TRIENNALLS: Okayama Art Summit 2022, Part II

Many in the crowded field of art biennales and triennales struggle to find alternatives to conventional, curator-led exhibitions. Okayama Art Summit stands out as an experiment directed by internationally renowned artists. Liam Gillick directed the inaugural Summit in 2016 and Pierre Huyghe is the Artistic Director of the 2019 edition (Part I).

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Okayama Art Summit Archive

Held in Okayama City once every three years, the Okayama Art Summit is an international exhibition of contemporary art. With Rirkrit Tiravanija taking the reins as artistic director, the Okayama Art Summit 2022 entitled “Do we dream under the same sky”, though written out, without the question marking the end of the sentence, it’s only an opening to an idea. In the past years, the with Global pandemic and the exertion of White Supremacy tendencies in the US as well as Nationalists Populist in many parts of the global world, I like for the exhibition to refocus our mindset and perspectives. With many of these thoughts in mind, I like the potential of the next Okayama Art Summit to be focused on peripheral practices by artists whom may share in common their itinerant backgrounds. In itinerant, I mean that most of the artists in this selection are coming from cultural and social back grounds that is diverse. Though they may have their practices and their locations in the center of western artistic hegemony, we could understand that their positioning in that ( western ) hegemony, is based on their identification with positions other than western. That their lives and histories are constructed, in difference, to the west. The dream here, is to dream in a sky of difference, in a sky of multiplicity, of narratives of representation that is peripheral to the western canon. That the dream is for us ( the participants and the viewer ) to experience representations, which are outside of our normative position. That the dream can open us to stories and lives and ways of thinking, looking, hearing, being, existing beyond the hopes, the aspirations, and dreams that we ourselves are touched by in our daily structures. The event offers visitors the opportunity not only to see exciting exhibits but also to experience the thought processes of the artists, enabling a unique interaction with art that transcends time and space-all from the historic city of Okayama.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is best known for his intimate, participatory installations that revolve around personal and shared communal traditions, such as cooking Thai meals, that are, in the words of curator Rochelle Steiner, “fundamentally about bringing people together.”1 At the forefront of the shift in avant-garde art practices in the 1990s away from traditional art objects and toward “relational aesthetics” that incorporate diverse cultural spaces, practices, and temporalities, Tiravanija has continually challenged and expanded the social dimension of art, inviting people from all walks of life to inhabit the special and personal spaces that he constructs and to communally engage in shared rituals and actions. Rasel Ahmed is a community-based video artist who uses traditional cinematic tropes and techniques to combine documentary with fantasy. Characters in his films function as an anchor to synthesize the iconography, visual metaphor, and psychogeography of cinematic spaces. Rasel’s experimental videos are a means to explore his dialogical relationship with displacement, citizenship, border, and loneliness. He uses a combination of participatory documentation, archival research, and collaborative re-enactment to finalize the performance and movement choices in the film. For Wang Bing, making films is born of an urgent need to question his own time, his own country, to establish without delay an alternative to official media coverage, oscillating between propaganda and censorship. Wang Bing’s films are pervaded by a question: how to display the lives of those nameless Chinese whom the “socialist market economy” has ignored, disdained, or exploited. The political scope of Wang Bing’s films, never openly declared, is manifest therefore in an ethics of patience, of concentration, of persistence. Daniel Boyd is an Indigenous Australian multidisciplinary artist. His paintings, installations, and sculptures are informed by his Kudjla/Gangalu heritage, and examine Eurocentric narratives around Australia’s colonial history. Through his signature ‘dot’ painting technique, Boyd presents visual manifestations of Indigenous collective memory and perception, refiguring  photographs, asking us to contend with histories that have been hidden from view.

Lygia Clark is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose pioneering body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the 1950s Brazilian Neoconcretist movement, Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Experimenting with modulations of form, color, and plane, her early abstract works harbored compositions that challenged the canvas’s edge and extended the visual field of painting into the physical realm of the viewer. Expanding on the intellectual investigation of his own paradoxical aesthetic concepts of autoconstrucción and autodestrucción, Abraham Cruzvillegas likens his works to self-portraits of contradictory elements and explores the effects of improvisation, transformation, and decay on his materials and work. In his experiments with video, performance, personal and family archives, and academic research, he reveals the deep connection between his identity—born of the realities of his family’s life in Mexico—and his artistic practice. Ryoji Ikeda’s innovative work explores the essential characteristics of sound and light by means of mathematical precision and aesthetics. The artist engages with frequencies and scales difficult for the human ear and mind to comprehend, visualising sounds, and rendering the imperceptible through numerical systems and computer aesthetics. By orchestrating sounds, visuals, materials, physics, and mathematics, Ikeda goes beyond the conceptual to delve into extremes and infinites, testing the limits of human senses and digital technology. Mari Katayama, whose legs were amputated at age 9 due to a congenital limb disease, is known for creating a variety of works, from hand-sewn objects that mimic her own body to meticulously staged self-portraits that use prosthetic legs that she actually uses herself. When shooting self-portraits, she uses a remote control and self-timer. Her motto: she always releases the shutter herself. Katayama has now become an internationally acclaimed artist who questions the ambiguity of the division between artificial and natural and what we think of as the “correct body.”

