Interdisciplinary Exhibition:
Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing

Overview

“Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing”
Period: 1st June 2023 (Thurs) – 4th June 2023 (Sun)
Performative Walk-through Sessions: 1st June (Thurs) – 3rd June (Sat) 16:30 / 18:00 / 19:30 ※Reservation required
Exhibition Only: 4th June (Sun) 11:00 – 17:00 ※Last admission 16:30
Admission: Free
Venue: Denchu Hirakushi House and Atelier
Address: 2-20-3 Uenosakuragi, Taito-ku, Tokyo, 〒110-0002, Japan

About the Exhibition

An international and interdisciplinary arts collective based in Tokyo, (O)Kamemochi presents their first project, Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing, from 1st June 2023 to 4th June 2023 at Denchu Hirakushi House and Atelier.

Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing is a multi-layered sensory experience merging visual arts, performance, and soundscapes. Through this project, (O)Kamemochi elicit and share personal autobiographical narratives and intergenerational memories within Denchu Hirakushi House and Atelier, an amalgam of traditional Japanese and modern architecture. They reconceive the space as a ‘haunted house’, enabling exploration of metaphysical, socio-political, and intimate postmemories.

This project traces the postmemory we can sense without having ever experienced. Through radical modernisation, westernisation, imperialism and colonialism, East Asian identities and relations shift between generations, creating challenges to understanding on personal, familial, and international scales. In search of a better understanding of ourselves and our cultural identity, we dive into the memories of our grandparents, but are caught in a tangled net of interweaved national histories, obscured by the murky waters of their personal experience. The director of this project, Sun Kim said. “My grandmother was dismissive of her memories, calling them “unimportant”. For her, life under colonial rule felt inappropriate to talk about. Despite her silence, I can feel I inherited her memories, haunted by her formless ghost.”

Based on her personal experience, (O)Kamemochi tries to softly touch on the forms of these ghostly memories and examine how they manifest in the present through this project. The distinct point of this project is that the artworks were curated around a personal fiction, with the performance and the soundscape weaving various artworks within this narrative, all interwoven and presented in the format of a haunted house. (O)Kamemochi named this format a Performative Walk-through in which soundscape and performance embodying the narrative will guide a predetermined number of audience members through the exhibition. In this process, performance and soundscape will not only convey the narrative or theme of this project but also will actively give breathtaking moments of resonating with artworks within the audiences’ memories.

Organised in the narrative flow of “Eating (Possession) – Translating – Singing,” the exhibition stages polyphonic micro-narratives. In doing so, each work is tied into a larger narrative of personal stories about inherited memories and emancipation from the past. At the same time, the dense layers of each artwork sing their own voices.

For the interdisciplinary experience, known as a “performative walk-through”, audiences should pre-reserve a time slot from any of the available sessions (16:30 – 17:30 / 18:00 – 19:00 / 19:30 – 20:30) from between 1st – 3rd June. For those who could not join a performative walk-through session, the exhibition only session will be open on the 4th June 11:00 – 17:00, for which advanced reservation is not required.

Performative Walk-through Sessions*
• 1/6/2023 (Thurs) : ① 16:30 – 17:30 ② 18:00 – 19:00 ③ 19:30 – 20:30
• 2/6/2023 (Fri) : ④ 16:30 – 17:30 ⑤ 18:00 – 19:00 ⑥ 19:30 – 20:30
• 3/6/2023 (Sat) : ⑦ 16:30 – 17:30 ⑧ 18:00 – 19:00 ⑨ 19:30 – 20:30

*Reservation is required. Each session is limited to 15 people. Reservation link

Exhibition Only
• 4/6/2023 (Sun) : 11:00 – 17:00 (Last admission 16:30)

Artists: bones tan jones / Emily Karasawa Grabill / Sun Kim / Asato Kitamura / Yusuke Komatsubara / Minjae Kwak / Megumi Okawa / Mio Okido / Marlies Pahlenberg / Mingxiang Wang
Performers: Sakura Obata / Naoyuki Sakai / Eureka Toyoda
Soundscape Artist: Leonid Zvolinsky

Related Program

Online Talk Event (English/Japanese interpretation available)

“Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws : Performative Curation in Mediating Personal Narrative-based Exhibitions Toward Porous Memory.”

