We would like to present the second part of the photography essay centring on TRANS-, an art project that took place in Kobe, Japan, from September to November 2019.
Focusing on Kobe’s underground spaces, this chapter explores the hidden layers and unseen passages beneath the city.
We would like to present a three-part series of a photography essay dedicated to an art project titled TRANS-, which took place in Kobe (神戸), Japan, from September to November 2019, exhibiting works by Gregor Schneider1 and Miwa Yanagi2.
Kobe is a well-known port city renowned for integrating foreign cultures, as well as its long history of commercial trade and industrial development. As you wander through the centre and parts of the city, it can even strike you as being in Europe at first glance: the pavements and street decorations, the style of the architecture, though noticeably with a Japanese twist.
Like numerous other cities around the world, Kobe is also going through phases of transformation. Memories are being left behind, buildings are deserted. Unlike countless biennales, art events, and festivals that have erupted across Japan and the world, especially during the last few years, TRANS- deliberately escaped the conventional framework of museums and exhibition halls. Instead, it utilises abandoned venues in areas outside the prosperous heart of the city, where decline had started to creep in many years earlier, following the Great Hanshin earthquake in 1995. The artists raised questions regarding such transformations, dealing with the city’s buried past and its people: in order to “move on”, how should the city “transcend”?
“Shut your eyes and see,” as James Joyce once stated. Rather than entertaining visitors with contemporary art pieces and visually appealing installations, the hollow, almost eerie spaces imagined by the artists instead created daunting moments for participants to experience the forgotten lives of the city.
We would like to present the fourth and final part of a photographic documentation series from last year’s Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion, which took place between August and October across various venues in Nagoya (名古屋) and Aichi (愛知), Japan.
This part of the series highlights the exhibitions at the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art. For the rest of the series, focusing on Nagoya City Art Museum, Endoji (円頓寺), and Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, please follow the respective links.
We would like to present the third part of a photographic documentation series from last year’s Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion, which took place between August and October across various venues in Nagoya (名古屋) and Aichi (愛知), Japan.
This part of the series highlights the exhibitions at Endoji (円頓寺). For the rest of the series, focusing on Nagoya City Art Museum, Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, please follow the respective links.
We would like to present the second part of a photographic documentation series from last year’s Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion, which took place between August and October across various venues in Nagoya (名古屋) and Aichi (愛知), Japan.
This part of the series highlights the exhibitions at the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art. For the rest of the series, focusing on Nagoya City Art Museum, Endoji (円頓寺), and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, please follow the respective links.
We would like to present a series of photographic documentation from last year’s Aichi Triennale 2019: Taming Y/Our Passion, which took place between August and October across various venues in Nagoya (名古屋) and Aichi (愛知), Japan.
The Triennale aims to explore a middle ground amidst an explosion of information and emotion, a time in which people have become increasingly anxious and vulnerable while attempting to emphasise the original Greek definition of the word “art”. Ironically and tragically, however, the dominant headlines surrounding the festival’s opening centred on the censorship and shutdown of a controversial exhibition featuring representations of comfort women before and during World War II.
We decided to publish this visual documentation one year after the closing of the Triennale, amid the outbreak of COVID-19, as well as the current absurd political climate and shifting cultural landscape. We hope it serves as a reminder, not only to our audiences and the public, but also to ourselves — of the crucial role contemporary art plays in modern society, that we may have been diverted onto a dangerous path, that freedom of expression should never be tamed, and that creativity should never be inhibited.
This first part of the series highlights the exhibitions at the Nagoya City Art Museum. For the rest of the series, focusing on the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, Endoji (円頓寺), and the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, please follow the respective links.
