TOP 30th Anniversary: Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025
Docs: Images and Records
Jan. 31—Feb. 16, 2025
- Jan. 31—Feb. 16, 2025
- Closed Mondays (except when Monday falls on a holiday, in which case the museum is open and closed the following day)
- Admission：Free *Admission will be charged for some programs such as screenings etc.
Aiming to re-examine the increasingly diversified means by which moving images are created and appreciated, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions has been dedicated to moving images not as an exclusive category, but with an eye to the various alternative views it embraces. The festival continues to serve as a platform for promoting and sustaining alternative visions that art and moving images can inspire in us. In the years since its inception, as the festival has featured moving images from Japan and abroad while presenting a new theme with each edition that asks anew “What is a ‘moving image’?”, the circumstances surrounding moving images have changed dramatically, while the frameworks and technologies that define moving images have diversified.
Amidst such change, the festival’s 2025 edition will aspire to an ever deeper investigation of the nature of moving images by exhibiting new works by four finalists in the Commission Project (3rd floor exhibition gallery), which is returning for its second edition. This exhibition, along with several new programs connected to this year’s theme, will further reinforce the role of the festival as a forum for moving images.
THIS YEAR’S THEME "Docs: Images and Records"
A document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.
The Lumière brothers’ Exiting the Factory (1895), which is a record of people leaving a factory, is widely recognized as the starting point of the history of motion pictures. People at the time were astonished to see scenes from their everyday lives being recorded and replayed before their eyes as if the events were actually happening right there. Today, 130 years after the invention of moving images, it is entirely unexceptional for people to record and share their daily lives through photographs and videos. Meanwhile, the definition of a photograph has been expanded to include digital images and that of moving images now encompasses digital video; in digital form, these media can be manipulated more freely than before, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous relationship between facts and the images that represent them. Held on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025 will focus on the transformation of these media. By examining a wide range of works through the lens of images and words, the festival will pursue a reconsideration of documents and documentary.
Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2024 Official website is here.
*The Commission Project (3rd floor exhibition room) is open until Sunday, March 23.
With assistance from: J-WAVE 81.3 FM
Sponsored by: Corporate Membership of Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
*The schedule is subject to change. Any further changes will be announced.