Towada Art Center’s satellite venue space is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Noriko Okaku from July 6, until September 8, 2024.

Okaku is an artist based in London and Kyoto. She is interested in transcendent forces and the principles that constitute the world. The artist weaves together stories and ideas from folklore, myths, legends, and the occult with theoretical frameworks such as philosophy, religious studies, quantum mechanics, and information thermodynamics, and creates works by employing modern technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI).

This exhibition presents an installation featuring human cutouts, microphones, and two monitors connected to an image-generating AI. Visitors are invited to enter their names into the AI program by speaking into a microphone. This alters the virtual space on the monitors, the results of which visitors are encouraged to share on Instagram.

This work is inspired by a quote from novelist William Burroughs: “Language is a virus from outer space.” Just as a virus infiltrates and reproduces its own genetic material inside a host’s cells, the unique names of visitors alter the space that spans across the monitors. This idea is also juxtaposed with how language exerts influence beyond human control.

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.