Date and time: 24/5/2023 19:00 (JST) – 20:30 (JST)
Moderator: Sun Kim (Director of Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing)
Panels: Adulaya Hoontrakul (Director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre), Kaku Nagashima (Associate professor of Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts; Director of Tokyo Festival)
Interpreter: Kana Miyazawa
Technical Operations: Wataru Shoji
Assistant: Alissa Osada-Phornsiri

Access: Zoom Webinar Link (Link opens 15mins before starting time)
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81055674146?pwd=RG5IWnRUYXZHUGFOekxiUGxXNGpxUT09
Webinar ID: 810 5567 4146 / Passcode: 136819

“Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws : Performative Curation in Mediating Personal Narrative-based Exhibitions Toward Porous Memory” is exploring the possibilities of personal and autonomous narrative as a curatorial methodology. The main title of this event, Girl, Your Body Has So Many Holes for Straws is cited from the title of a poem by Korean poet Hyesoon Kim. She gives birth to language through her own body and gives birth to “others” through it. For her, the hole is a new dimension where she can give birth to infinite others and simultaneously intermingle with them with her own language and body. Similarly, in this talk, we will reframe the autobiographical narrative and its meanings as calling back the infinite hidden ‘others’ beyond the ‘self’. Moderator Sun Kim (Director of the upcoming interdisciplinary exhibition “Touch My Mumblings, Hug My Words, Kiss My Singing”) will discuss with two specialists in each field, Kaku Nagashima (Director of Tokyo Festival) and Adulaya Hoontrakul (Director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre), alternative curatorial perspectives through traversing the theatrical performance perspective.

While researching for the upcoming exhibition, Sun realised that not only her grandmother, but many of her grandmother’s generations, especially those in Asia who lived through colonialism and modernisation, had a common hesitation to talk about themselves. But she also realised that their silence was an act that consciously or unconsciously influenced her generation in many ways, leaving them with feelings or traumas that cannot be clearly explained.

Through this talk session, Sun aims to share the panel’s thoughts with audiences regarding how we can imagine new ways to foster a place to emancipate and intermingle with infinite alienated others, such as our grandmother generation, through the understanding of ourselves, our own body, and language. Through this, we aim to materialise a porous imagination where our own narrative coexists with the narratives of “others”.

[Speaker Bios]

NAGASHIMA Kaku
NAGASHIMA specializes in dramaturgy in the field of performing arts. His involvement with theater came first as a performance subtitles operator and script translator, and has since participated in various scenes of performing arts as a dramaturg: a creative partner of directors and choreographers. His recent concerns have seen him seek ways to take ideas and know-how of the theater outside the theater space, involving him with various art projects. NAGASHIMA is also one of the FT Label Program Directors at the Tokyo Festival. His published works include “How to Build the House of Atreus” and translations of Samuel Beckett’s works, “Worstward Ho” as well as “The Complete Plays of Samuel Beckett” series (supervision, co-translation).

Adulaya Kim Hoontrakul
Adulaya Kim Hoontrakul is an art curator-historian. She holds a graduate degree in History of Art and Archaeology with Music from SOAS and a postgraduate from Goldsmiths London/LASALLE College of the Arts in Asian Art Histories. She is a PhD student at GEIDAI Tokyo in Art Studies and Curatorial Practice and is the current Director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Kim has worked with multiple artists and inter-disciplinary exhibitions from around Asia Pacific, her current research is on decolonisation dialogues and politics of craft.

Sun Kim
Sun Kim (b. Seoul, Korea) is a curator, researcher, and artist who imagines polyphonic narratives that can unveil the marginalized memory, senses, and language in public areas. She recently explores micro but porosity memory in the contemporary context by posing the question about repressed inherited memory that can be sensed even if we have never experienced it. She worked in the curation team at Art Sonje Center and has led and participated in various projects as a director, curator, artist, and space designer in artspace, schools, and alternative cultural spaces in Korea and Japan. She is currently doing her M.A. research on a performative and interdisciplinary art project connecting her interests and artistic practices.

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Director: Sun Kim
Producer: Alissa Osada-Phornsiri
Assistant Producer: Guldiyar Dawut
Performance Director: Dan Dagondon
Performance Managers: Minano Hirano / Zhang Yiyi
Curators: Sun Kim / Chloe Paré / Finn Ryan
Graphic Designer: Cléo Verstrepen (Photography by Ching-Chuan Kuo)
PR: Sun Kim / Alissa Osada-Phornsiri
Video Translation: Hanna Hirakawa
Text Translation: Minano Hirano / Serena Yajima / Naoto John Tanaka

Organised by: (O)Kamemochi
Supported by: The Mutomai Fund for Music Creation, Education and Research
Cooperation: Ibara City, Okayama Prefecture, Ueno-Sakuragi Denchu Hirakushi House and Atelier, NPO Taito Cultural and Historical Society, Arts management group ‘Yanaka no Okatte’

(O)Kamemochi is an international and interdisciplinary collective arts group of various fields such as fine art, curation, theatre, production, and music. The core members are all current students studying at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School of Global Arts. Currently, they are focusing on interdisciplinary art projects based on a collective working process.

Contact: okamemochi.collective@gmail.com
Instagram: @okamemochi.collective