Driven to find the poetic substance of materials and spaces, Precious Okoyomon works in sculpture, moving image, and words in a practice of re-embodiment and ludic catharsis, whose tender gestures often pair with visceral critical inquiry. The inevitable horizon of death and decay—and the celebration of the fact that from this horizon all life springs—serves as a central focus and impetus in Okoyomon’s work, inviting the reader into a space of morose play where aesthetics of the cute register abjection, destruction, and aggression. In an interview with the Creative Independent, she states that her writing is “just me trying to boil down my gibberish and self-recriminations into some destruction and rebirth of me trying to give flesh to my memories.” There is a similar distillation in the visual component of her practice, which points to her poetic approach.  Vandy Rattana portrays episodes of historical violence through understated and tranquil images. He began his photography practice in 2005. His serial work employed a range of analog cameras and formats, straddling the line between strict photojournalism and artistic practice. His recent works mark a shift in philosophy surrounding the relationship between historiography and image making. For Vandy Rattana, photographs are now fictional constructions, abstract and poetic surfaces, histories of their own. An installation and performance artist, Aki Sasamoto works in various media, finding material inspiration in response to the conditions of her site or surroundings. Often collaborating with other artists, scholars, and even mathematicians, Sasamoto performs within her installations, which can take place in galleries, theaters, or outside of traditional art venues. The artist builds these installations from everyday found objects, and her performances actively engage viewers, occasionally transforming them into participants. Shimabuku is an artist-traveler who, through surprising encounters and detours, challenges the boundaries between reality and imagination. His installations, sculptures, drawings, writings, photographs and videos stem from experiences, stories and anecdotes in which he interacts with the living world or with the mineral world. Freely combining performance, land art, music and cooking, Shimabuku’s poetic actions are forever spinning new tales. His texts, which form the narrative thread of the exhibition, interweave installations, films, sculptures and photographs executed over the past 30 years. One of the most widely shown artists of her generation in the world today, Haegue Yang continues to live and work between the cities of Seoul and Berlin since the mid-nineties. She is known for producing a form of conceptual language and an aesthetic vocabulary τhat is uniquely interwoven. Whichever aspect of Yang’s practice is mentioned, her engagement is decidedly non-binary, tending to unsettle ideas, concepts and forms she previously sought to establish.

Participating Artists: Rasel Ahmed, Art Labor in collaboration with Jrai artists, Wang Bing, Daniel Boyd, Lygia Clark, Abraham Cruzvillegas, ENKU, Ryoji Ikeda, Mari Katayama, My-Linh Le, David Medalla, Asif Mian, Precious Okoyomon, Frida Orupabo, Vandy Rattana, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane, Aki Sasamoto, Jacolby Satterwhite, Shimabuku, Yutaka Sone, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Haegue Yang

Photo: Precious Okoyomon installation view of To See The Earth Before the End of the World, 2022, at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, “The Milk of Dreams, 2022. Photo by Roberto Marossi. Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia

Info: Artistic Director: Rirkrit Tiravanija, Okayama Art Summit 2022, Duration: 30/9-27/11/2022, Venues: Various (see list), Days Tue-Sun, Hours:  Former Uchisange Elementary School, Tenjinyama Cultural Plaza of Okayama Prefecture, Okayama Orient Museum & Okayama Shrine 9: 9: 00-17:00 / Hayashibara Museum of Art: 10:00-17:00 / Okayama Korakuen Garden 9:00-16:00 / Okayama Castle 16:00-21:00 / Okayama Tenmaya: 8:00-19:30 www.okayamaartsummit.jp/

Venues:
Former Uchisange Elementary School, 1-2-12 Marunouchi, Kita-ku, Okayama City,
Tenjinyama Cultural Plaza of Okayama Prefecture, 8-54 Tenjincho, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Okayama Orient Museum, 9-31 Tenjincho, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Cinema Clair Marunouchi, 1-5-1 Marunouchi, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Hayashibara Museum of Art, 2-7-15 Marunouchi, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Okayama Korakuen Garden, 1-5 Korakuen, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Okayama Shrine, 2-33 Ishizekicho, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Ishiyama Park, 7 Ishizekicho, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Okayama Castle, 2-3-1 Marunouchi, Kita-ku, Okayama City
Okayama Tenmaya, 2-1-1 Omotecho, Kita-ku, Okayama city