CAM—Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian celebrates its 40th anniversary with the launch of the first iteration of a Japanese contemporary art season. This event anticipates the reopening of the CAM building in 2024, re-designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma.
Engawa—A Season of Contemporary Art from Japan 2023–2024 is a time-based art programme that crosses different artistic practices and disciplines, taking as its starting point the architectural concept of engawa that underlies Kengo Kuma’s project for the CAM new building, which denotes a space of passage found in traditional Japanese houses.
Engawa evokes multiple relational spaces outside the domestic sphere, a metaphor for a “liminal space,” an idea that found a powerful echo in the ’80s between Japan and the Western world through the notion of ma. This concept was embodied in the Japanese multidisciplinary art movements and collectives of the post-war period, during which several parallel histories emerged to question the fiction of the official history constructing Japanese identity and which continue to resonate in the practices of contemporary artists in Japan.
“The Engawa could be the tangible place for generations of the Hesei era (1989-2018) marked by the bursting of the economic bubble and the Hanshin-Awaji earthquake (1995) as a pivotal and historical turn in Japanese society. Its consequences on social and political levels affected memories and myths as well as the weaving between the intimate and the community. In the words of Timothy Morton, it is a question of ‘observing what is changing before our eyes, slowly and collectively and how to share it with the other.’ This ecological thought finds a particularly strong echo in Japan. The mesh, its infinite connections and its infinitesimal differences, finds its source in the intimate space, so-called the dividuality of the person which could be translated by the multiplicity of the being corresponding to each of the relations one creates (human or non-human). In other words, it leads to the confrontation with multiple worlds so aptly described by novelist Keiichiro Hirano. It welcomes subjective experience, redefines the question of identity and borders. It embraces the feminine, the vulnerable, the fragility and the uncertain and broadens our perception of the world. In this area of ecological and digital interconnectivity emerged artistic practices inspired by a return to cultural notions of animism and its inclusion in a booming technological society that served as a support for the new generation that emerged after the Fukushima disaster questioning the tangible of our life as human.” —Emmanuelle de Montgazon, curator
The Japanese Season at CAM will present these topics through time-based art exhibitions, site-specific projects and commissioned works and events. In a deep collaborative process with the multicultural context in Lisbon and Portugal, the Season aim to enlighten how the inter-relations between perception and emotion create other realities, articulated with embedded social and political situations to suggest powerful transformations.
Programme 2023
July 20–23, 2023: CAM 40’s anniversary celebration
Masayume: art team [mé]
Installation in motion in the city of Lisbon
100 Cymbals: Ryoji Ikeda with Les Percussions de Strasbourg, Tomás Moital, Madalena Rato, Joana Duarte, Paulo Amendoeira and Francisco Cipriano
Concert
Cuisine Existentielle: Lei Saito
Performance
Delicious landscapes: Lei Saito in collaboration with chef Leopoldo Calhau and Leonor Pêgo
Workshop for families with children aged 6 to 12 years
September 8–10, 2023: FluxFest Lisbon
Conversations on Japan with Mieko Shiomi (video), Ami Yamasaki, Ko Ishikawa, Christian Marclay and Jaime Reis, moderated by Emmanuelle de Montgazon
Conversation
Solo performance: Ami Yamasaki
Performance
Interview with artist Mieko Shiomi (Mieko Shiomi and Michelle Elligott)
Screening
Christian Marclay’s Manga Scroll performed by Ami Yamasaki
Performance
From the Endless Box: works from 1966 to 2023: Mieko Shiomi (artistic director: Jaime Reis with local performers)
Performances
Yobi Mizu; Ami Yamasaki (voice) and Ko Ishikawa (shō)
Performance
November 10–12, 2023: An Engawa of the City
A new Build-Burger: Chim↑Pom from Smappa!Group (CPfSG)—A site-specific project for a neighbourhood in Lisbon
Installation and events
The season will continue in the spring of 2024, as CAM celebrates the reopening of its building: it will occupy several spaces as well as the new garden, with an intense programme of exhibitions, performances, concerts, film sessions, debates and other artistic practices, that will coincide with the inaugural exhibitions.
Bringing together different collaborations with artists and cultural institutions in the city of Lisbon, the season gathers a set of creators from Japan and the Japanese diaspora, many of them for the first time in Portugal.
Curators: Emmanuelle de Montgazon (guest curator) with Rita Fabiana (curator and head of Live Arts CAM)
Production: Catarina Ariztía and Diogo Marques (Live Arts CAM)
Co-productions: Alkantara Festival 2023 (Lisbon), Biennale SON (Sion, Switzerland), Fundação Serralves (Porto) supported by Institut Français du Portugal/Mais França 2023 and Lisbon Council
Sponsors: Canon, PLMJ Foundation, PLMJ
