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CURATORIAL INSIGHTS

A conversation with Sohrab Mohebbi in the frame of the Art Week Tokyo.

This year's edition of AWT Video examines art as a space where rituals and collective experiences migrate, adapt, and transform. In our fractured present—where multiple temporalities overlap and sometimes collide—rituals and traditions tether us to various planes of existence, from the cosmic to the digital. The conversation below offers an insight into the curatorial theme of the section.

 

Coming from a global curatorial network, how do you interpret the idea of 'international' in the context of Art Week Tokyo, and how does it inform your approach to curating within Japan?

I work within the possibilities and contours of each project. For Carnegie International, I believed it was important to explore what "international" means in the context of the U.S. post-1945 and how this intersects with the notion of the "Contemporary" in art (as in post-1945 art historiography). For AWT Video, I worked with a pool of video works and realized that one way to think about a large grouping of them was how they process multiple (and disjunctive) temporalities—experiencing media fragmentation on the one hand, and climate catastrophe on the other.

In curating for Art Week Tokyo, how do you navigate the nuances of introducing global perspectives into a distinct cultural setting like Japan? What challenges and opportunities have you encountered?

The aforementioned notions of shattered temporalities are among the conditions of living on earth today. How artists respond to these conditions in different contexts can shape new ways of imagining how to live with, process, and respond to the impacts of these conditions in our respective environments.

Your work often involves bringing overlooked or underrepresented narratives to light. How does this mission manifest in your contributions to Art Week Tokyo, and what stories are you most excited to share?

What is important about emerging or overlooked narratives is how they are yet to be absorbed into hegemonic systems. The challenge lies in how representation and subjugation often go hand in hand, and how art can contribute to shifting the imaginary within this context. There is a utopianism involved in this line of thinking, but I don’t think we should abandon it, regardless of how it might be recuperated.

fig. 1


What do you believe is the responsibility of art institutions like Art Week Tokyo in shaping public awareness around the poly-crisis?

I mentioned elsewhere recently that art is not necessarily there to change things but, as Clarice Lispector said about writing, our task is to “try to open [things] up somehow.” I think the institutional responsibility is to create this opening up, by following the practices of artists.

Given your experience with the political responsibility of artworks and politically charged themes, how do you integrate these into the Japanese context at Art Week Tokyo? What new dialogues do you hope to create?

The real political act is to exercise one’s freedom, and art is the space (or one of the spaces) where this freedom can be practiced.

For more info about the Art Week Tokyo visit www.artweektokyo.com

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Sohrab Mohebbi is the Director of SculptureCenter, New York. Previously, he served as the Kathe and Jim Patrinos Curator of the 58th Carnegie International (2023) as well as SculptureCenter’s Curator-at-Large (2020–21) and Curator (2018–20). He received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BFA in photography from Tehran Art University. He curates the program for Art Week Tokyo in 2024.





  • Image Caption

    Cover: Tsubasa Kato, Break it Before it’s Broken, 2015. Video,
    © Tsubasa Kato, courtesy of the artist and Mujin-to Production.

    fig. 1: Sohrab Mohebbi. Photo by Julian Abraham “Togar.”



     

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