Arts Towada 10th Anniversary Exhibition: Inter+Play Season 3

Video artist. Born 1984 in Aomori Prefecture.
Mizushiri Yoriko’s works often feature tactile animations of familiar objects and parts of the human body. Her work has been screened at film festivals around the world, including the Berlin Short Film Festival, and she is the recipient of numerous awards including the Japan Media Arts Festival Animation Division New Face Award.

Sculptor. Born in Gifu Prefecture in 1981, Aoki Chie holds a doctoral degree from the Kanazawa College of Art, where she currently serves as a college professor. Driven by a desire to create out of an interest in Japanese lacquer, Aoki was drawn to the depth of its gloss and began to produce lacquer works that center on themes of human existence. Her works pursue a unique expression that fuses the human body with other abstract forms. Her past exhibitions include The Human Form and Sculpture (Shizuoka City Museum of Art, Shizuoka, 2014) and Hard Bodies: Contemporary Japanese Lacquer Sculpture (Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, 2017), among many others both at home in Japan and abroad. In 2019, Aoki received the Merit Award at the 2019 KOGEI World Competition in Kanazawa.

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.
Saraseno’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 1979 in Shizuoka Prefecture.
Yasuhiro Suzuki’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 is comprised of artist Haruka Kojin, director Kenji Minamigawa, and production manager Hirofumi Masui. 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 1968 in Nagoya.
Makoto Nomura’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 was formed in 2018 when two classically trained dancers visited a large welfare facility for people with disabilities in Hong Kong where Makoto Nomura was working as an artist in residence. 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 1968 in Osaka.
Shin Sakuma 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 was formed in 2018 when two classically trained dancers visited a large welfare facility for people with disabilities in Hong Kong where Makoto Nomura was working as an artist in residence. 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 1965 in Osaka.
In 1991, Osamu Jareo 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 was formed in 2018 when two classically trained dancers visited a large welfare facility for people with disabilities in Hong Kong where Makoto Nomura was working as an artist in residence. 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