AWT
VIDEO
BETWEEN CONTRAIL AND MOUNTAINS
Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi
BETWEEN CONTRAIL AND MOUNTAINS
Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi
Screened at a special pavilion in the lobby of SMBC East Tower in the Marunouchi district, AWT Video presents a selection of single-channel moving image works by Japanese and international artists drawn from Art Week Tokyo’s participating galleries. Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi, the director of SculptureCenter in New York, this year’s program, “Between Contrail and Mountains,” features 14 works by 13 artists.
CURATORIAL STATEMENT
How does the time of the cumulus intersect with that of the graveyard, or that of the peonies with the lava stone? Rituals and customs are temporary synchronizing devices that give shape to time and our collective experience of it. They can traverse human time to that of the cosmos, connect skin to stars and thoughts to boulders. The time of the digital has fractured our experience of the moment, creating simultaneous temporalities that slip away through various feeds and create ever-fleeting slippages of synchronization: a split second of a seascape; a flooded village; a crème brûlée; a bomb crater. On the other hand, an overreliance on burning the sedimented prehistoric biomatter that is excavated to energize most dimensions of human activity is charting an uncertain future and threatening all current life forms. The fractured present and its unsettled atmospheric temporalities disrupt rituals and longstanding modalities of being together while simultaneously allowing for new forms of collectivity to be imagined.
The works in this edition of AWT Video look at art as both a site for the migration of rituals of being and a location for experimentation with emerging modes of togetherness. Someone recently asked about the choice between contrail and mountains, a question that might appear categorically disjunctive to respond to but speaks to the collapse of timescapes that, among other things, works in this video program proceed to clock. Perhaps it is not dissimilar to what the poet Rae Armantrout asks in “Simply” (2024): “Our earliest ancestors / were accelerants. / They ate change. / Where does that leave us?”
ARTISTS
ARTISTS
EDGAR CALEL
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AT NU JUKUKEMPE BIK’IN—TE TRAIGO ARRASTRANDO CONMIGO (I’M DRAGGING YOU ALONG WITH ME)
2015
Digital color video, with sound
2 min., 7 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City Centering the artist as he walks up a hill, this work is connected to Edgar Calel’s ideas concerning memory, embodiment, and history, speaking to the weight and commitment inherent to living and being in the present. As he ascends the uneven ground, the artist’s face is obscured by a mask of plant roots, his arms carry a bouquet of calla lilies, and he drags a dried-out tree branch tied to his hair. “Our bodies have different roots and branches that occupy not only physical but also abstract spaces,” Calel says. “For example, I have myself lived [through] neither the Guatemalan armed conflict nor the Spanish invasion, but as fear is inherited, this memory is present in my contemporaneity. . . . We cross this journey [of life] with silence, fear, loneliness, history, memory, pain, and poetry.”
About the Artist
Edgar Calel (b. 1987, Chi Xot [San Juan Comalapa], Guatemala) studied at the National School of Plastic Arts in Guatemala City. He works in a variety of media to explore the complexities of the Indigenous experience as seen through the Mayan Kaqchikel cosmovision, spirituality, rituals, community practices, and beliefs. He places this point of view in juxtaposition with the systematic racism and exclusion the Indigenous people of Guatemala endure on a daily basis.
TING-TONG CHANG
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THE BLUE WAVE WOMEN
2022
Digital color video, with sound
9 min., 54 sec.
Courtesy the artist and nca | nichido contemporary art Filmed in Taiwan and on Jeju Island in South Korea, The Blue Wave Women interweaves legends from each location to de- and re-construct the mythology of the birth of an island nation. Ting-Tong Chang collaborated with composer Tak Cheung Hui to create a soundtrack featuring multiple Korean folk songs. He also worked with dancers to combine traditional Korean dance and modern dance, utilizing physical movement to explore the multilayered meanings of the “hole” as a symbol for human origin, birth, and death. In one part of the video, three dancers represent the three demigods believed to have emerged from three holes located in what is now the heart of Jeju City, before the island was inhabited. The video then goes on to explore other elements of Jeju Island’s origin myth, including a giant serpent and sacrificial virgins. The project, as the artist writes, “presents a story that transcends time and space, aiming to evoke thoughts on origin, gender, myth, and cultural identity through the symbolism of island myths.”
