ARTISTS

Paola Besana

Paola Besana (1935-2021) was fascinated by the potentialities of advanced weaving techniques stemming from different social contexts and cultures and she produced textile artworks that explore the tridimensional nature of weaving. Her textile sculptures, reaching sometimes a large scale, put folk culture and abstract contemporary art on a continuous line. Parallel to her personal oeuvre, for three decades she led Studio di Tessitura Paola Besana, a workshop and center for research, production and teaching. In this frame, together with associates Paola Bonfante and Lalla Ranza, she designed textiles for architects, the theater, fashion and the industry. She developed a personal teaching methodology based more on the logic of techniques than on the patterns through which such techniques are commonly expressed. Alongside to her teaching and research activities, she curated a large collection of textile-related objects, such as woven items, samples of weaves, traditional objects and a textile library, which are now made available through the Paola Besana Archives.

Bianca Bondi

Bianca Bondi (Johannesburg, South Africa, 1986) lives and works in Paris. Multidisciplinary, her practice involves the activation or elevation of mundane objects through the use of chemical reactions, most often by salt water. The materials she works with are chosen for their potential for mutation or their intrinsic and symbolic properties. Her aim being to promote experiences beyond the visual and advocate the life of matter with an emphasis on interconnectivity, transience, and the cycles of life and death. Passionate about ecology and the occult sciences, Bianca Bondi combines the two resulting in pluridisciplinary works of a transformative nature through which the aura of objects is key. Often site specific, the poetic results are very much connected to the places in which they are to exist.

AKI INOMATA

Artist / Part time lecturer at Tama Art University and Musashino Art University, Visiting researcher at Waseda University Born in Tokyo, Japan in 1983, lives and works in Tokyo.
M.F.A., Tokyo University of the Arts, Department of Inter-Media Art, 2008.
Focusing on the act of "making" is not exclusive to human beings, Inomata creates art works with various species “collaboratively.” She investigates relationships between animals and human beings and the creation emerging from them.
Her major works include Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter” to Hermit Crabs?, an attempt she created 3d printed shells for hermit crabs and handed it over to them, and I Wear the Dog’s Hair, and the Dog Wears My Hair, in which the artist and her dog wear capes made from each other’s respective hair.
Her recent exhibitions include Broken Nature, MoMA (2021; New York, USA), AKI INOMATA: Significant Otherness, Towada Art Center (2019; Aomori, Japan), The XXII Triennale di Milano, La Triennale di Milano (2019; Italy), Thailand Biennale 2018 (Krabi), and Aki Inomata, Why Not Hand Over a “Shelter” to Hermit Crabs?, Musée d’arts de Nantes (2018; France).
Her works are included in the collections of MoMA, Art Gallery of South Australia, and 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Umesh P K

Umesh P K is a Baroda based Indian artist. He often draws inspiration from the natural world around us and shares his concerns regarding the lost pathways between humans and nature. His interest in mythology, history of representation and spirituality feed his artistic pursuit. The lush landscapes in his paintings got instilled in him during his childhood in Kerala, the southernmost part of Indian subcontinent, a land stretches between the Western Ghat, a biodiversity hotspot in the world and a vast coastline of the Arabian sea. He explains his practice as contemplative, an attempt to understand painting in terms of its fundamentals such as the Interactions of colours, the play of lines and forms and bringing a sense of spaciousness into a two dimensional surface by referring back to various movements in the history of painting and different pictorial traditions.
He has participated in various shows and art festivals, which include Lokame Tharavadu(The World is One Family), curated by Bose Krishnamachari, conducted by Kochi Biennale Foundation in Alappuzha, Kerala(2021).

Atsunobu Katagiri

Atsunobu Katagiri is a flower arranger/artist and the master of the Misasagi Ikebana school. He studied in the United States after graduating from middle school, and returned to Japan in 1994. He succeeded to the aforementioned position of ikebana master in 1997. In 2005, he opened Monde Books, which serves as both a classroom and gallery, in the city of Sakai, Osaka, and embarked on a wide range of activities, including the unearthing of young artists, holding of exhibitions, and publication. After the Great East Japan Earthquake, he visited Fukushima Prefecture, where he produced and photographed works conveying hopes for recovery in areas affected by the catastrophe at the nuclear power station. He documented these works in the book Sacrifice: The Ikebana of Regeneration, Offered to the Future, which was published by Seigensha Art Publishing in 2015.
In style, his works cover a wide range extending from arrangements of little wild plants to installations in the nature of contemporary art. He delves into the animistic aspect that forms part of the wellsprings of ikebana, and aspires to gain insights into the relationship between plants and human beings from the perspective of cultural anthropology. His activities center on solo exhibitions and workshops in Japan and other countries.

