Lingua Franca: TOKAS Creator-in-Residence 2025 Exhibition

对不起，此内容只适用于EN。

Since 2006, TOKAS has been implementing the Creator-in-Residence program, which offers opportunities for creators active in various disciplines including visual art, design, and curation to stay and create works in Tokyo or at various overseas destinations. This exhibition presented the work of creators participating in the TOKAS Residency Program in 2024, done either overseas at associated residency providers or at TOKAS Residency.

This two-term exhibition showcases the work of 14 Japanese and international artists who have participated in residencies in Tokyo and various locations around the world. In this group show, artists who created work during their stay at the TOKAS Residency with the shared theme of “Beyond Divisions,” and artists who were either dispatched to partner institutions or welcomed to TOKAS in 2024, will exhibit their work together in the same space.

Throughout history, humans have inhabited different regions around the world, coexisting with and adapting to their natural environments while developing social structures and unique cultures, customs, and languages. For various reasons, such as shifts in climate or the need for resources, peoples have migrated en masse to new lands, where they have encountered other communities with different backgrounds. These encounters involve linguistic contact and mutual influence, through which simplified forms of communication emerge. Over time, as languages take root and communities settle or merge, new shared languages (lingua franca) evolve.

The 14 artists featured in this exhibition deepened their engagement with people from diverse cultural backgrounds during their residencies, conducting research shaped by their issues of concern and interests, and distilling these experiences into their work. The resulting works appear in the exhibition space as mediums of communication. The artists’ insightful perspectives and confrontations with reality organically connect with the knowledge and imagination that we, as contemporaries, have accumulated, evoking a wide range of reactions and interpretations.

Much like a lingua franca, which emerges and develops to enable communication between speakers of different native languages, this exhibition invites us to encounter unfamiliar worlds and overlooked phenomena. In doing so, it has the potential to free us from conventions, assumptions, and cultural backgrounds that shape us, offering new ways to understand one another.