17. Juli - 11. Oktober 2020

Yokohama, Japan

Titel: Afterglow

Künstlerische Leitung: RaqsMedia Collective
Siehe das Interview

Teilnehmer: 67 Künstler und Gruppen

Veranstalter: Stadt Yokohama, Yokohama Arts Foundation, Japan Broadcasting Corporation (NHK), The Asahi Shimbun und das Organisationskomitee der Yokohama Triennale

Fototour

"What the global spread of the new virus has made apparent — even more so than its toxicity — is a distrust of and overconfidence in information, and a fear of an uncertain future and other people," states KIMURA Eriko, Curatorial Head. "Once the immediate crisis has passed, memories of fear will likely remain like sediment here and there in people and society. In order to survive in such a world, it will become more important than ever for each of us to recognize the diversity of both human society and our entire ecosystem, and to stand on our own feet and exist as though glowing like a light. Yokohama Triennale 2020 aims to provide an opportunity, through contemporary art, to think about the power to 'catch that light' which will allow us step into an uncertain future."

"In the face of significant restrictions on international travel, it was the collective enthusiasm of the artistic director Raqs Media Collective and participating artists that has delivered to Yokohama these cutting-edge artworks which will now be presented to the world," writes KONDO Seiichi, from the YT Organizing Committee. Thanking all the citizens, companies and organizations who have made it possible to hold Yokohama Triennale 2020, HAYASHI Fumiko (Mayor, City of Yokohama), expresses: "As we commence one of the first biennale and triennales in the world to open amid these circumstances, I am convinced we can deliver cheer to everyone. We also hope we are able to send a message of courage to artists around the world."

For the exhibition, which opens on 17 July, 2020, Raqs Media Collective proposes: "Imagine the Yokohama Museum of Art, and the Plot 48 as ‘thicket hosts’: temporary shelters for the biological diversity of the mind and the imagination. In these times, when we have begun to learn a new vocabulary of ‘social distance’, think of a thicket — the very opposite of the exclusionary principle that a pandemic unleashes. It brings to mind an image of density, immersion, and entanglement. It is also interesting to think about the state of alertness the mind enters into while navigating a thicket. It slows the experience of time. A transformed experience of time can bring forth a form of compassion that is as caring as it is contagious — where contact, and a state of awareness about being in contact, is the key to a return to safety, without the fear of banishment of the contagious. It is welcoming of different forms and propensities of life."

In the Sourcebook, Raqs had shared an amazement, which the artists now would like us to feel again: "Life, the universe, the world, and the time of each day disintegrates and gets re-constituted through innumerable acts, incrementally rebuilding through luminous care. Broken minutes are mended in the afterglow of time’s toxic debris. Life is a luminous autodidact."

Komplette Statements
Pressemeldung, 16. Juli 2020

Siehe auch:
Interview mit Raqs Media Collective
von Pat Binder und Gerhard Haupt, 21. August 2020