Rinko Kawauchi

Rinko Kawauchi was born in Shiga Prefecture in 1972. She was selected for the 27th Kimura Ihei Photography Award for her works UTATANE (Siesta) and HANABI (Fireworks) in 2002. Her art has been given high marks internationally as well, as evidenced by her selection for the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award in the Sony World Photography Awards. She has held numerous exhibitions inside and outside Japan. Her main publications are Illuminance (2011), Ametsuchi (2013), and Halo (2017). Her recently published photography collections are Yamanami and Daidai ga minoru made (co-authored with Hisako Tajiri). From 2022 to 2023, the solo exhibition Rinko Kawauchi: M/E ―On this sphere Endlessly interlinking was held at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery and Shiga Museum of Art.

Kimsooja

Born in 1957 in Daegu, Korea. Currently resides in Seoul, New York, and Paris. Internationally acclaimed conceptual multimedia artist. Kim’s works, created through a combination of site-specific installations, address questions related to aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment, while also investigating the human condition. Recent projects include a site-specific installation at Cisternerne, Frederiksberg museums, Denmark(2023), a permanent stained glass work at the Metz Cathedral in Metz, France (2022) and at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) in Sydney, Australia. She has also participated in a number of international biennials and triennials, including Documenta 14 in Kassel, the Venice Biennale, and the São Paulo Biennial among many others.

Mirai Moriyama

Born in 1984, lives between Kobe and Tokyo.
Moriyama is a multidisciplinary artist who works in Japan and overseas.
From a very young age, Moriyama trained in a variety of dance genres before making his stage debut in 1999. He was nominated Cultural Ambassador by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2013, worked with Inbal Pinto & Avshalom Pollak Dance Company for a year in Tel-Aviv, Israel and collaborated with diverse performing arts groups in European countries.
Since then his activities have been focusing on "physical expression that is generated through a relationship with people, things, and places”.
As an actor he has won several Japanese film awards and as a dancer he won the 10th Japan Dance Forum prize. He performed a solo dance at the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games. In April 2022, he initiated a group to launch and operate Artist in Residence KOBE（AiRK）in Kobe, Japan.
He is also a Post-Butoh dancer.

Saburo Ota

Saburo Ota was born in Yamagata Prefecture in 1950. He graduated from the National Institute of Technology, Tsuruoka College with a degree in mechanical engineering in 1971, and began producing artwork in 1980. He has continued to create works using the motif of postage stamps, as exemplified by his SEED PROJECT, for which he mounted seeds he collected on stamp-like squares of washi, and his POST WAR series, which took up various postwar issues. His main exhibitions in recent years include OTA Sabura: I am Here (Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, 2019), MOT Collection Journals, vol. 2 (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, 2021), and Ota Sabura Exhibition: People Beside a Disaster (BB Plaza Museum of Art, 2022). The major awards he has received are the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology's Regional Cultural Merits Award and the Okayama Prefecture Cultural Award. His works have been added to the collections of museums inside and outside Japan, including the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden; and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (Seoul).

Smitha G S

Smitha G S, a self-taught artist from the Malabar region of Kozhikode in Kerala, a southern state of India. She is infl uenced by childhood memories brimming with nature's melodies. Her pieces emphasize animals and the intricate beauty of nature, often sidelining human forms. Yet, as her style evolved during the 2010s, Smitha's artworks began resonating with societal themes, such as Kerala's Nipah outbreak, juxtaposing human vulnerabilities with the unpredictable realm of animals. The COVID-19 lockdown marked a transformative phase, inspiring her to create a universe of happiness within the boundaries of her home. While her initial pieces celebrated the animal world, her post-COVID creations started to weave in human fi gures, emphasizing the performing arts and rituals of Malabar, and their relation with nature.
Smitha’s works were featured in the "Lokame Tharavadu" (The World is One Family) exhibition curated by Bose Krishnamachari in 2021, which was a breakthrough in her artistic career. Since then, numerous art institutions and galleries, both in India and abroad, have acknowledged and acquired her works.

