Kyoto’s PARASOPHIA 2015 announces initial artists


Pipilotti Rist – Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014), audio and video installation (photograph inspired by Yuji). Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine.

At a press conference in Kyoto on April 4, Shinji Kohmoto, the artistic director of the inaugural PARASOPHIA: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, discussed the exhibition title and framework, and announced an initial list of eight participating artists and groups.
Scheduled to run from March to May 2015, PARASOPHIA is a new international exhibition that will attempt to create a site for intellectual exchange in Kyoto. Kohmoto explained that he arrived at the name PARASOPHIA after considering a title that would be both mysterious and yet familiar to Japanese audiences, while also conveying a sense of the exhibition’s significance to international audiences of diverse cultural backgrounds. From its Greek roots the name Sophia, Kohmoto said, has connotations of wisdom and learning, while the prefix “para,” with its connotations of otherness or opposition, also recalls the para position of the hexagonal benzene ring. The hexagon also evokes the underlying structure of the city, which took on a hexagonal form after the former capital Heian-kyo was devastated in the Onin War of 1467-77. As such, Kohmoto also sees the hexagonal benzene ring as a symbol of the city’s resilience and its ability to maintain vital links between its past, present and future.
Some 40 Japanese and international artists will participate in the exhibition, which will be held primarily at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art and the Museum of Kyoto. At the press conference, Kohmoto confirmed eight initial participants, some of whom have already taken part in the “Open Research Program” series of lectures, discussions and performances leading up to the exhibition proper. These artists include Cai Guo-Qiang and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, as well as William Kentridge, whose multimedia installation The Refusal of Time was presented in a prelude exhibition in Kyoto earlier this year. The other announced participants in PARASOPHIA 2015 are the Berlin-based artist duo Hoefner/Sachs; the filmmaker and member of the Kyoto-based artist group Kyupi Kyupi, Yoshimasa Ishibashi; the Swiss multimedia artist Pipilotti Rist; the Berlin-based sound artist Susan Philipsz; and the Kyoto-based multimedia artist Miwa Yanagi.
A series of PARASOPHIA 2015-related events will be held in Kyoto this month featuring Ishibashi (Apr 18), Philipsz (Apr 20) and Rist (Apr 29).

Related:
Yasumasa Morimura & Shinji Kohmoto: Yokohama Triennale 2014/PARASOPHIA 2015

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