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Video Letter Exchange: A Community of Images (Screening and Performance)
July 19 @ 8:00 pm - 10:00 pm
Join us for a special presentation of a performance and screening celebrating contemporary Japanese video artists with cinéSPEAK.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition that explores experimental moving images created by Japanese artists and their connections to North America. Covering a wide range of practices and themes; including avant-garde film, performance, design and healing, ecology, expanded cinema, independent documentary, music, race, feminism, video art, community-based video, technology and communication, and others, the project features works and activities that took place in Japan and in the U.S.
As part of the public engagement programming for the exhibition, we will be presenting the 1983 Video Letter, a remarkable 64-minute compilation exchange of video letters that took place between video artists Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa in the months immediately preceding Terayama’s death. The Video Letter can be thought of as a home video produced by two preeminent poets and interlaid with highly abstract philosophizing, slightly aberrant behavior, and occasionally flamboyant visuals.
In homage to the original 1983 Video Letter, CCJ and JASGP commissioned a group of four contemporary video artists to produce a new video letter exchange as part of the Community of Images exhibition. Two of the artists are U.S.-based (Nadia Hironaka, Philadelphia, and Shinpei Takeda, San Diego), with two others based in Japan (Hikaru Suzuki, Tokyo and Yu Araki, Kyoto).
Unlike the original video, the videos were anonymized during the exchange that took place between February – May 2024. This screening will be the first world premiere screening.