About the Artist
Ting-Tong Chang was born in 1982 in Taipei, where he continues to live and work. The artist’s practice is driven by a thorough analysis of issues affecting contemporary societies, such as the ecological and social impact of consumerist lifestyles. Through a versatile approach that ranges from drawing to performance, sculpture, and video art, Chang uses his work to embrace science, technology, and history while deconstructing the world around him.
NAOTAKA HIRO
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SURFACE ON IT
2007
Digital video, transferred from Super 8 film, no sound
3 min., 20 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Misako & Rosen Throughout his career Naotaka Hiro has been consumed with ideas surrounding the fact that “there is no way to check the inside of one’s own body with one’s own eyes.” In the mid-2000s he created a number of works focused on the insides and outsides of the skull. In Surface on It, which is usually presented as a looped video, Hiro attempts to reanimate a skull through the addition of flesh. The bone becomes fleshy with a molten-looking egg-white-colored substance—a tactile attempt, according to the artist, to imagine a body part that we can never see for ourselves. Here, the skull serves as a mere pedestal or platform for further consideration of its second surface: human flesh.
About the Artist
Naotaka Hiro (b. 1972, Osaka) lives and works in Pasadena, California. He has exhibited at institutions in the United States including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), the Aspen Art Museum (2022), and the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno (2021). His work is held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the National Museum of Art, Osaka.
TISHAN HSU
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GRASS-SCREEN-SKIN
2022
Digital color video, with sound
2 min., 24 sec.
Courtesy the artist To create this video Tishan Hsu first planted grass seeds in a wetland and then placed a sheet of aluminum with holes cut into it on top. Using a microscopic camera, he recorded the ecosystems above and below the water as the grass grew and penetrated the holes in the metal, which can also be seen as a type of screen. Hsu meshed these recordings with images of internal and external human body parts and skin, abstracting the natural footage and creating an assemblage of grass-screen-skin—an attempt at depicting an embodied technology within the context of the natural world surrounding it.
About the Artist
Tishan Hsu (b. 1951, Boston) spent his early years moving between Zurich, Switzerland, and various locations in the United States. He studied environmental design and architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received his BSAD in 1973 and M.Arch in 1975. While at MIT, he also studied at Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and Graduate School of Design. Hsu has resided in New York since 1979 and held his first exhibition in the city at Pat Hearn Gallery. Since 1985 he has exhibited extensively in the US and Mexico as well as across Europe and Asia, with works held in many public and private collections. Hsu has held solo exhibitions at institutions including MAMCO Geneva (2024); Secession, Vienna (2023–24); the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2021); and SculptureCenter, New York (2020–21).
AI IWANE
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NO MAN EVER STEPS IN THE SAME RIVER TWICE
2020
Digital color video, with sound
11 min., 45 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Kana Kawanishi Gallery Having researched the interconnected histories and cultures of Hawaii and Japan, particularly the Issei community, Ai Iwane visualizes the fading memories of the past and the activities of people living in the present in this video, originally part of an eponymous three-channel installation. Referencing the key visuals and themes of the video, Iwane writes: “Cemeteries of the first-generation Japanese immigrants swallowed by lava / Cemeteries hidden in the last sugarcane plantation / Cemeteries on the beach, washed away by the tide and buried in sand / Centered on the narratives of those who protect Hawaii’s cemeteries, a river of massive lava flows.” Seeing the images and hearing the stories of deceased migrants appearing like phantoms in sugarcane fields and the massive lava flows that destroyed the Puna district of Hawaii in 2018, viewers might also recall the people of Fukushima being forced to leave their homes due to the nuclear power plant accident in 2011.
About the Artist
In 1991 Ai Iwane (b. 1975, Tokyo) moved to the United States by herself to attend Petrolia High School in California, where she led an off-grid, self-sufficient life. After returning to Japan, she began her photography career in 1996. Based on fieldwork she conducts to discover invisible connections between distant lands, Iwane creates photographic and video installations that unravel the natural traditions and intangible cultures that communities rely on. She was the associate producer of the documentary film Bon Uta (2018) and has received multiple awards, including the 44th Kimura Ihei Award (2019), the 44th Ina Nobuo Award (2018), and the 3rd Prix Pictet Japan Award (2022). Her books include Kipuka (Seigensha, 2018), Journey Towards Kipuka (Ohta Publishing, 2019), and A New River (Bookshop M, 2020).
