Multiple Temporalities, Plural Lifeforms
On “currents / undercurrents ― Bringing together the endless flow”

　To generate new forms of creativity, one must remain sensitive to the events of the present moment while also engaging in continuous inquiry into the creations and legacies of the past. Just as Johann Sebastian Bach transformed European folk melodies into groundbreaking polyphonic compositions, the contemporary musician Bob Dylan added his own lyrics to Scottish and American folk songs to make them his own. His 1964 composition “The Time They Are A-Changin’” can be seen as a brilliant musical achievement that captured both the surface-level shifts of the era and the deeper changes in sensibility and thought that stirred beneath.

　In Japan in 2024, the year began with a series of shocking incidents: an earthquake in the Noto Peninsula, a plane collision at Haneda Airport, and a flood of subsequent breaking news. Internationally, the U.S. presidential election loomed, while the prolonged wars and invasions in Ukraine and Palestine continued to saturate our attention, to the point where it became difficult to remember what had happened only days before. The endless stream of information created a state of overload. Tiny bubbles that rise to the surface may, in fact, be signs of seismic shifts in the deep currents below. Even in Aomori’s local news, topics ranged from a new sumo champion to the closure of regional supermarket chains and long-established department stores. These stories―joyful or sorrowful―came and went. And yet, we live amid such updates while continuing to practice habits inherited from long ago. Until one day, even those habits evolve―giving rise to new, small whirlpools. Artists, too, live within these small, everyday vortices.

　The AOMORI GOKAN Art Festival 2024, held across multiple sites within a single municipality, stood out as a fresh and ambitious experiment. Among its many programs, the one that left the deepest impression on me was the exhibition “currents / undercurrents” at Aomori Contemporary Art Centre (ACAC). Of course, ACAC has long been a site for distinctive exhibitions shaped by artists’ fieldwork and intensive residencies in Aomori. What made this season’s show particularly noteworthy was its structure: it was divided into two phases―a first and second period, each with a separate installation―effectively doubling the usual artist residency length. This allowed for a six-month research-based program enriched by workshops and public events. I was fortunate enough to see both phases of the exhibition. Across all of the works, I could feel a depth of investigation, a sharpness of emergence, and a richness of technique.

　In the first half of the show, Gallery A opened with a striking dialogue between SUZUKI Masaharu’s Pacific Ocean series and a suite of woodblock prints by Robin WHITE, created during her time in Kiribati. Nearby, photographs by SAWADA Kyoichi, taken around Misawa Air Base and Lake Ogawara, formed a kind of atmospheric prelude. At first glance, Suzuki’s Pacific Ocean prints resemble non-historical mandalas, yet they evoke far-reaching themes: the history of human movement and communication across the Pacific, including the slave trade, the migrations of modern humans during the Paleolithic era, and even the geological history of the Earth―long before humanity existed. In resonance with Suzuki’s vision, Robin White’s work, which traverses New Zealand and Kiribati, depicts the invisible labor and unrecorded lives of women―those whom history has often overlooked. Best known as a conflict-zone photojournalist, Sawada here turns his gaze seaward from Aomori, capturing images that invite viewers to reflect not only on military presence, such as Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and U.S. military bases, but also on the geopolitical entanglements of the region.

　As the exhibition unfolded, visitors were gradually led into a deepening constellation of works: photographs by IWANE Ai, documenting the aftermath of a devastating wildfire in Lahaina, Hawaii; delicate drawings and video works by Jumana Emil Abboud, echoing the fragments of ancient myths; a photographic series by NAKAJIMA Koji, revealing the rhythms of the body in confrontation with contemporary life; and designs and ceramics by KUDO Shoji, born in Aomori and a lifelong explorer of ancient cultural forms from East and West. This “walking journey” through the exhibition―a mosaic of works by both living and deceased artists, from global and local perspectives―ultimately brought viewers into the solemn space of AONO Fumiaki’s monumental installation. Aono’s work inevitably evokes the spiritual temporalities embedded in everyday objects as it engages with traditional beliefs concerning rites for the dead in Tohoku, notably those surrounding the Jizo statues at Kawakura Sainokawara, a temple in Goshogawara City. These temporalities in turn manifest as the work of a noble soul honoring the departed spirits of the countless victims of war and violence around the world, past and present. Even as this effort is torn apart by brutal realities and contradictions, any misery or cruelty is overcome by an indiscriminate compassion. It is in this context that Iwane, whose work in the central gallery touches on Bon festivals and the memory of the deceased among Fukushima’s diasporic communities in Hawaii, presents a series of photographs commemorating her late sister in the exhibition’s innermost space. The cherry blossoms in her images serve as a quiet, poignant response to Aono’s installation―an interweaving of personal mourning and collective remembrance.

　In Gallery B, the work of KORETSUNE Sakura unfolded like the spirit of a giant whale swimming midair. Created by gathering and disassembling, fraying, layering, mending, and finally re-dyeing with indigo scraps of kimono collected across Aomori, Koretsune’s work incorporates the everyday labor of the hand. Her process brings forth an organically woven space, reminiscent of multi-species symbiosis, constructed through a self-organizing logic of collective making―where self and others are continuously entangled. Through this delicate craft, unspoken phrases emerge as poetic threads embedded in action. Koretsune’s fieldwork, which spans the Pacific Ocean, the Sea of Japan, and the Tsugaru Strait, reveals not only reverence for whales, but also collective memory―gratitude, fear, and awe―toward these immense creatures. Her approach does not follow the path of academic documentation, but rather reattaches us to the lived realities of local histories through forms of embodied knowledge.

