remains difficult to interpret. Links to Aldous Huxley's Art of Seeing are suspected.
"History flows from all the presents"
AIT is pleased to host the artist talk by our current artist in residence from Sweden, Hans Andersson, with the support of Iaspis.
What if a work of art could induce in the viewer a certain calming state of mind?
This kind of question was predominant when art was made in the service of higher consciousness. We see it repeated in the religious art of all cultures, and yet it is a question that is somewhat difficult to confront since the dawning of modernism.
Hans Andersson creates dense and richly time-layered drawings, collages and objects which perhaps hold some sense of this 'timeless' quality of great religious art. Drawing on numerous experiences and sources, including early electro-acoustic music, Indian Tantric art, architecture and altered states of consciousness, Andersson's art asks us to surrender and give ourselves over to the complex but eternally intruiging intersecting of matter and time.
Andersson will bring examples of his art work to help expound his talk, and Roger McDonald from AIT will join him later in conversation, and provide some basic consecutive translation.
Hans Andersson works with abstract images and sculptural objects from found materials. His work is a continuous questioning of the materials, their heritage and their internal and external qualities and tension. His process is intuitive and nonlinear. The philosopher Simone Weil states that a subject acts through its non-actions. The subject acts, but it is no longer the will that is the foundation for its actions, it is, on the contrary, a sort of obedience. Art, and philosophy as a concept, should according to Weil be received in awaiting and treated with contemplation. Hans Andersson spend a great deal of time with his work. The procedure is both gentle and spontaneous.
"Tangled Thread over Southeast Asia"
AIT is pleased to host a talk by the current artist in residence from Thailand, Piyarat Piyapongwiwat.
For the past decades, Fast Fashion has brought a whirlwind of change in our world, economically and culturally. With the countries of Southeast Asia as well as China are the main producers in the industry that they satisfy our basic necessity, issues on the wage and the working/living environment of the workers have emerged along with the growth of the industry.
Over the last 5 months, Piyarat Piyapongwiwat has spent her days conducting detailed research over several countries in Southeast Asia such as Vietnam, Thaniland, Cambodia, Myanmar where she observed of workers carefully in garment factories in each country. She collected pieces of video footages including everyday lives of these workers, even with their own cameras on the mobile phones capturing their private scenes with the family members.
At this talk, Piyapongwiwat will share us what these collections of moments will narrate in today's globalizing community and will revolve around the issues on work environment, wage, and labor conditions in the Southeast Asia's garment industry, as the reverse side of globalism in our economic and cultural activities.
Piyarat Piyapongwiwat (born in Phrae, Thailand, 1977) is an artist based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Her work centers on contemporary issues such as gender and social disparity as well as the implications of the globalized economy, which she conveys by incorporating philosophy and social science theories through the use of various media such as images, photographs, texts, and sounds. She is currently staying shortly in Japan, as part of Japan Foundation Asia Center's fellowship program and also joining a residence program supported by AIT. Her recent works have been exhibited at "Koganecho Bazaar" (Kanagawa, 2016) in which her work "Message from Nowhere to Nowhere" was derived from a research on Thai community in Yokohama, along with a collection of words and conversations gathered in the urban space. She also participated in a group exhibition "Samut Thai: Incomplete History" (Kanagawa, 2017) with other fellow Thai artists. Most recently, she is currently participating in the 6th Asian Art Biennial at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts (Taichung, Taiwan, 2017).
AIT is pleased to host a talk by the current artist in residence from the Netherlands, Rory Pilgrim on Friday, March 17th. Rory Pilgrim is currently undertaking his residency in Japan from January to March in 2017 with AIT, with the support of The Mondriaan Fonds in the Netherlands.
Pilgrim will make a performative talk that will explore ideas of language, body and technology. In his work, Pilgrim is greatly inspired by the origins of Socially Engaged and Feminist art practice. At a time dominated by the proliferation of the Internet, Pilgrim's work has explored how people come together beyond the screen to voice themselves individually and collectively. Pilgrim composes music as a way to bring people together, enable action and create a collective experience.
Working with a variety of people in contexts including schools, churches, art fairs, public space and television, his work has focused on the need and failure of language to voice ourselves. The largest of his performance works included choreographing the re-opening of the Stedelijk Museum in which he collaborated with a group of teenagers to create an anthem and a series of speeches exploring how they as a generation would give a voice to the museum. From 2013-2016, Pilgrim created a film trilogy entitled 'Sacred Repositories' that focused on the need to find and reclaim words through intergenerational dialogue, as a means to explore how language can still have radical agency.
At the talk, Pilgrim will introduce examples of his work while interweaving a series of simple exercises that think about language and our relationship with the body. Pilgrim will also use these exercises to introduce his current research in Japan which will contribute towards his latest body of work entitled 'Erasure' that focuses on how the voice and body can be used as a site of action at a time of momentous global political change.
The work of British artist Rory Pilgrim is based on emancipatory concerns, in which personal and political questions are brought together to explore questions of time and connections between activism, spirituality, music and community. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works in a wide range of media including live performance, film, text, workshops and musical composition. Pilgrim in particular composes music as a way to bring people together and explore how we use it to challenge, celebrate and voice ourselves.
AIT ARTIST TALK #69 "Unknown Arts & Crafts"
AIT is very pleased to host two UK based artists in collaboration with Camden Arts Center. This collaboration has focused on the exchanges and dialogues between contemporary art practice and ceramics.
The wider issues which this residency explores are the ways in which art today is an expanded field incorporating many different fields and approaches. One of these has been a renewed interest in the field of craft, and its many implications concerning the hand-made, traditional materials such as clay and an array of historical references and figures which have usually been left out of art discourse.
