Visuals by Shoko Ise / Audio by Steve Jansen
STILL/ALIVE is the sixth in the annual series of exhibitions of work by contemporary photographers in Japan held by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In this year's exhibition, the focus is on contemporary lives and times and their expression in a group exhibition presenting the work of four artists, all in their thirties, who work in photography and video.
People living today must keep up with an ever-accelerating pace of life, yet recognize that speed is not all. Our values are shifting towards recognizing the merits of the “slow life,” towards appreciating a more leisurely approach. We also now have more options for how to live and ways to spend our time than ever before. The option of the innocent faith in progress that once prevailed is, however, denied to us. As individuals, children and adults both experience an inchoate despair, a pall devoid of hope hanging over the future.
In the world of photography and imaging, the rapid development of digital media and communication tools has made it possible to edit our experiences freely and to take it for granted that we can replay them over and over as well as share them with others. At the same time, however, those changes undermine our sense of living in the here and now. Time itself is invisible and conceptual, but as human beings we do, or expect to, experience the times we live acutely and as very real. Is that possible in our digital, fast-moving world? In our ever-more-complex, multi-layered reality, how is time being transformed? What does that mean?
The exhibition title, STILL/ALIVE, implies immobility and motion, and, in terms of time, synchronic and diachronic: still and video photography. Artists give form to their images of time, stimulated by their constant interaction with the everyday world of reality. Those images are sculpted by memories of times past, intimations of the future, and time now. The title is also a metaphor for the place an exhibition is held and the real world going about its business outside its walls. The exhibition’s goal is that the many senses of time and expressions of it incorporated in the works on display and the time that visitors to the exhibition and the many people involved in it spend conjoin in a shared sense of living in the here and now.
(Text taken from the website of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)
