Past Exhibitions
Fri, Oct 1, 2021 - Mon, Jan 10, 2022
Towada Art Center Welcomes Tomás Saraceno: World-Renowned Large-Scale Installation Artist in Permanent Collection
“Inter+Play” is Towada Art Center’s ongoing three-part exhibition to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Arts Towada, a city-wide initiative that promotes art throughout the city along its main thoroughfare Kanchogai Avenue. The second season will take place from October 1, 2021 to January 10, 2022, and features the visionary artist Tomás Saraceno, whose work is part of the center’s permanent collection. Visitors will be invited into the floating and interconnected worlds of Aerocene and Arachnophilia, the artist’s transdisciplinary, open-source, community projects, calling for environmental justices and interspecies cohabitation through renewed relationships with the terrestrial, atmospheric and cosmic realms. Saraceno’s international and interdisciplinary practice challenges dominant ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment, continuously redefining the place of artistic production in the face of destructive habits, subjugated forms of knowledge, and unequal power relations. The artist’s solo exhibition will fill the entirety of the center’s gallery spaces, marking the largest display of his work ever held at a Japanese museum.
Jorōgumo, a Yōkai of Japanese mythology that exists in the liminal space between woman and spider, serves as one of our guides into the web of rhizomatic relations made visible in Saraceno’s exhibition. Featured in two of the artist’s three new Arachnomancy Cards, Jorōgumo blurs species boundaries and invites us to attune to a plane of radical interconnectedness, challenging hierarchical, patriarchal, and colonial power structures and celebrating what Marisol de la Cadena calls the “anthropo-not-seen”, those alternative forms of knowing and inhabiting the world that survive and subvert the homogenizing impulse of the Capitalocene, opening spaces for inter-species recognition. An extension of its cognitive system, the spider’s
web allows for communication with the greater world through vibration, mapping its consciousness along threads like the neural map of our own brain. The 33 cards that make the Arachnomancy deck draw on this extended cognition, transforming it into an instrument of mediation, one of the many ways to consult spider/web oracles, messengers between perceptual worlds, transcending the reciprocal blindness between life forms and inviting us to attune to our sympoietic futures. The oracle in the third Arachnomancy card created specifically for this exhibition is Argyroneta aquatica japonica, a Japanese subspecies of the water spider Argyroneta aquatica, featured in Saraceno’s short film Living at the bottom of the ocean of air, also on display at Towada Art Center. The unique behaviour of this spider reveals the capacity of certain species to transform their way of life to adapt to new environments, posing the question: Can the destructive logic of the Capitalocene be altered in response to climate change, zoonosis and species extinction caused by some humans?
The pandemic has made us more aware of our shared yet unequally experienced fragility, of the exposure inherent to breath. What is floating in the air today? What are we breathing in? And who has the possibility to breathe at all? Today, bad air quality kills a staggering 8.7 million people a year, three times more than the pandemic has in the same amount of time. Particulate matter floats in the air, much of which is the byproduct of human fossil fuel consumption. In Aerographies, the exhibition’s main room, Saraceno challenges business-as-usual approaches to environmental issues by envisioning a future free from borders and fossil fuels. The Aerocene Backpack, a portable flight starter kit enclosing an aerosolar sculpture that floats using only the sun and air and is always evolving through a collective and open process of construction, takes the center stage, inspiring us to rethink current ways of moving in and with the planet, towards Aerocene, an era where we can all live and breathe.
Throughout the exhibition, Tomás Saraceno’s collaborations with spiders and the atmosphere offer a moment of transcendence, celebrating forms of wisdom that subvert the hierarchical relationship through which some organize the world and inviting us to reattune to the web of coexistence as it manifests at Towada Art Center.
SUZUKI Yasuhiro’s Quantum Apples and art collective 目［mé］’s space from Season 1 will continue to be on display, and a performance by Problem Behaviour Trio is also scheduled during the exhibition.
Image: Tomás Saraceno, Arachnomancy Cards, 2019, Photography by Studio Tomás Saraceno
Courtesy the artist and Arachnophilia
Born 1973 in Tucuman, Argentina; lives and works in Berlin. Tomás Saraceno’s practice is informed by the concepts linking art, life science and the social sciences. Enmeshed at the junction of these worlds, his floating sculptures, community projects and interactive installations propose and explore new, sustainable ways of inhabiting and sensing the environment.
Saraceno’s community activated multiples projects, including Museo Aero Solar and Aerocene, which aimed towards an ethical collaboration with the atmosphere. Most recently, with the international, interdisciplinary artistic community Aerocene, Saraceno launched Fly with Aerocene Pacha, and the certified and untethered flight Fly with Aerocene Pacha, using only the warmth of the sun and the air we breathe, into the international, interdisciplinary artistic community Aerocene, a huge, balloon-like flying sculpture. For the first time in history, a human being floated into the sky using only the warmth of the sun and the air we all breathe, and in the process set six world records.
Saraceno’s profound interest in spiders and their webs led to the formation of Arachnophilia.net and the Arachnomancy App. Through these platforms Saraceno invites people from around the globe to weave the web of interspecies understanding and take part in the challenge of Mapping Against Extinction.
Saraceno has most recently exhibited at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence for Aria (Italy, 2020), the 58th Venice Biennale as part of May You Live In Interesting Times (Italy, 2019) and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris for his Carte Blanche exhibition ON AIR (France, 2018).
Photo: Tomás Saraceno © Alfred Weidinger, 2015
Artist. Born in Shizuoka Prefecture in 1979.