TSUBASA KATO
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BREAK IT BEFORE IT’S BROKEN
2015
Digital color video, with sound
4 min., 49 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Mujin-to Production Built structures are often difficult to move due to their weight and their friction with the ground; however, when pulling forces exceed friction, a structure can be lifted and gain potential energy. As an object rises and falls, potential energy transforms into kinetic energy, resulting in destructive energy upon impact and sonic energy in the form of the sound of its breaking apart. In 2015 Tsubasa Kato worked with a stateless refugee community in Malaysia to transform an energy of despair into kinetic, destructive, sonic, and future potential energies. The community was facing eviction from their land by the government, and Kato asked its leader if he and his people wanted to destroy something before their homes were demolished. The artist and community went on to construct a structure using wood and corrugated iron that mirrored the form of their simple, temporary homes. The community banded together to overcome friction and tear apart the impromptu shelter. According to the artist, the performance documented in this video symbolizes “their forced mobility.”
About the Artist
Tsubasa Kato (b. 1984, Saitama) received an MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2010. Kato is known for works that incorporate performance, built structures, and video documentation. His first midcareer survey was held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in 2021. His work has been presented at international institutions including the Ulsan Museum, South Korea (2023); CHAT—Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile, Hong Kong (2022); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2021); the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2021); Tai Kwun, Hong Kong (2020); and MAXXI, Rome (2020). In 2022 he was an artist-in-residence at the Watermill Center, New York.
SAORI MIYAKE
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SEASCAPE (SUZU) 2
2024
Digital black-and-white video, no sound
11 min.
Courtesy the artist and Waitingroom Saori Miyake created Seascape (Suzu) 2 as a modest action in response to the shock and devastating effects of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Suzu City, Ishikawa Prefecture, on January 1, 2024. To make the video she revisited footage of the Suzu landscapes that she had recorded between 2019 and 2021 as a participant in the Okurazarae Project, a community-oriented project carried out under the auspices of the Oku-Noto Triennale, alongside image and video materials sent to her by Suzu residents. By inverting the black-and-white color scheme of the moving images to a negative format, the video takes on an eerie quality, raising questions about the entangled relationships between technology, nature, and humankind.
About the Artist
Saori Miyake (b.1975, Gifu) lives and works in Kyoto. She graduated with an MFA from Kyoto City University of Arts in 2000. In her multimedia practice Miyake employs a photogram technique that consists of printing “shadows” of drawings: She reverses found images and draws them on transparent sheets where negative and positive space are inverted. She also makes video works, which reflect the deeper thinking she has developed as a result of producing these photograms, as well as cyanotype prints that are photosensitive to sunlight. She has exhibited at institutions including the Institut français de Tokyo (2024); the Museum of Fine Arts, Gifu (2021); the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (2019); and the National Art Center, Tokyo (2018). Her work is held in public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art.
MIKA NINAGAWA WITH EIM
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BUTTERFLY
2024
Digital color video, with sound
5 min., 58 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery Rooted in the Japanese tradition of Noh theater, Mika Ninagawa’s 2023 installation Butterflies’ Season also served as a stage for Noh performer Hisa Uzawa to enact the second half of the Noh play Butterfly. This video offers carefully edited excerpts of the performance infused with poetic abstractions. Uzawa plays the spirit of a butterfly who is unable to connect with a plum blossom and appears before a monk in search of relief. Images of trees in full bloom and butterflies in close-up are projected onto screens as well as the performer’s Noh mask and costume. Spring gradually turns to winter, and the joyful dance comes to an end. But then spring comes around again, and the butterfly flies away in a dreamy haze. In the video, which was produced in collaboration with Uzawa and the creative team EiM: Eternity in a Moment, the butterfly symbolizes not only the connection between dreams and reality but also, as the term “butterfly effect” implies, the possibilities of various futures.