　Her piece titled If You Dream of Twin Whales can be read as a kind of counter-dream to the old whalers’ proverb: “Never dream of a whale with its calf.” It seems to give form to the dream of the whale itself―a reversal of perspective. Outside the gallery space, MITSUOKA Koichi’s shishi-odoshi (a water-powered sound device) echoed faintly, as if responding to Koretsune’s whale breaking the surface of a deep current to breathe or spout. According to Mitsuoka, the device was inspired by the act of draining water from instant cup noodles―a humble origin for a piece that resonates with natural rhythms. Between the two artists, an exquisite interplay emerged―resembling the kind of interspecies collaboration often seen in nature. Mitsuoka’s sound installation, which amplifies the sound of raindrops leaking from the ceiling, along with the pictograms drawn in tape across outdoor architectural elements, reversed the spatial order of the gallery: indoor creative processes were made to spill outward, while acts of construction and play outside became works of art in themselves. This radical inversion of space redefined the gallery as a site of porous boundaries―between inside and outside, human and nonhuman, artwork and act.

　In the second half of the exhibition, the space of Gallery B, once home to Koretsune’s whale-spirit, was now filled with the vast water imagery of IWANE Ai. Her video captured the brackish zone of the Mattole River in Northern California, where she had spent her high school years. Located at a latitude similar to Hachinohe, this river breaks open into the ocean just once each year, giving rise to complex currents and whirlpools of intertwining flow. Projected from a subjective viewpoint, the video allowed the audience to relive this moment, creating a strange, immersive sensation―as if one’s consciousness had detached from the body, continuing to drift and observe from outside the self. That same sense of strangeness, or dissociation, was carried through to the photographs in Gallery A, documenting Iwane’s journey across Tokyo, Fukushima, California, Hawaii, and Aomori. Through this trans-Pacific passage, she not only mourned the dead but also developed a visual language that evokes the out-of-body perspective―a practice that draws from spiritual traditions such as the Bardo (intermediate state) described in texts like The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

　Gallery A, while partly repeating elements of the earlier display, revealed new depths through subtle revisions. For example, Jumana Emil Abboud, a Palestinian artist, gathered various water-related legends and oral histories from Aomori, echoing memories of the once lush Jordan Valley, now devastated by settler colonial development. Her drawings, glassworks, and videos formed a quiet yet insistent response―a hopeful counter-song for a future in which Palestine might again reclaim its water and greenery. In dialogue with this, the second period also featured a display of Ainu garments collected from sites across Japan’s borderlands―Shimokita Peninsula, Hakodate, and Karafuto (Sakhalin). These artifacts remind us not only of the assimilation and suppression that Indigenous Ainu communities endured under settler colonial rule, but also of a deeper truth: that the roots of craft and design in Tohoku are intertwined with Ainu cultural heritage. The intricacy and richness of the clothing designs testify to a cultural vitality that transcends historical oppression and reclaims space within the narrative of regional identity.

　Taken as a whole, the exhibition succeeded in engaging with the multiple layers of expression and psychic realities unique to each participating artist. In retrospect, this kind of experimental attempt may represent a step beyond the surface-level “research-based works” and “site-specific installations” that became ubiquitous during the earlier wave of art festivals in Japan. But more important than that is something else: this exhibition demonstrated the potential of a creative environment that allows artists to temporarily detach from the turbulence of contemporary history, and to reexamine their relationship with the body, with the living and the dead, with the human and more-than-human realms. As part of a university campus, ACAC’s public mission offered fertile ground for this kind of exploration. By supporting long-term residencies and research, it enabled artists to draw out contemporary artistic expressions from overlapping temporalities―not merely living in different times, but resisting the acceleration of time, and remembering the timeless presence of the dead. This remembering, in turn, made it possible to reintegrate those perspectives into the stream of one’s own life. The artists also invoked time on a geological scale―evolutionary time, tectonic time, volcanic and oceanic time―thereby decentering human temporality and placing it within a wider, nonhuman framework.

　Spanning half a year and bridging two exhibitions, the project critically questioned the very stance of today’s living beings―artists, researchers, viewers, and industry professionals―who so often devote themselves to the market and forget the perspective of the dead. Yet this sharp critique was enveloped in something tender: a different sense of time―one that faces death, remembers the dead, and seeks to live alongside spirits and those no longer present. To think of death is to confront the stasis of one’s own time, and to encounter the lifetimes of strangers, of once-sainted ancestors, of those forgotten. And this, ultimately, becomes a ritual of regeneration―not merely a meditation on physical death, but a miracle made possible by imagination: a meeting with plural lifeforms that exist beyond singular bodies and linear time. Just as Bon Odori, handed down from ancient times, finds new life in the societies of the diaspora, we, too, encounter renewed forms of life―again and again―through new expressions and renewed rituals. This project connected the unique temporality of this land to the times of others beyond its borders. It awakened within us the vitality to resist the barren powers of death and to reclaim our own time of life. We live with the dead. And in these converging flows, we begin again.

Photo by HYAKUTOU Takeshi