Kazuyo Sejima

Born in Ibaraki Prefecture. Architect. In 1987 she opened her own studio in Tokyo and in 1995 she founded SANAA with Ryue Nishizawa. In 2010 Kazuyo Sejima was appointed director of the 12th International Architecture Exhibition of Venice Biennale. Her honors include, the Prize of Architectural Institute of Japan*, Venice Biennale Golden Lion Award*, Pritzker Architecture Prize, Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Letters, and the Medal with Purple Ribbon. SANAA’s main works include the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa*, the Rolex Learning Center (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne)*, and Louvre-Lens*.
*as SANAA

Jukan Tateisi

Jukan Tateisi was born in Chicago in 1986. As a contemporary artist, he produces works that take as their theme the dissolution and synthesis of dichotomic borders such as virtual and real, and natural and artificial. His main works include Beach on Beach, which superimposes beach layers; To The Fog, in which he delivers a personal monologue directed to fog through a public broadcasting system; and In(to)stallation, which brings the space for viewing art into a forest. His activities extend to numerous other domains, such as music, film, performing arts, and even food products. He was selected for New Contemporaries 2021, a program of contemporary art awards in the United Kingdom, and received a Master of Arts degree from the Royal College of Art in London.

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija is known for a practice that overturns traditional exhibition formats in favor of social interactions through the sharing of everyday activities such as cooking, eating and reading. Creating environments that reject the primacy of the art object, and instead focus on use value and the bringing of people together through simple acts and environments of communal care, Tiravanija’s work challenges expectations around labour and virtuosity. Tiravanija is on the faculty of the School of the Arts at Columbia University, and is a founding member and curator of Utopia Station, a collective project of artists, art historians, and curators. He also helped establish an educational-ecological project known as The Land Foundation, located near Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Yoshihiko Ueda

Photographer/Professor of Department of Graphic Design, Tama Art University.
Born in 1957 in Hyogo Prefecture. Among his many awards are the Photographic Society of Japan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Tokyo Art Directors Club Grand Prize, and the New York Art Directors Club Photography Award. In 2011 he launched Gallery 916.
His most noted series/ "Quinault," "at Home," "Materia," "A Life with Camera," "FOREST: Impressions and Memories 1989-2017 ," "68TH STREET," "Apple Tree," "Māter," and "Dream Always" (AKAAKA, 2023).
His work as a film director is also attracting attention, as his film "The Garden of Camellia" to be released in 2021, has been met with a great response.

Asim Waqif

Born 1978 in Hyderabad, India.
Delhi-based Asim Waqif studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. After initially working as an art-director for film and television he later started making independent video and documentaries before moving into a dedicated art-practice.
His recent projects have attempted a crossover between architecture, art and design, with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban-design and the politics of occupying/intervening/using public spaces. Some of his projects have developed within abandoned and derelict buildings in the city that act like hidden activity-spaces for marginalized people.
Concerns of ecology and anthropology often weave through his work and he has done extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste and architecture. His artworks often employ manual processes that are deliberately pain-staking and laborious while the products themselves are often temporary and sometimes even designed to decay. He has worked in sculpture, site-specific public installation, video, photography, and more recently with large-scale interactive installations that combine traditional and new media technologies.

Giacomo Zaganelli

Giacomo Zaganelli was born in 1983. He now lives and works in Florence and Berlin.
He is an artist, curator, and activator of artistic-cultural projects aimed at the community. Through his practice, he investigates the social and public dimensions of the concept of space, understood as the result of territory, environment, and landscape.
Since 2015, he has been working continuously in Taiwan and Japan.
Among his recent projects, the solo exhibitions Superficially at MOCA Taipei (2018) and Grand Tourismo Triennale at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence (2018/2019); the participation in the Setouchi Triennale in Japan (2019) and in the Thailand Biennale (2021).