Past Exhibitions
Sat, Apr 13, 2024 - Sun, Nov 17
We live in a time of rising global temperatures, accompanied by ever more severe disasters. Having nurtured our lives for so long, the environment is now increasingly unstable, necessitating an urgent rethink of our attitude toward nature. But given that what we know today as “human” is a concept of our species as something external to nature, and which has almost always exploited, controlled, and managed nature, is it truly capable of “saving the planet”? This exhibition re-examines the “human” as a rational, autonomous entity that is a product of modernity, and focuses on the ideas and things that were excluded over the course of that process. It enables encounters with stories and determined ways of living that are neither tame nor wild, but feral, blurring the various binaries that have defined our thinking.
The exhibition showcases the practices of artists who understand nature in different ways: Umico Niwa, a transgender woman with Japanese and American roots who expresses her approach to life through her sculpture; Yoko Daihara, a self-taught artist who uses wool to convert drawings into colorful mindscapes with motifs from daily life; Nagata Kosuke, whose moving image and food-related works reflect on human control of flora and fauna through selective breeding and farming; and Anais-karenin, whose work re-questions the relationship between humans and plants, based on knowledge passed down in Brazil since before the colonial era. With a focus on new work by these young artists, the exhibition features a diverse selection of contemporary art across various forms and mediums, from sculpture to moving image, wall tapestry, sound, installation, and food.
AOMORI GOKAN Arts Fest 2024
AOMORI GOKAN Arts Fest will take place from April 13 to September 1, 2024, at five contemporary art institutions in the prefecture: Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Aomori Museum of Art, Hachinohe Art Museum, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, and Towada Art Center. A new kind of art festival envisioned as “interweavers in open fields,” AOMORI GOKAN features a wide-ranging program of events that harness the unique characteristics of each participating venue.
Towada Art Center will hold Becoming Feral, an exhibition that interprets the festival theme of an open field as exchange between nature and humankind, and examines those complex interrelations.
Born in 1991 in Aichi, Japan, Umico Niwa is based in the United States. Rejecting Western notions of personhood, she uses sculpture to explore alternative modes of selfhood unbridled by physicality or gender. Her practice incorporates organic elements like wilting flowers or ripening fruit to express the fleeting and mutable nature of existence. Her major solo exhibitions include My Life Inside a Shoe (the Phantom Cricket) (Fig., Tokyo, 2023) and The Quantified Elf (and how it came to love itself) (Someday Gallery, New York, 2022), and her group exhibitions include The Invention of Nature (Nino Mier Gallery, LA, 2023) and Spring Is Coming (XYZ collective, Tokyo, 2022).
©︎Umico Niwa, 2022, Photography: Colin Conces
Born in 1989 in Chiba, Japan, Yoko Daihara is based in Tokyo. She employs wool to convert drawings and digital images into textile works. She composes colorful and fantastical mindscapes out of motifs from daily life, such as plants, as well as imaginary elements. Her major solo exhibitions include project N 88 DAIHARA Yoko (Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, 2022) and Please eat, don’t eat (Take Ninagawa, Tokyo, 2022). Along with artists Togashi Tatsuhiko and Watanabe Yohei, Daihara runs Lavender Opener Chair / Tohmei, an art space and restaurant.
© Yoko Daihara, courtesy of Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.
Born in 1993 in São Paulo, Brazil, Anais-karenin is a Japan-based artist and researcher. She situates her practice in an intimate engagement with plants, exploring the body of knowledge related to medicinal plants passed down in Brazil since before the colonial era, and re-questioning the relationship between humans and flora. She conducts her transdisciplinary research and fieldwork on such themes as animism, mythology, colonial history, language, and science, creating work that newly interprets plants through comprehensive approaches that appeal to smell, hearing, and our other senses. Anais-karenin’s major solo exhibitions include Things named [things] (The 5th Floor, Tokyo, 2023) and Mediate Plants (Gallery Kobo Chika, Tokyo, 2023). She is a PhD fellow at the University of São Paulo and a visiting researcher and teaching assistant at Waseda University.
Photo: Kato Hajime
Born in 1990 in Aichi, Nagata Kosuke is based in Kanagawa. Through photography, moving image, and installation, his practice explores the self and the other, nature and culture, the body and the environment, and other binary oppositions that undergird modern thinking, and their latent ambiguity. His recent work has focused on video essays and performances in the form of meal courses, reflecting on how food culture shapes national identity, the body techniques and power relations contained within table manners, and the control of animal and plant life in food production. Nagata’s major solo exhibitions include Eat (gallery αM, Tokyo, 2020) and group exhibitions include Seeing as though touching: Contemporary Japanese Photography vol. 19 (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2022) and the Aichi Triennale (Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Nagoya, 2019).
Title
Date
Location
Towada Art Center
Hours
9:00 – 17:00 (Last admission at 16:30)
Closed
Mondays (Except for National Holidays, in which case the art center will close the following day).
*Please check our website for the latest information.
Admission
1,800 yen
200 yen discount for groups of 20 or more
Under 18: free
Organized
Towada Art Center
Endorsed by
Embassy of Brazil, Asahi Broadcasting Aomori Co., Ltd., Aomori Broadcasting
Corporation, Aomori Television Broadcasting Co., Ltd., Aomori
Fm Broadcasting, The Daily-Tohoku Shimbun Inc., The To-o Nippo
Press, and Towada City Board of Education
Curator
Toyama Aruma
Umico Niwa, Metropolis Series: Good Egg Community
2022
Courtesy the artist and Someday, New York
Photography: Daniel Terna
*reference image
Yoko Daihara, It doesn’t get it
2022
© Yoko Daihara, courtesy of Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.
*reference image
Nagata Kosuke, Purée
2020
*reference image
Anais-karenin, Ancestry plant
2023
Photo: Takehisa Naoki
*reference image
