In conjunction with ISCP’s exhibition The Animal Mirror, Japanese artist Shimabuku will discuss his recent work. Shimabuku has explored the role of communication, memory, and travel in the construction of both animal and human consciousness. His work often involves encounters with live animals. From 1990 to 2013 he made a series of works involving octopuses, including a film documenting his tour of famous sites in Tokyo with a live octopus. For his work in The Animal Mirror, he produced an exhibition for a group of Japanese macaque monkeys in Kyoto.

Shimabuku’s recent solo exhibitions include Exchange a mobile phone for a stone tool at Wilkinson Gallery, London (2015) and When Sky was Sea at Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery (2014). His work is represented in the collections of the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Kunsthalle Bern; and the National Museum of Art, Osaka, among others.

After the lecture, ISCP will launch the exhibition catalog, Aqueous Earth & The Animal Mirror, which combines documentation, images, and supporting texts from two recent exhibitions at ISCP: Aqueous Earth (October 21, 2015 – January 22, 2016) and The Animal Mirror (November 2, 2016 – January 27, 2017). The catalog includes contributions by Kari Conte, Jacques Derrida, Simone Forti, Dylan Gauthier, Terike Haapoja, and Timothy Morton.

Bringing together a diverse group of international artists, this pair of exhibitions engages recent challenges to anthropocentric perspectives—the looming ecological crises of the Anthropocene in Aqueous Earth and our increasing understanding of the complexity of non-human animals in The Animal Mirror—to explore art’s centrality in understanding and negotiating these shifts and their effects on human culture and society.

This event is generously supported by The Japan Foundation, New York.

Aqueous Earth & The Animal Mirror is supported, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Greenwich Collection Ltd. ,The Japan Foundation, New York, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen e. V., New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York State Legislature, and New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.