SIAF2014 outline

SIAF 2014 – the city’s first international art festival – will be held as part of the Creative City Sapporo initiative over a period of 72 days from Saturday, July 19 to Sunday, September 28, 2014, under the stewardship of Guest Director and globally renowned artist Ryuichi Sakamoto. The theme of the event is City and Nature. Globally active contemporary artists will contribute to this international art festival, which will provide opportunities for visitors to examine how cities can coexist with nature in the future. During SIAF 2014, a variety of projects will be implemented across Sapporo.
The entire city and its museums will serve as a stage for the event.

EXHIBITIONS

Thematic Exhibition : City and Nature

Centerpiece to SIAF 2014, the “City and Nature” contemporary art exhibition allows an opportunity to reflect upon Hokkaido and Japan’s progress of modernization and state of the natural environment through the works of both domestic and international contemporary artists, and to reconsider how Sapporo and Hokkaido ought to approach urban coexistence with nature, energy solutions, and manner of life.

The exhibition will make use of the distinctive characteristics and locational conditions of two museums that serve as the main venues for this event. Revolving around the themes of urbanization and modernization beneath the umbrella theme of “City and Nature,” the first floor of Gallery A in the Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art will feature works including Masao Okabe’s large scale frottage piece on the Yubari Colliery ruins and powerful sculptural installations by artists such as Tetsumi Kudo, Subodh Gupta and Anselm Kiefer. We will be made to rethink the modernization process that underpins our current lifestyles through a line-up of pieces that trace historical transitions in energy production from coal mining to nuclear power and depict their relation to the surrounding environment and societal backdrop. The second floor will feature the photography of Naoya Hatakeyama as well as a selection themed upon snow – the element symbolic of Sapporo’s natural environment – which aims to reevaluate the relation of city and nature from a both artistic and scientific perspective. Appreciating this selection’s snow-themed works of Carsten Nicolai and Shiro Takatani and the snow crystal photography of Dr. Ukichiro Nakaya will serve as a bridge to the second venue centered on the theme of nature, the Sapporo Art Park.

Visitors to the Sapporo Art Park will be greeted by Fujiko Nakaya’s new fog sculpture,FOGSCAPE #47412, generated from within and around the inner garden and be exposed to diverse expressions on the motif of trees and the forest through Bikky Sunazawa’s wooden sculpture works, Youki Hirakawa’s new video installation and Takashi Kuribayashi’s installation incorporating Japanese paper. Additionally, through works such as Aiko Miyanaga’s new sound installation soramimimisora (“hearing things”), which employs the use of ceramic bowls, and Carsten Nicolai’s enormous new projection piece, unicolor, guests will be made to experience the nature of a more abstract eternity with the creation of an abysmal space seemingly expanding from below ground to the Earth’s surface and then further out into deep space, simultaneously tapping into the time flow of a parallel universe. New sculptures by Tomás Saraceno and Taiji Matsue’s aerial photography swooping down over Sapporo will invite the observer to refocus attention on the city theme.

At Takeo Arishima’s Old Residence within the Art Park, Soichiro Mihara’s subtle sound piece, ‘ bell’, quietly questions out the relation between human beings and natural science to those strolling the sculpture garden of the Art Park. In the forest of the sculpture garden, Susan Phillipz’ sound installation featuring renditions of canons by the bird of Sapporo, the cuckoo, creates a space resonant with nature.

Situated in the two museum venues, the contemporary art exhibition creates a space for deep reflection and embodies the theme of “City and Nature.”

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