Guest Judge IKEDA Kaho (Independent curator)

Due to the renovation of ACAC’s Exhibition Hall, the Aomori Citizens’ Art Gallery in downtown Aomori City will instead serve as the venue for the Results Presentation of the 2025 Artist in Residence (AIR) program. This year’s artists will push the boundaries of their creativity as they respond to the atypical spatial restrictions and the new connections that will come from locating the venue in the center of the city.
This year’s program title, “CAMP,” was proposed by ACAC’s curatorial team as “a reference, not a requirement,” a clue to help guide the artists as they expand on and develop their ideas. It was put forward as a concept which carries multiple meanings: a place for temporary shelter or for training; a community or cooperative group; a subversive aesthetic.

During the selection process, in addition to the two criteria stipulated by the curatorial team (the significance of the artist’s project for their own career and for ACAC’s 2025 program), I emphasized the following three points:
1) The connection between Aomori and the artist’s previous practice; 2) a positive perspective on the division between the production and presentation spaces; 3) collaboration with the citizens of Aomori City in order to take advantage of the downtown location of the presentation venue.
Creative responses to the title “CAMP” were not required but were positively evaluated.
Joining from the second screening, I treated every application sincerely and impartially, adding my comments to each one. During consultations with the curatorial team, I took the time to discuss and exchange ideas with them until I was satisfied. As a result, I believe we were able to select just the right people for this year’s ACAC residency, in terms of the mutual benefit for both ACAC and the artists’ careers.

Even among the applicants who did not make the final cut, there were numerous distinctive proposals from which we judges learned quite a lot. Of these, one which impressed me was a submission from Israel tying the title “CAMP” to the issue of Palestine in an earnest attempt to respond to the situation there. While considering this proposal, I shared the importance of assessing the artist based on their personal stance without regard for their nationality. It was very beneficial to have open discussions with the curatorial team about the question of how applications like this should be received, taking into consideration factors such as the artist’s choice not to accept sponsorship from the Israeli Embassy, or the possibility of ACAC expressing its own position on the issue.
There are many other proposals I would like to mention, but I will have to omit them here. I will only add that some proposals were turned down due to regulations at the new venue regarding noise – something which likely would not have been an issue at the previous location. In this light, I feel it is important to acknowledge the impact brought about by the change in venue.

This year’s AIR is taking place in a different environment from past years, which is precisely why I believe it can build new relationships between the artists, the curatorial team, and the citizens of Aomori, and provide more opportunities for all of them to “get involved” in the production process. I myself am not only involved in artist selection as a guest judge, but also aim to actively “get involved” in the program itself; and I hope to witness the changes and realizations that the resident artists bring about together with everyone else. This kind of mutual involvement naturally reveals itself, even during the screening process, and over my many careful discussions with the curatorial team, I sensed a collaborative response that went beyond a mere process of selection. As an extension of this, we have decided to share the writing of this year’s commentary between all the members of the curatorial team, rather than making my voice the only one. I hope that doing so will evoke the multilayered nature of the selection process.

HATTORI Hiroyuki (ACAC director)

Unlike in past years, the 2025 Results Presentation for ACAC’s Artist in Residence program will be held at an exhibition hall in front of Aomori Station, due to renovation of the facilities at ACAC. Despite the new venue, we received an impressive number of residency proposals that viewed this change in a positive light. As the other judges and I read carefully through the application documents, our judging criteria were based particularly on the following two questions: whether there was any significance to realizing the applicants’ residency proposals here in Aomori or at ACAC; and whether their participation in this AIR program would have relevance for their future careers. After a series of open and constructive discussions over the course of the two-day-long second screening, the other judges and I arrived at what we felt was a satisfactory selection, although it pains me that we could only award 4 spots out of over 800 applications.

It was particularly difficult to choose between the 10 or so applications that advanced to the final stage. There were several intriguing residency proposals: one used the theme of water to link the area around ACAC with downtown Aomori City; another offered a humorous and experimental intervention in the facility renovation itself; and another examined the artist’s connections to land and people from their origins as a refugee.

