Echoes Now is a performance program by Kyoto Experiment that showcases the next generation of curators and artists. Led by three curators who come from various fields and hold different backgrounds, the program introduces Japan-based artists creating experimental work. The name of the program Echoes Now reflects the hope that the works of these artists and thoughts of these curators will reverberate throughout the art scene in Japan and beyond. Furthermore, as well as introducing works with an eye on the future, the program also focuses on what should be presented now and the spirit of the next generation.

Daisuke Kuroda
Ghosts of School [Performance]

One day, while walking down a rural road, I found a potsherd. I was excited as it turned out to be a rare potsherd from the Yayoi period.
That’s when it began. I felt an unknown presence. That presence was something like a ghost, and it was telling me something. “I don’t understand your old language,” I said, trying to ignore it. But I sometimes held the potsherd tightly, imagining life approximately 2000 years ago.
Another time, I found a small and weathered piece of concrete while walking in a seaside town. Dwelling in the shard was a deep, wartime sadness, and just holding it made me well up with tears. I couldn’t stand it and threw it on the ground, but it broke into two upon impact.
This work is part of my practice involving objects that contain such stories, and is an account of buildings, windows, doors, hallways, decorations and souvenirs, sculptures and paintings, or fragments of such objects.

[Maki Kawaguchi Curator’s Statement]
Contemporary artist Daisuke Kuroda often uses theatrical staging and acting in his works. He aims to temporarily draw viewers back into a primitive and chaotic world through the universal childhood experience of imagining and mimicking; creating confusing and bewildering situations by making time and space unfamiliar.
Incidentally, Kuroda says that he is afraid of bears. Just sitting in an urban cafe imagining a bear climbing down from a mountain gives him goosebumps. In a way, we live in a society of primitive chaos—what will emerge when Kuroda brings his art practice to Kyoto Experiment? This piece is an attempt to question the fundamental meaning of acting, and to see how many stories may emerge by trusting in the innate human ability to perceive latent fears and presences.

Text, Direction, Art Work: Daisuke Kuroda
Performers: Asano Mitsuya, Ao Morita, Takuro Yokozawa
Translation: Charles Worthen

Rin Takahashi
CHASHITSU [Performance]

Working with all media and materials equally, including painting, text, video, and sound, Rin Takahashi creates art about the uncertainty of modern-day issues and the ambiguity of people. In recent years, she has grown her practice and presented a large-scale solo exhibition in Nagoya, as well as participated in the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024. In the performance piece CHASHITSU, the artist selects work from Emaki, a years-long drawing series in which she records traces of everyday activities, replacing the light and flat images with three-dimensional space. The piece depicts time spent by characters who are deemed invisible by society, but who certainly exist: a graffiti artist, a freestyle rapper, a koi fish that crawls on all fours, a painter who erases graffiti, socks that prepare for the day ahead, a dragonfly that dances constantly off-stage. These characters just happen to exist together in the work’s simplified setting, their individual actions intersecting with their attempts to escape the stage. While there may be the illusion of a story at first, time unfolds in a manner completely unlike theatrical narrative.

[Takuya Tsutsumi Curator’s Statement]
Even when seemingly immortal works are displayed according to the archetypal principles of art exhibitions, the resulting experience is temporary and will shift relative to the visitors’ physicality and emotional states. After all, “exhibitions” are no different than a typical performance in that they are singular and ephemeral experiences. It is true, however—perhaps in recognition of this—that there are artists who bring life to these spaces, otherwise understood to be unchanging during an exhibition. Rin Takahashi is one such artist who does not intend for exhibition spaces to be static. Her installation and performance pieces originate from her drawings, not from text. What kind of texture and intensity will reach (or not reach) the viewers of her work when it is presented within a framework like Kyoto Experiment? To explore this question, Takahashi will restage her most complicated script (a drawing) from among her many performances.

Direction & Composition: Rin Takahashi
Perfomers: Andre, Nanako Ishihara, Daisei Suzuki, Chaelin Jeon, Mao Nakagawa, Rin Takahashi
With the cooperation of Yamanaka Suplex

©bozzo

Hirotaka Fukui
Interior [Theater]

We surround ourselves with things that we need to survive and things that enrich our lives, and we create our private spaces by arranging these objects just so. A chair, a table, a bed, a refrigerator, a washing machine, dishes, a television, clothes, tissues, stuffed animals, borrowed books, a MUJI nail clipper, soy sauce, a rug that doesn’t suit your taste, plants, and so on. The inhabitants of these spaces and their things maintain an intimate relationship while shaping each other’s existences. Borrowing the format of a play, this piece attempts to present the events that comprise “living”—the actions we perform repeatedly on a daily basis in our private sanctuaries. As a jumping-off point, we will begin by collecting things owned by the audience and performers and placing them on the stage to construct a fictional home setting. Please bring an item from home to the event. In this theatre piece, you will come with things, watch with things, and go home with things.

[Nagara Wada Curator’s Statement]
Hirotaka Fukui has been deeply interested in the relationship between physical objects and performance spaces. He takes measure of the spaces that these objects occupy in terms of their plain reality, freeing them from their usefulness to humans. This approach is dry and stoic while also being strangely comical. When encountering Fukui’s work, I become aware that I, too, am just a body placed languidly on a chair among countless other things (the T-shirt I wear, the folding umbrella in my purse, a crumpled-up receipt). Can we, as “objects,” use this impossible dead-end as a forum to play light heartedly within this system called theater?

Direction: Hirotaka Fukui
Performers: Hitoshi Kaneko, Kazuya Inoue