7th Yokohama Triennale: “Afterglow”
Yokohama Museum of Art and other locations
Yokohama

At last. This sentiment arose when I visited the 7th Yokohama Triennale not only because it was the first major international festival to open following many pandemic-related postponements, but also because it marked many unprecedented changes for the event. For the first time since the Triennale was founded in 2001—yet, still before any other bi/triennales in Japan—organizers had appointed a non-Japanese artistic director.

Led by the New Delhi-based artist trio Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta), the 2020 edition, “Afterglow,” featured 67 artists, 36 of whom were exhibiting in Japan for the first time. A significant majority of the lineup was of non-White/Western origin, and around half were from the millennial generation.

Besides increasing the diversity of the represented artists, the curators attempted to alter the framework of the Triennale through a decentralized approach that opened up platforms for discussion and exchange. Rather than imposing a theme, “Afterglow” departed from five keywords: “autodidact,” “luminosity,” “friendship,” “care,” and “toxicity.” A “sourcebook” compiled texts related to each concept by writers from different time periods and places. They vary from social anthropologist Tom Gill’s dialogue with a Yokohama day-laborer called Kimitsu Nishikawa, and the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Osamu Shimomura’s excerpted account about his research on bioluminescence, to a 16th-century astronomy manual believed to be authored by autodidact and sultan Ali Adil Shah. The choice of these lesser-known texts might feel eclectic, but all reveal interesting perspectives, life events, even a kind of prescription for survival, inviting the audience to reflect on the five keywords from different angles and consider how they relate to their own lives. The introduction of “Episdos,” a series of live and virtual talks and performances, was another key means of decentralizing the mode of presentation, expanding the arena for continuous conversation beyond the exhibition space.

The Triennale’s main exhibition took place across two primary sites, the Yokohama Museum of Art and the former indoor amusement park Plot 48, as well as a satellite section within the NYK Maritime Museum. “Afterglow” felt like a collage of different elements, open to various connections and interpretations. The unique wall texts, poetic interpretations of the works written by Delhi-based editor Shveta Sarda, further encouraged the audience to mobilize their imagination.

At the Yokohama Museum, the five keywords loosely guided viewers through the exhibits. While many artworks were placed in dialogue with each other, some spun webs of connection across the museum. To the left of the entrance hall was Fumiaki Aono’s sculptural assemblages of found materials from the wreckage of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, simultaneously evoking the tragedy of the natural disaster as well as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident it triggered and suggesting that humans can always recover from devastating situations with imagination and care. On the upper floor, Rosa Barba’s 35mm film Bending to Earth (2015), shot over uranium disposal cells in North America, shares this complex view of catastrophe, showing how the most dangerous toxic waste can still display beautiful hues of blue, green, and reddish brown that are uncomfortably captivating.

Kei Takemura’s Renovated series (2015– ) connected notions of loss and repair to the show’s exploration of luminosity. As if treating a wound, the artist stitched together the broken pieces of various everyday objects, from cups and glasses to an alarm clock, using fluorescent silk. The glowing green color derives from a luminous protein discovered by Shimomura in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria, as explained in the show’s sourcebook. In his text, the scientist recounts that experiencing the bright light of the atomic bomb dropped by the United States on Nagasaki in 1945 inspired him to pursue his bioluminescence research. Seeing Takemura’s stitches, a product of Shimomura’s work, gently glowing in the dark of the gallery, one was reminded of the complex relationship between nature and humans, and the positive and negative forces that keep the world rolling.

The portion of the exhibition in Plot 48, on the other hand, came across as rather discursive, and required more patience to tease out unexpected relationships between works. A possible starting point was Anton Vidokle’s striking 30-minute film Citizens of the Cosmos (2019), which continues from his prior series Immortality for All: A Film Trilogy on Russian Cosmism (2014–17), about the titular movement in Russia at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries that considered possibilities of human space travel and resurrection. Vidokle’s latest film was shot in Kiev and Tokyo, mixing surrealistic scenes including subdued street demonstrations by Russian Cosmists, a kitsch danse macabre in a forest, and a Japanese-style funeral in a Cosmist church. The protesters demand freedom for trans-planetary trips and the revival of their ancestors, which strangely resonated with the current pandemic situation, where people cannot travel and many have lost or fear losing their loved ones. At one point in the film, the narration goes: “Death is a mistake; we must resurrect our ancestors—from cosmic particles, as minerals, as plants, solar, self-feeding, collectively conscious. Immortal, transsexual. On earth, in spaceships, on space stations on other planets.”

This vision interestingly formed a subtle connection with other works in the venue. On the same floor, Zheng Bo’s film installation portrays interspecies intercourse to mobilize the body as queer. Pteridophilia 1–4 (2016–19) features scenes of young men engaging in intimate contact with ferns, juxtaposed with footage of bees and wasps pseudocopulating with orchids shown on the other side

of the screen, and a replica on the wall of the 1814 Hokusai print depicting an erotic encounter between a woman diver and octopi. Elsewhere, Oscar Santillán’s Chewing Gum Codex (2019–20) resembled an ovoid space station unit with potted plants popping out of little holders on the pod’s white surface. The installation unfolds the peculiar story of a wad of chewing gum allegedly spat out by the astronaut Neil Armstrong in 1976 during a scientific expedition into the Amazon. An Ecuadorian soldier who accompanied the party collected the piece of gum and, 43 years later, the artist took it to a lab in order to extract Armstrong’s DNA, which was then transplanted into the plants. Seeing the first man on the moon “reincarnated” as plants in the exhibition space, I felt the nonsensical arguments of Vidokle’s Cosmist protesters suddenly take a realistic shape. While we cannot physically resurrect bodies yet, Santillán’s project reveals how we could potentially claim immortality in an alternative way.

Touching on the meaning of the word raqs, which describes in Persian, Arabic, and Urdu the state of spiritual awakening achieved through the continuous whirling of Sufi dervishes, Raqs Media Collective sets “kinetic contemplation” as their fundamental attitude in their creative practice. In the Japanese context, this sensibility can perhaps be likened to the Zen practice of samu—active meditation—as opposed to zazen, or sitting meditation. The Collective’s Triennale was an exercise for Japanese audiences to find their own kineticism and flexibility in developing their thinking on the entangled situations and issues of the contemporary world.