Video Letter Exchange: A Screening and Conversation

Please join us for a screening and conversation focusing on the recently commissioned film, titled Video Letter Exchange: Community Of Images (2024). This program will begin with the screening and will be followed by a conversation between artist Nadia Hironaka, Executive Director of Collaborative Cataloging Japan Ann Adachi-Tasch, and curator Yuka Yokoyama.

Video Letter Exchange: Community Of Images (2024) pays homage to an earlier film, titled Video Letter (1983), which is a 64-minute compilation ­of an exchange of letters in the form of videos that took place between artists Shuji Terayama and Shuntaro Tanikawa. The film to be screened at this program was led by Nadi Hironaka, who organized a video letter exchange between US and Japan-based artists, Shinpei Takeda (San Diego), Hikaru Suzuki (Tokyo) and Yu Araki (Kyoto).

Video Letter Exchange: Community Of Images (2024) was co-commissioned by Collaborative Cataloging Japan and the Japan America Society Of Greater Philadelphia for the current exhibition, hosted by Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Participant Bios:

Nadia Hironaka creates counter-mythologies and post-humanist fables that play out as moving images, immersive installations and environments, and public artworks. She, along with her collaborator, Matthew Suib are recipients of several honored awards including a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, CFEVA, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and are the 2024 Public Works Artists In Residence.Their work has been widely exhibited at venues including, Fondazione MAXXI (Rome), New Media Gallery (Vancouver), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), UCLA Hammer Museum, PS1/MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the American Philosophical Society. They have been artists-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Banff Centre, Marble House Project, Interlude, and the Millay Colony for Arts. Nadia Hironaka serves as a professor in the Studio Arts low residency graduate program and is the interim department chair of Animation and Game Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Ann Adachi-Tasch is Executive Director of Collaborative Cataloging Japan, a not-for-profit that supports preservation and archiving of Japanese historical and experimental moving image works. Ann has worked at The Museum of Modern Art where she managed projects for the Museum’s global research initiative titled Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives (C-MAP), and contributed to the launch of its digital platform, post (post.at.moma.org). In 2009, she organized a touring screening program and publication of Japanese experimental video and film, Vital Signals at Electronic Arts Intermix, a video art archive and distributor where she was the Distribution Coordinator. Ann has given presentations and written about the status of media archiving in Japan, at The Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Tate Modern (London); Keio University Art Center (Tokyo); and the Archives of American Art (Washington D.C.), among others. A mother of three, Ann also works at Asian Arts Initiative.

Yuka Yokoyama has worked at museums, non-profit organizations, and galleries in New York, Philadelphia, and Japan for the last 20 years. She co-founded the Marginal Utility Gallery in Philadelphia with David Dempewolf, a space for artists and thinkers to experiment with new ideas through art, discussion, and printed publications, actively exhibiting local, international, emerging, and established artists through organizing events and programs within respectful and supportive communities of artists, neighboring galleries and organizations. Recently, Yuka co-curated and produced an exhibition, catalog, and documentary film on Shofuso Japanese House in Philadelphia related to modernism in architectural history through the lens of Japanese, Japanese American, and European American architects’ creative collaboration. Yuka’s current research and collaborative projects include the Japanese Artists’ community in New York and how the WWII experience affected their lives and artwork.

In addition to Nadia Hironaka (see bio above), the following artists have participated in the creation of Video Letter Exchange: Community Of Images (2024)

Shinpei Takeda works and lives in San Diego, CA; Tijuana, Mexico; and Düsseldorf, Germany. Takeda is an artist/filmmaker, focuses on highlighting marginalized memories and challenge dominant narratives and perceptions working with a wide array of mediums like installation, film, participatory projects, texts, sound, performance, and Virtual Reality.

Shinpei Takeda is a co-founder of The AJA Project, and has recently returned to the organization as the Executive Artistic Director. Since 2000, he has transformed an all-volunteer nonprofit working with refugee youth using photography to one of the only arts organization focusing on Social Justice in San Diego. He is also a co-founder of Antimonument e.V. another nonprofit in Düsseldorf, Germany, creating various XR projects on the intersections of technology, art and memory.

Hikaru Suzuki has been in the Doctoral Program of Film and New Media, Tokyo University of the Arts since 2023 and researches the Development of “Essay-Film“ in the Western and Non-Western Worlds. He participated in a video letter project initiated by Dir. Nele Wohlatz in Germany with an artist in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during Covid 19 era in 2020. The video letter project between Buenos Aires and Fukushima, Yokohama” was selected for the “35th Mar del Plata International Film Festival (Buenos Aires)”. Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has made it his life’s work to film the people and transformation of Landscape of Fukushima, and continues to do it. He is currently working as an organizer and programmer for the Japanese screening organization “Experimental Film Culture in Japan” since 2019.

Yu Araki majored in sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis (USA) and furthered his studies at the Graduate School of Film and New Media Studies, Tokyo University of the Arts (Japan). As a failed English/Japanese interpreter, his central theme has been revolving around the idea of mistranslation and misunderstanding in intercultural contexts, in which he explores “difference” via reenactment, remake and reanimation. Recent exhibitions include venues such as Tokyo Photographic Art Museum (2024), Towada Art Center (2023), C-LAB (Taipei, 2023), Pola Museum of Art (Kanagawa, 2020), Shiseido Gallery (Tokyo, 2019), and Art Sonje Center (Seoul, 2019). His films have been screened at Institute of Contemporary Arts, FIDMarseille, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam and many more. During 2017-18, he was a guest resident at Asia Culture Center in Gwangju as well as Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Araki was selected as one of the finalists for the Future Generation Art Prize 2019. He won the Special Prize in the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2023 Commission Project for his video installation “Unmasked (Bootleg)” about a Japanese KISS tribute band named WISS.

Light refreshments will be provided.

AAAinA’s general programming and operations are funded in part by the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, Ruth Foundation, and the Vilcek Foundation.

Host or Publisher Asia Art Archive in America