The title of this talk indeed references two of these figures: the founder of the Japanese Mingei Movement Yanagi Soetsu and the title of his collected writings 'The Unknown Craftsman' (1972), which is also a fascinating point of dialogue between the English potter Bernard Leach and Japanese ideas about art and craft, and the Arts and Crafts Movement of John Ruskin and William Morris in the UK.
This unique historical dialogue is one of the reasons we wanted to create a collaborative residency with Camden focused on the arts and crafts dialogue today.
The two artists will each present a thirty minute slideshow about their works, followed by a discussion moderated by Roger McDonald from AIT about some of the wider issues surrounding art and craft, art and issues of use-value, domesticity, social function, the hand-made and ideas about presence and time, and the relevance of historical references.
These issues are also very much a part of the 2017 MAD curriculum and its Holistic perspective. Several lectures will focus on similar issues throughout 2017.
Admission: 1,000 yen (800 yen for MAD students, general students and AIT Base member / Free for AIT House and Support member) *All admission include 1 free drink.
Investigation into material and process led practices through cross-disciplinary workshops, seminars and writing, predicates Materman's art-work. This dual approach of direct research into the boundaries and preconceptions of the visual arts, coupled with her own artistic practice, allows Masterman to create a critical discourse that surrounds her own sculptural territory; one that sits firmly in the middle of the 'expanded field' of inter-disciplinary, material-specific making and fine art sculpture.
Sprague's work plays-up tensions between aesthetic and functional, sculptural and pictorial, lasting and ephemeral: a room divider performs as a painting, a painting on the wall is also a plaster cast sculpture, painted cardboard appears to be ceramic. These ambiguities are characteristic of relationships, physical and psychical, Sprague's work tenderly exposes.
AIT is pleased to host SLIDE TALK #34 "Can we curate commons?" by Haizea Barcenilla, a current curator in residence on December 21, 2016. Barcenilla is staying to undertake her research in Japan until December 31 on a collaborative residency program initiated by AIT and TABAKALERA International Center for Contemporary Culture to exchange curators between Basque/Spain and Tokyo/Japan.
The talk will revolve around the idea of the public and the commons in relation to art practice and art curating which leads to her ongoing research developed as part of her residency at AIT. Her research consists to analyze the ideas of the public and the commons in Japan, especially in relation to the concept of performativity.
In the essay included in a book "Public Places in Asia Pacific Cities", academics have noted that the definition of space in Japan is marked by its use rather than its physicality. This would mean that publicness would be enacted temporarily while being created in certain spaces at specific moments.
At the presentation, Barcenilla particularly picks and introduces the project "Andrekale" produced and curated under "the New Patrons program", as an example of collaborative practice reflecting upon several themes chosen by participants such as urban space, history writing, gender and city empowerment.
Throughout the residency, Barcenilla asks; Can this performative idea be linked to the commons and understood as a social relationship around a resource or a knowledge? What is the role of art and of other cultural practices in the creation of these performative moments of publicness? During her talk, she shares with us some introductory ideas to develop these possibilities to expand further.
Barcenilla is an art critic, curator and art history lecturer at the University of the Basque Country. Her research revolves around two axes of interest: on the one hand, the ideas of public and common, and how they can influence curatorial practice and artistic research; on the other one, the revisitation of history from a gender point of view.
She has written extensively on both topics, including a PhD about curating and the commons, and also curated and produced various artworks and exhibitions. The recent ones are framed in the New Patrons scheme, in which she helped develop and produce the publication Manual de Uso by artist Andrea Acosta about the Zorrozaurre neighborhood in Bilbao, and the video Andrekale by Señora Polaroiska, with the collaboration of Tabakalera, for the town of Hernani.
ARCUS Project and Arts Initiative Tokyo [AIT] are pleased to host a mini-talk on Sunday, November 27, 2016 starting from 16:30 at ARCUS Studio which is the base of ARCUS Project. The talk will invite three artists currently undertaking residencies at ARCUS Project, Ernesto Bautista from El Salvador, Gan Siong King from Malaysia, Yen Noh based in Austria and one artist, Jenny Yurshansky who is staying with AIT in its residency program, she is based in Sweden and the USA. This talk will be a closing event held in conjunction with open studios at ARCUS Project, it will be followed by a gathering with the artists.
Ernesto Bautista works on sculpture, installation and video works and he is deeply conscious of the violence, death and war around him and feels compelled to investigate the essential meaning of human existence and life. Gan Siong King values a sense of "play" in his works and explores such theme as laughter, humor and joy. The works, however, are not so much sensuous but conceptual and they investigate primeval painting compositions. Yen Noh takes language and translation as her themes in producing installation and speech-performance, two of which relevantly face each other in a space. She examines misreadings and misunderstandings that impacted on modernization. The process of their artistic practices and research will be showcased and shared with audience during their open studios which begins on Friday, November 11. Jenny Yurshansky conducts detailed research on the origins and social histories of various invasive plants, connecting botanical and cultural landscapes. She works mainly with sculpture and installation. Her artistic practice explores the empiric and its tension with the poetic.
Although these four artists deal with various concepts and work on different mediums, their expressions all induce strong interest and perspective on the society we live in. It is as if their practices carefully "peel off" various layers of our society and those actions embed accumulation of time from the past, present and future. This mini-talk will reveal more about their practices, research and how they are experiencing each residency in Japan. It will invite us to look our daily lives differently through their unique way of depicting the world. The coordinators, both from ARCUS Project and AIT, will also join and everyone is welcome to meet the artists for further discussion.