PARASOPHIA 京都国際現代芸術祭2015

A collaborative project by Parasophia & Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa

Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa: www.goethe.de/ins/jp/de/kam.html (in German)
Informationen zur Veranstaltung: www.goethe.de/ins/jp/de/kam/ver.cfm?fuseaction=events.detail&event_id=20477372
Symposium transcript in German: blog.goethe.de/villa-kamogawa/archives/84-201538,Parasophia-Conversations-03.html#deutsch

For the third event in the Parasophia Conversations series, Parasophia and Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa jointly present a symposium featuring art professionals from Japan and Germany.
In this symposium, five art professionals who have worked in international exhibitions, museums, art education and research, and other fields related to art will exchange their views on the special significance and possibilities held by exhibitions that reach outside of art museums and other formal cultural institutions.
The five speakers are Andreas Beitin, who is the director of ZKM | Museum of Contemporary art, which is widely recognized for their innovations as an institution for the study and exhibition of media art; Roger M. Buergel, who has directed leading international exhibitions such as Documenta and the Busan Biennale; Satoru Takahashi, who is both a contemporary artist working on a global scale and officially participating in Parasophia as well as a professor at Kyoto City University of Arts; Shinji Kohmoto, the artistic director of Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015; and Yukie Kamiya (Chief Curator, Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art), who will be acting as the moderator for this conversation. Buergel and Kamiya are also members of Parasophia’s Professional Advisory Board.
After the two-hour symposium, the audience will be invited to participate in a casual social event with the speakers at Café Müller, inside of Villa Kamogawa. (Please note that participants will be responsible for the cost of their own food and drinks.)

About Parasophia Conversations
Parasophia Conversations is a platform for relaxed open conversations on various subjects, based on the Open Research Program.

Andreas Beitin
Director, ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art (Karlsruhe, Germany). Born 1968 in Uetersen, Germany. Beitin has been the director of the ZKM | Musuem of Contemporary Art Karlsruhe. Before serving as a project director for an international art consultancy, he has worked at the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art in Karlsruhe in various research and curatorial capacities since 2004, and was appointed director of the museum in 2010. He has curated and co-curated many exhibitions at the ZKM and abroad, including Lee Bontecou: Insights (2011), Matthew Day Jackson: Total Accomplishment (2013), Gianfranco Baruchello: Certain Ideas (2014–15), and Civic Rada: Lynn Hershman Leeson—the Retrospective (2014–15). He has published numerous scholarly articles and held lectures in Germany and abroad, and is also the editor of a number of publications. For many years he has served on various expert juries and advisory boards, including the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the RWE Foundation and the Volkswagen Foundation. In 2013, Beitin was appointed chair of the Goethe-Institut’s Advisory Board for Visual Arts.

Roger M. Buergel
Director, Johann Jacobs Museum. Born 1962 in Berlin. Buergel is an art critic, a curator, and a member of Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015’s Professional Advisory Board. He served as a guest curator for the Museum of Contemporary Art Barcelona before teaching at Luneburg University (2002–05) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe (2007–09). He was appointed the artistic director of Documenta XII (Kassel, 2007) with art historian and curator Ruth Noack. Buergel also served as the artistic director of the 6th Busan Biennale (2012). He has curated and co-curated many exhibitions including Things we don’t understand (Generali Foundation, Vienna, 2000), The Government (University Art Gallery Luneburg and other locations, 2003–05), and Barely Something. On Ai Weiwei (Museum DKM, Duisburg, 2010). In 2013, he was appointed the Director of Johann Jacobs Museum in Zurich, an exhibition space and research institution dedicated to the cultural residue of global trade routes. On January 30, 2015, Buergel delivered a lecture as part of Parasophia’s Access Program (Access Program [Lecture] Roger M. Buergel “When the Present Begins”).

Satoru Takahashi (高橋悟)
Parasophia participating artist; Professor, Kyoto City University of Arts. Born 1958 in Kyoto. BFA, Conceptual Planning of Arts, Kyoto City University of Arts. MFA in Sculpture, School of Art, Yale University. Assistant and Associate Professorships at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Michigan (2001–08). In his project The Art of Survival they focus on the creative techniques human beings employ in order to stay alive, reconfiguring physical, intellectual, and linguistic relationships in a research and production project on art that encompasses medicine, biology, the environment, and systems, carried out in conjunction with institutions and researchers in Japan and overseas including the California Institute of Technology, the University of Michigan, Kyoto University, and Kyoto City University of Arts. They are also engaged in exploring innovative arts-education theory and practice that transcends the boundaries of conventional visual arts education. At Parasophia, Keiko Kurachi & Satoru Takahashi presents the project Ornament and Crime: Sense/Common, featuring a paradoxical space (a labyrinth of language) containing a white structure signifying a courtroom and prison, garden stones, and white nautical maps, from which relationships and meanings have been dismantled and bleached away to nothingness.

Shinji Kohmoto (河本信治)
Artistic Director, Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. Born in Kyoto. Completed the Master’s Program in Design at the Graduate School of Engineering and Design, Kyoto Institute of Technology. Curator at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto from 1981; Chief Curator from 2006 to 2010. Kohmoto was one of the four Artistic Directors of Yokohama 2001: International Triennale of Contemporary Art (2001), the first Yokohama Triennale, subtitled Mega-Wave—Towards a New Synthesis, with fellow artistic directors Nobuo Nakamura, Fumio Nanjo, and Akira Tatehata. He was also on the award jury for the 50th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2003), and the selection committee for the artistic director of Documenta 12 (2007). Exhibitions curated by Kohmoto include Against Nature: Japanese Art in the Eighties (1989), a landmark presentation of contemporary Japanese Art that he co-curated with Kathy Halbreich, Thomas Sokolowski, and Fumio Nanjo, which toured across the United States until 1991; Project for Survival (1996), a cutting-edge exhibition featuring seven artists and projects from the early 1970s to 1996, all underrepresented in Japan up to that point, that deal with the ways an individual or an institution builds relationships with and survives in contemporary society; and William Kentridge—What We See & What We Know: Thinking About History While Walking, and Thus the Drawings Began to Move (2009), one of the biggest solo exhibitions of the artist’s work and the first in Japan, which was awarded for its excellent curation.

Yukie Kamiya (神谷幸江)
Chief Curator at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art since 2007. Born in Kanagawa Prefecture. Studied Art History at Waseda University. Previously served as Associate Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Kamiya has curated many exhibitions internationally, including solo exhibitions by Do Ho Suh, Simon Starling, Tsuyoshi Ozawa, Martin Creed, and Cai Guo-Qiang at Hiroshima MOCA, and co-curated exhibitions such as Re: Quest—Japanese Contemporary Art since the 1970s (Museum of Art, Seoul National University, 2013). She was and is on the advisory board for Yokohama Triennale 2014 and Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, and on the jury for the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program among others. She is one of contributors of the publications Creamier: Contemporary Art in Culture (London: Phaidon, 2010) and Ravaged: Art and Culture in Times of Conflict (Brussels: Mercatorfonds, 2014).