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SANCTUARY OF BLOSSOMS
2024
Digital color video, with sound
8 min., 9 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Tomio Koyama Gallery This work revolves around two spaces: a sanctuary-like space with flowers in full bloom and another where time flows toward death, with flowers decaying and dying. These two different realities symbolize the span of human life and emotion. On the one hand, it is crucial for an infant to have a realm where they feel secure; the infant uses this space to develop, to start expanding their boundaries and relate to the world through a variety of emotions and experiences. On the other hand, adults sometimes languish in their own comfort zones, with their desire to keep distance from whatever makes them uncomfortable leading, at times, to social divisions. By metaphorically referring to these two states, Sanctuary of Blossoms reflects on the transitions that humans experience throughout their lives, showing that notions of blossoming and decaying do not necessarily stand in contrast to each other but rather can be understood as complementary states that exist in unison.
About the Artist
Mika Ninagawa (b. 1972, Tokyo) has an artistic practice that spans photography, film, video, and spatial installations. She is also one of the members of the creative team EiM: Eternity in a Moment. Her accomplishments as a photographer include receiving the Kimura Ihei Award (2001) and publishing numerous books, such as Flowers, Shimmering Light (Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2022) and Mika Ninagawa (Rizzoli, 2010). She has directed five feature films, including Diner (2019) and Helter Skelter (2012), as well as the Netflix drama series Followers (2020). She is currently preparing a solo exhibition at the Kyoto City Kyocera Museum of Art that will open in January 2025.
YUTAKA NOZAWA
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BIRD→◯
2023
Digital color video, with sound
3 min., 51 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Kayokoyuki In this work Yutaka Nozawa creates a unique landscape by reframing a scene that would otherwise be passed by as ordinary. Viewers watch as dawn turns to day, as clouds move across a blue background, as birds enter and exit the limited line of sight—all reflected in a circular mirror leaned against a concrete wall to reflect the sky. In its stunning simplicity, Bird→◯ offers a meaningful meditation on our conceptions of time and space.
About the Artist
Yutaka Nozawa was born in 1983 in Shizuoka, where he continues to live and work. He received his BFA from Tokyo Zokei University and his MFA from Tokyo University of the Arts. He also received an MFA in photography from the IED campus in Madrid. Nozawa has presented his work at venues around the world, including Sadie Coles HQ, London (2024); void+, Tokyo (2023); Kayokoyuki, Tokyo (2017); the Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art (2015); the Centre national de l’audiovisuel, Dudelange, Luxembourg (2014); and Intercambiador ACART, Madrid (2014).
MILJOHN RUPERTO
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THE BAROQUE IS A GEOMETRIC IMPOSITION UPON WILD NATURE, HISTORY AWAITS IMMANENCE, WESTERN TEMPORALITIES INCLINE TOWARDS A TRIPARTITE STRUCTURE
2023
Digital black-and-white video, no sound
3 min., 56 sec.
Courtesy the artist This video features animated line drawings of three disembodied heads in an otherwise empty white space. The first head is based on Peter Paul Rubens’s Medusa (c. 1618), the second on Rodin’s Saint John the Baptist (1878–80), and the third on a three-faced Christ, a representation of the Holy Trinity that was banned by the Catholic Church in the early 17th century but persisted in its colonies. Like Miljohn Ruperto’s practice at-large, this work refers to historical and anecdotal occurrences to prompt a reevaluation of the nature of assumed facts and the construction of truth.
About the Artist
Miljohn Ruperto (b. 1971, Manila) and lives and works in Los Angeles. Ruperto is interested in developing approaches to interrogating and expanding conceptions of nature and history, such as historiography, the history of nature, and the nature of nature.
AKI SASAMOTO
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WEATHER BAR FORECAST #2
2021
Digital color video, with sound
3 min., 55 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa Weather Bar Forecast #2 combines an evening weather report with the accoutrements of a cocktail bar to show how ecological systems span microcosmic to global scales. As the weather forecast is narrated by an insouciant voiceover, Sasamoto, the bartender, proceeds to make the bar’s daily cocktail, the “Orange Tornado.” As Sasamoto traps a flaming alcoholic beverage inside a tall cylindrical fence and vigorously spins it on a turning stand, the flame twists and rises into a tornado of fire, providing a visual allegory of the weather report. “As the forecasts unfold,” the artist says, “science and mystery are fused with much satire [about] recent abnormal world events and climate changes.”
