April 13 - September 1, 2024

The AOMORI GOKAN Arts Fest 2024 focuses on five contemporary art museums and art centers in Aomori Prefecture: Aomori Museum of Art, Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, Aomori Public University, Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Hachinohe Art Museum, and Towada Art Center. The exhibition "currents / undercurrents : Bringing together the endless flow" features work by Ai IWANE (ACC 2022). The theme for 2024 is be "Interweavers in Open Fields." Curators from each museum who have put down roots in the local area are collaborating on a program of art exhibitions, projects, and performances that showcase each museum's unique characteristics. This is a new type of art festival. It will also be an opportunity to discover Aomori ’ s many charms by experiencing the rich culture of each of the cities where museums are located, from landscapes and cuisine to architecture, with art as the starting point.

 

Interweavers in Open Fields

The term “open field” can conjure up different images for different people – an empty plot, for example, or a grassy plain. Aomori is home to five unique contemporary art venues that can be seen as five unique “open fields,” each with its own possibilities and characteristics.An open field is not a place one goes to with a specific purpose, but rather a place that one finds oneself in, a place of encounters and occurrences, a borderland between the special and the everyday.

In these open fields, the daily discrete activities of the humans, animals and plants that come and go interweave with each other to help create the space itself. This shared theme was chosen based on the hope that these five museums and art centers will function just like “open fields,” that the unique activities of the various people who find themselves in these spaces will weave together to form new relationships. Here, through this first-ever joint program between our five “open fields,” we hope to create landscapes that have never been seen before.

 

Exhibition: "currents / undercurrents : Bringing together the endless flow"

For many generations, living creatures including humans have survived in the wild by migrating from one place to another, while being influenced by natural environments. How are those places—where one is born, lives, visited or to visit—interlaced with Aomori, the city in which many of you “happened” to be at this moment? And how can we hold dialogues with the environment, alongside the existence, history or memory of lives in various places, while seeking co-existence as we pass over and reconnect with them from time to time?

Organized in the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre, the hub for global talents on creative pursuits, the exhibition embraces two keywords: current, as in “present”, as well as everlasting flows of water, air, or energy; and undercurrent, in terms of a tendency or hidden message under the surface or current that are not openly shown. Reflecting this theme, it features creators around the world who explore artistic expression as they interact with various places, in addition to pieces by people associated with Aomori. The two-session structure aims to facilitate continuous involvement with places and deliver ever-evolving current statues to the exhibition space.

As the streams or whirls that spring from each of the curated pieces meet and blend with each other, they give birth endlessly to new patterns. We are looking forward to sharing a piece of the meaning behind this evolving tale with our visitors as we walk through this journey and reaffirm where we all stand.

Jumana Emil ABBOUD, AONO Fumiaki, IWANE Ai, KORETSUNE Sakura, KUDO Shoji, MITSUOKA Koichi, NAKAJIMA Koji, SAWADA Kyoichi, SUZUKI Masaharu, Robin WHITE, Traditional Clothing of the Ainu (Collection of the Aomori City Board of Education / Exhibition pieces from the 2nd term)

 

To learn more, click HERE.