Atittayaporn SAENPO aims to draw links between northeastern Japan and her own roots in a farming community in northeastern Thailand with a project focused on mushi-okuri
, traditional ceremonies still performed among farmers in the Tsugaru region in order to drive insects away from crops. Adi SUNDORO, a member of the Jakarta-based graphic artist collective Grafis Huru Hara, hopes to develop new collaborations in Aomori, which has a rich history of educational hanga printmaking. MAETANI Kai will search for unique forms of expression which combine bodily representation with photographs he will collect during fieldwork on the Tsugaru Peninsula. Meanwhile, Fukushima-born Okinawa resident TANJI Rie will examine the ways that the people of Aomori relate to things like war and disaster in their daily lives. With Aomori as the shared setting, I hope that the diverse interests of the artists will result in a wide range of expressions responding to the theme of “CAMP,” and inspire many people.

HARADA Momomi (ACAC curator)

In this AIR program, the ACAC curatorial staff will be assigned to the participants, whom we also selected, in order to coordinate their respective projects. In other words, in addition to acting as judges during the screening process, afterwards we will also accompany the participants as coordinators. For that reason, I was constantly thinking about how I could tie the applicants’ plans to this place (including its people, history, and everything else associated with it) as I read through their applications.
Each of the four artists who were selected had clear reasons for conducting their residence here in this place at this time, as well as persuasive motivations for carrying out their specific plans. A residence is a living organism; once an artist actually moves in and begins their research, things often turn out much differently than they expected. I hope that these artists will be flexible in dealing with this reality, and make good use of their stay here.
In closing, I want to touch on the many fascinating plans we received which did not end up being selected. Applying to an AIR is an act that requires one to elaborate and verbalize new conceptualizations. I am very grateful for the time and effort these applicants spent doing so, and, for my part, I sincerely hope that their ideas will eventually be realized in some form or another.

SETOU Tomo (ACAC curator)

In the diverse residency proposals, designed in response to the cross-disciplinary functionality of our facilities, I was able to imagine further possibilities for the production environment at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (ACAC). From these, the plans which were ultimately selected contain elements which lead me to hope that this year’s special circumstances – the moving of the venue of the Results Presentation to the Aomori Station Building due to construction work at ACAC – will act not as a constraint but rather as a source of production and inspiration. There was also much debate amongst the judges about the methods and attitudes with which the invited artists would incorporate the deeply-rooted cultures and customs of the region into their works. This perspective was probably also carefully considered in screenings in the past, and I feel that we must continue to keep it in mind in the future. Lastly, there were more than a few times when, reading through the application forms, questions came to mind which I wished I could ask the artists directly. One option would be to add an interview component to the judging process, but I feel that we need to look for a better design for our open-call guidelines and the kinds of questions we ask on our application form.

OKURO Yuka (ACAC art coordinator)

This year’s AIR program took advantage of ACAC’s closure for renovation work to expand our actual activities into the geographically distant downtown. I think that this expedition into the city center has the potential to have wider repercussions than ever before, in terms of the possibilities for making diverse connections, spreading our activities out into the local community, and intersecting with different fields. How will the unique themes, exchanges, and expressive methods of each resident artist extend into both the wider region and the artists’ future creative activities, while also remaining rooted in local contexts? The two keywords I brought with me into the applicant screenings were “repercussion” and “expansion.”
There were many unique takes on this year’s situation among the over 800 applications, and this diversity allowed each of the judges to bring our respective viewpoints to the discussions.
The residency plans of the shortlisted artists demonstrated both the necessity of their staying here in Aomori under this year’s special circumstances, and the multifaceted repercussions of their projects for their future creative activities. My heart swelled with anticipation of the artists’ expansions through novel perspectives, practices, and experimental processes: attempts to involve others in production, collaborate with local citizens, and utilize folk customs and socially-relevant topics to connect across localities.
In what forms can our “open art center” connect to the community this year? I hope the artists will allow themselves to have some “campy” fun with this year’s irregular circumstances as their unique perspectives take them off in various new directions.