Aichi Triennale 2025 , A Time Between Ashes and Roses
Group Exhibition Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya, Japan

Artists: Robert ZHAO Renhui 赵仁辉 | 

This triennial departs from Adonis’ poem A Time Between Ashes and Roses. Echoing its sentiments and visions, this exhibit brings together a futurity empowered by geologic time views rather than immediate and national or territorial perspectives which illuminate contemporary human-environment divides. The apocalyptic and optimistic extremes are decentered in this triennial and the interlayered complexities of environmental justice are addressed so that the bearing of responsibility and realisation of complicity is illuminated. The triennial emphasises the shades and expression in between destruction and blossoming as well as the entanglement of the human and environment.

Inviting artists and collectives from all over the world, the works will present existing and unknown narratives about the environment in which we occur. The curatorial mission and artist works expand upon the triennial’s locality and unearth environmental narratives inspired by ceramic and Setomono production. Since the industries are a source of local pride, they support the triennial’s framework which explores alternative and experimental forms for modelling the human-environment relationship. In Aichi’s industrial history, the ashy black skies from the production of ceramics signified prosperity rather than pollution and destruction. Do such local industries and heritage pave way for nuanced thinking about the human-environment entanglement? A Time between Ashes and Roses is a traversal which adopts the spectral and in between, so that assumed positionalities and hierarchies come undone.

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