AWT
VIDEO

BETWEEN CONTRAIL AND MOUNTAINS
Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi
BETWEEN CONTRAIL AND MOUNTAINS
Curated by Sohrab Mohebbi

TSUBASA KATO
TSUBASA KATO, Break it Before it’s Broken, 2015. Video, 4 min., 49 sec. © Tsubasa Kato, courtesy the artist and Mujin-to Production.
SAORI MIYAKE
SAORI MIYAKE, Seascape (Suzu) 2, 2024. Video, 11 min. © Saori Miyake, courtesy the artist and Waitingroom.
MIKA NINAGAWA
MIKA NINAGAWA with EiM, Butterfly, 2024. Video, 5 min., 58 sec. © Mika Ninagawa, courtesy Tomio Koyama Gallery.

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

TING-TONG CHANG

NAOTAKA HIRO

TISHAN HSU

AI IWANE

TSUBASA KATO

SAORI MIYAKE

MIKA NINAGAWA

YUTAKA NOZAWA

MILJOHN RUPERTO

AKI SASAMOTO

ATSUSHI YAMAMOTO

GOZO YOSHIMASU

VISIT
VISIT

LOCATION

SMBC East Tower 1F
1-3-2 Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku

GOOGLE MAPS

DATES AND TIMES

November 7–10, 10am–6pm

ADMISSION

Free

SMBC East Tower