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| The ten day Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions opens on February 19. The event will take place in the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and Yebisu Garden Place and feature exhibits, film showings and live performances. We sat down with Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions Festival Director Keiko Okamura, who has been involved with the festival since its inception, to talk about the story, purpose, and highlights of the festival. |
―――The previous Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions
The first festival was set up to incorporate entirely everything associated with the word “image.” Concretely, we had documentaries, films, animation, live features, short features and long features. But in the end the number of people who saw everything was limited. It proved difficult to show people the full breadth of image.
―――Why “Song” for the theme of the second festival?
Images naturally go together with sounds and musical elements. Thinking from this side of things, and with the keyword of “song,” we wondered if images couldn’t also imitate sounds, and so we set the theme for the festival as “Searching Songs” and decided to think about images in this way.
―――Complete composition, direction
The theme of the festival is song, but rather than gathering works that highlight this theme, we tried to draw out the charm of each image and look for new meaning in them by placing very different works side-by-side. This allows one to make free and wide associations and provides a direction for the whole show.
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Keiko Okamura
Director of the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions and curator of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Moved to her current position in 2007 after being curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo. Planned the shows “Land/mind/body-scapes in the Age of Cold Burn, MOT Annual 2000” (2000), “POSITIONING-In the Reality of Europe: Art from Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary” (2005-2006), “IMAGINATION: Vision, Perception and Beyond” (2008-2009), and “ISHIDA TAKASHI and Genealogy of Abstract Animation” (2008). Established the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions, building on the success of the 2007 exhibition “Seven Nights, Seven Lights.”
http://www.yebizo.com/
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