About the Artist
Aki Sasamoto (b. 1980, Kanagawa) is a New York–based Japanese artist who works in performance, sculpture, dance, and video. Her videos often develop in tandem with her improvisational performances and installations in which spoken narrative and physical contortions unfold in a feedback loop with careful arrangements of sculpturally altered found objects and multimedia elements. Sasamoto has had solo exhibitions at institutions including Para Site, Hong Kong (2024); the Queens Museum, New York (2023); the Kitchen, New York (2017); and SculptureCenter, New York (2016). She has participated widely in international exhibitions including the 59th Venice Biennale, the Aichi Triennale, the Busan Biennale, and the Okayama Art Summit (all 2022), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2016), and the Yokohama Triennale (2008).
ATSUSHI YAMAMOTO
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THE GHOST FROM THE CITY OF GHOSTS
2019–23
Digital color video, with sound
8 min., 48 sec.
Courtesy the artist and ShugoArts There is a group of tombs known as the City of Ghosts near Hue, Vietnam, where Atsushi Yamamoto spent the year of 2018 as part of the Program of Overseas Study for Upcoming Artists sponsored by Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs. Now a tourist attraction, the tombs are so luxurious and ornate that they are more like castles. After Yamamoto visited the tombs, he imagined the ghost of an aristocrat wearing an equally sumptuous ao dai, or traditional Vietnamese dress. In this video the aristocratic ghost escapes from its tomb, wanders through urban ruins and deserted residential areas, and arrives in the bustling city of Hue during Lunar New Year, where it becomes one with the crowds—an uncanny reflection of the everyday, where ghosts simultaneously blend into and haunt our experiences.
About the Artist
After graduating from the Department of Painting at Tama Art University, Atsushi Yamamoto (b. 1980, Tokyo) moved in 2003 to Berlin where he developed a video practice. He now lives and works in Tokyo, where he works an office job during the week and films on his days off. He has produced more than 300 videos in many diverse genres—from social drama to essayistic documentary to comedic experimental shorts—that question both the meaning and meaninglessness of life.
GOZO YOSHIMASU
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OH! MADEMOISELLE KINKA!
2021
Digital color video, with sound
5 min., 33 sec.
Courtesy the artist and Take Ninagawa The poet Gozo Yoshimasu began making films with a digital handheld video camera in 2006, resulting in an ongoing body of work he calls gozoCine. In each of the videos he combines moving images with spontaneous poetic compositions and readings, as can be seen and heard in Oh! Mademoiselle Kinka! For this short video Yoshimasu filmed the view from a hotel window— which, prior to filming, he covered with marks, fragments of text, and pieces of paper—overlooking Mount Kinka in central Japan. As he holds the camera with his hand, his face unseen, Yoshimasu recites a poetic meditation referencing legendary figures in art and literature ranging from the 17th-century haiku master Matsuo Basho to Cézanne and his Montagne Sainte-Victoire paintings, while a piece by Russian pianist Valery Afanassiev plays in the background. Highlighting the multiplicity of language, Yoshimasu’s visual and aural poems traverse diverse geographic and discursive topoi and test the limits of translation.
About the Artist
Gozo Yoshimasu was born in 1939 in Tokyo, where he continues to live and work. He first emerged in Tokyo’s avant-garde intermedia scene in the 1960s, when he developed an experimental practice that sought to recover the shared roots of poetry and performance. He also makes mixed-media paintings that blur the lines between literary manuscript, calligraphy, and painting, and has developed a video practice that he refers to as gozoCine. Yoshimasu has held solo exhibitions at institutions including the Shoto Museum of Art, Tokyo (2018), and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2016). His work has been featured in international exhibitions including the Manchester International Festival (2021), the Sapporo International Art Festival (2017), and the 21st Bienal de São Paulo (1991). His poems have been widely published in Japanese. A book of translated poems, Alice Iris Red Horse: Selected Poems of Yoshimasu Gozo, was published by New Directions in 2016.
VISIT
VISIT
LOCATION
SMBC East Tower 1F
1-3-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku
DATES AND TIMES
November 7–10, 10am–6pm
ADMISSION
Free