Suzuki Yasuhiro’s works add new dimensions to familiar objects as he continually asks questions about how we see things and how we perceive the world. He has held solo exhibitions at the Art Tower Mito, Contemporary Art Gallery (2014) and the Hakone Open Air Museum (2017). He garnered attention for his Zipper Boat, which debuted at the 2010 Setouchi Triennale, when it was displayed on Tokyo’s Sumida River in 2018. His work was exhibited at the fourth Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art in 2011, and in 2016, he represented Japan at the inaugural London Design Biennale. In 2014, he received the Mainichi Design Award. Suzuki is a professor at Musashino Art University and also works in the Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Tokyo.
Photo: Nakagawa Masako
Art collective founded in 2013.
Mé comprises artist Kojin Haruka, director Minamigawa Kenji, and production manager Masui Hirofumi. They value teamwork that utilizes the individual strengths of each member, which allows them to develop works that attract us to the endless uncertainty of the real world, placing an emphasis on exhibition spaces and the role of the visitor, regardless of any specific genre or methodology. Their major works include Unreliable Reality – The Where of This World (2014, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo) and Elemental Detection (2016, Saitama Triennale).
Photo: Tsushima Takahiro
Composer and pianist. Born in Nagoya in 1968.
Nomura Makoto’s solo exhibitions include Organic Vegetable (Art Space Niji, Kyoto), and he has participated in a number of group exhibitions, including Textures (Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Aomori), Archway Sound Symposium (Five Years Gallery, London), Makoto Nomura’s Music Room (Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima), and Notations 21 (Jeanie Tengelsen Gallery, New York). He currently serves as director of community programs for the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra.
Behaviour Problem Trio
Behaviour Problem Trio is a unit comprised of Nomura Makoto, Sakuma Shin, and Jareo Osamu. They bring people together from all different backgrounds to conduct joint productions that transcend rules, conventions, and common sense for the sake of creative expression. Their improvisational performances push physical boundaries in a dialogue with people and environments. In 2019, they held Nomura, Jareo & Sakuma’s Behaviour Problem Show: Practice Pieces for Becoming an Outsider at the Toyonaka Performing Arts Center.
Traditional Javanese Dancer.Born in Osaka in 1968.
Sakuma Shin has been involved in projects that promote collaboration, improvisation, and communication. These include Body Talk, a clinical philosophy project initiated by Osaka University, and Hiru no Dance, a new kind of dance between dance and people with disabilities created together with Tanpopo-no-ye in Nara. He is also the co-author of Social Art: How Art and People with Disabilities Can Change Society (Sōsharu āto : shōgai no aru hito to āto de shakai o kaeru) (Bungeisha Co., Ltd.).
Behaviour Problem Trio
Behaviour Problem Trio is a unit comprised of Nomura Makoto, Sakuma Shin, and Jareo Osamu. They bring people together from all different backgrounds to conduct joint productions that transcend rules, conventions, and common sense for the sake of creative expression. Their improvisational performances push physical boundaries in a dialogue with people and environments. In 2019, they held Nomura, Jareo & Sakuma’s Behaviour Problem Show: Practice Pieces for Becoming an Outsider at the Toyonaka Performing Arts Center.
Photo: Kusamoto Toshie
Choreographer and dancer. Born in Osaka in 1965.
In 1991, Jareo Osamu formed a dance unit with Misako Terada. But in recent years, he has focused on solo work as well as projects for people with disabilities, the elderly, and displaced persons, working to develop a practice that connects art with society. In 2016, he published his first book, Dancing in the Nursing Home: Choreography, Care, and the Birth of Totsu Totsu Dance (Rojin Home de Umareta “Totsu Totsu Dance” – Dance no Youna, Kaigo no Youna) (Shobunsha). Jareo serves as a specially appointed professor in the Department of Body Expression and Cinematic Arts at Rikkyo University.
Behaviour Problem Trio
Behaviour Problem Trio is a unit comprised of Nomura Makoto, Sakuma Shin, and Jareo Osamu. They bring people together from all different backgrounds to conduct joint productions that transcend rules, conventions, and common sense for the sake of creative expression. Their improvisational performances push physical boundaries in a dialogue with people and environments. In 2019, they held Nomura, Jareo & Sakuma’s Behaviour Problem Show: Practice Pieces for Becoming an Outsider at the Toyonaka Performing Arts Center.
Photo: Miura Hiroyuki
Title
Date
Hours
9:00–17:00 (Last admission 30 minutes before closing)
Closed
Mondays
except for National Holidays, in which case the museum is open on the holiday and closed the following Tuesday
Organized by
Towada Art Center
Endorsed by
Embassy of the Argentine Republic, The To-o Nippo Press, The Daily-Tohoku Shimbun Inc., Aomori Broadcasting Cooperation, Aomori Television Broadcasting Co., Ltd., Asahi Broadcasting Aomori Co., Ltd., & Towada City Board of Education
In Cooperation with：
Goethe-Institut Tokyo
No related events to display.
1. A number of Saraceno’s projects on display in Japan for the first time
Some of Saraceno’s signature works will be on display for the first time in Japan, such as a Hybrid Web, created as spiders from different species weave freely in the same space, each one of them telling a story of unique relationships, and the Aerocene Backpack, a sculpture that floats fuelled only by the sun, carried only by the wind.
2. art collective 目 [mé] present movements inside installation space in downtown Towada
For Season 2, art collective 目 [mé] will present movements inside of their installation space. A stark-white gallery embedded in a building in downtown Towada, space features different artworks for the first and second half of the exhibition.
movements, on display for the second half of the exhibition, may look like a swarm of countless black creatures when viewed from above, but upon closer inspection, these little creations each move mechanically, noisily ticking away with the movements of the clock.
