Held in Okayama City once every three years, the Okayama Art Summit is an international exhibition of contemporary art. With Rirkrit Tiravanija taking the reins as artistic director, the Okayama Art Summit 2022 brings the artistic touch to various historical and cultural sites near Okayama Castle and Okayama Korakuen Garden for two months from 30 September to 27 November, 2022.
The event offers visitors the opportunity not only to see exciting exhibits but also to experience the thought processes of the artists, enabling a unique interaction with art that transcends time and space-all from the historic city of Okayama.
Though written out, without the question marking the end of the sentence, it’s only an opening to an idea.
In the past years, the with Global pandemic and the exertion of White Supremacy tendencies in the US as well as Nationalists Populist in many parts of the global world, I like for the exhibition to refocus our mindset and perspectives.
With many of these thoughts in mind, I like the potential of the next Okayama Art Summit to be focused on peripheral practices by artists whom may share in common their itinerant backgrounds. In itinerant, I mean that most of the artists in this selection are coming from cultural and social back grounds that is diverse. Though they may have their practices and their locations in the center of western artistic hegemony, we could understand that their positioning in that ( western ) hegemony, is based on their identification with positions other than western. That their lives and histories are constructed, in difference, to the west.
The dream here, is to dream in a sky of difference, in a sky of multiplicity, of narratives of representation that is peripheral to the western canon. That the dream is for us ( the participants and the viewer ) to experience representations, which are outside of our normative position. That the dream can open us to stories and lives and ways of thinking, looking, hearing, being, existing beyond the hopes, the aspirations, and dreams that we ourselves are touched by in our daily structures.
— Rirkrit Tiravanija, Artistic Director of Okayama Art Summit 2022
