Sophia University Institute of Comparative Culture Lecture Series 2019


Mediating Urban Space:

1970s Tokyo through Video Hiroba's Lens


Nina Horisaki-Christens


19:05-20:35, July 18th, 2018

Room 301, 3F, Building 10, Sophia University


In 1960s Japan, the concurrent rapid urbanization and proliferation of mass media forms collude to forge a conceptual link between urban space and media space. Urban space thus becomes both the subject of mass media and the site in which media proliferates. While hardly the only artists to deal with the problematic power structures this confluence entails, the artists of the early 1970s collective Video Hiroba look to video as a means of troubling the easy association of mass media and urban space. This talk will discuss how works by key members of this Tokyo-based collective used video to mediate urban space based on their own ties to contemporaneous art and media discourses. In tracing how the possible meanings of the nascent video medium were negotiated within this urban collective, I hope to delineate an approach through which artists began to envision public space under the growing influence of the kanri shakai.


Nina Horisaki-Christens is an art historian, curator, and PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University (NY). She has been a visiting researcher at the Institute of Comparative Culture at Sophia University since fall of 2017, studying the development of video practices by Tokyo-based artists in the 1970s. She was a 2017-18 Fulbright Graduate Research Fellow, a 2012-13 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program, and a Research Assistant for Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She has also contributed to publications produced by ArtAsiaPacific, Art Tower Mito, the Mori Art Museum, ArtPhil, Takuro Someya Gallery, and Hyperallergic, among others.


Language: English / No Prior registration necessary

This lecture is organized by Professor Michio Hayashi (FLA)

http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/html/events/2019-2020/190718_Horisaki_Christens.pdf　


Institute of Comparative Culture (ICC) Sophia University: 7-1 Kioicho, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102-8554, JAPAN/ Web: http://icc.fla.sophia.ac.jp/