Yokoo Tadanori’s Haunted Museum
Japan
Kobe
2021
13
Yokoo Tadanori’s Haunted Museum presents a compelling exploration of the intrinsic connection between art and fear, featuring a diverse range of the artist’s works. Yokoo Tadanori has consistently pursued phenomena that remain invisible or unexplainable by science, a fascination rooted in his childhood experiences with profound darkness and mystical encounters in Nishiwaki. This deeply personal history informs much of his art, from his celebrated illustrations for the Complete Works of Edogawa Rampo to his paintings created since his “painter’s declaration.” The exhibition, designed with deliberately darkened spaces, encourages visitors to engage with their own ambivalent emotions of wanting to look yet fearing the unknown. It highlights art’s enduring capacity to interpret and express humanity’s primal responses to mystery and the unseen, fostering a reflection on these universal aspects of human existence.
Why should you watch this?
The film Yokoo Tadanori’s Haunted Museum asks what happens when fear and curiosity meet in the same moment. Drawing on childhood nights of complete darkness and on the unsettling imagery of his Edogawa Rampo illustrations, Yokoo turns the unseen into something you can almost touch. A face appearing out of shadow or a mouth repeated like a chant unsettles, yet also holds you in place. The experience lingers because it reminds us that fear is not only about danger but about discovery, and that learning to face it can change how we see the world.
Curators in Panic
Japan
Kobe
2021
21
The exhibition Curators in Panic addresses the unpredictable realities of operating a contemporary art museum, presenting unique works by artist Yokoo Tadanori, who has continuously redefined painting since the 1980s. Rooted in the early 2020s — a period marked by the coronavirus crisis and logistical demands from the large-scale retrospective Genkyo Yokoo Tadanori — this show responds directly to the sudden absence of major holdings and the challenges of museum governance. Three participating curators, deeply familiar with the collection, selected their personal favorites not included in the tour, highlighting the profound existence of the artist’s full creative output. This perspective reflects the confusion of managing a cultural facility during a state of emergency. By adopting the curators’ viewpoint, visitors gain an opportunity to freely enjoy the viewing experience and rediscover the rich, constantly changing creative world of Yokoo Tadanori.
Why should you watch this?
Curators in Panic speaks directly to the uncertainties of our present, when cultural institutions and everyday life alike are shaped by disruption and absence. The film captures the uneasy humor of curators calling their own exhibition a “state of emergency,” a phrase that resonates far beyond the museum walls in a world still negotiating the aftershocks of the coronavirus crisis. Their candid voices, recounting both discoveries and setbacks, turn curatorial practice into a deeply human story of resilience and adaptation. Viewers are left with a striking reminder that art, even when interrupted or displaced, continues to create meaning and connection.
Yokoo Tadanori Collection Gallery 2021
Japan
Kobe
2021
13
The Yokoo Tadanori Collection Gallery presents a comprehensive view of the artistic world and deep influences shaping the practice of Japanese artist Yokoo Tadanori. This permanent space, established in 2021 within the Yokoo Tadanori Museum of Contemporary Art in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, displays his original drawings, color proofs, and project designs. The collection offers insight into the cultural and historical contexts that fed Yokoo’s aesthetic, illuminating the wider network of artistic references he engaged with. Visitors can study archive materials and works by figures he admired, such as Francis Picabia and Giorgio de Chirico, revealing the sources that informed his output. The gallery ultimately encourages visitors to recognize the enduring dialogue between personal vision and international creative lineage that defines lasting contemporary art.
Why should you watch this?
The Yokoo Tadanori Collection Gallery reveals the surprising connections between Yokoo’s imaginative designs and the works of artists he admired, such as Picabia and de Chirico, showing how ideas travel across time and place. Scenes capturing his bold color proofs alongside delicate sketches create moments of both delight and contemplation, exposing the processes behind visual invention. By following the intersections of personal creativity and broader artistic currents, the film invites viewers to experience the thrill of discovery and recognize how enduring inspiration emerges from unexpected juxtapositions, offering a vivid reminder of the vitality of art across generations.
Abdellatif Laâbi: A Poet Passes Through
Morocco
Rabat
2024
11
A Poet Passes Through celebrates the expansive world of Abdellatif Laâbi, the Moroccan writer, poet, and painter, at the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat. This exhibition explores Laâbi’s rich and engaged body of work, presenting him as a voice for a generation seeking meaning through art. It unveils the creative spirit of an era, featuring literary works, archival documents, paintings, and videos that trace his journey and reveal his less-known facet as a painter. A significant focus is the groundbreaking Souffles review, co-founded by Laâbi, which profoundly transformed Moroccan culture and liberated minds. Visitors will discover how one artist’s vision and intellectual struggle historically shaped artistic expression and continue to resonate today, offering a unique insight into a life dedicated to creative impact.
Why should you watch this?
A Poet Passes Through speaks directly to questions of voice, memory, and cultural freedom. Abdellatif Laâbi’s journey — from the radical energy of Souffles to the intimacy of his paintings — shows how words and images can both confront oppression and nurture renewal. The exhibition reveals the texture of a life lived in dialogue with history, where poetry became protest and later painting carried a quieter, but no less powerful, resonance. To watch it is to sense how one artist’s struggle for expression connects with ongoing searches for dignity and meaning, making Laâbi’s work as urgent as it is timeless.
Eloquent Simplicity in Wood and Fiber
X
X
2012
13
Eloquent Simplicity in Wood and Fiber is an exhibition exploring the versatility of natural materials, presenting sculptural forms and functional objects that blend traditional expression with contemporary design. The display defines the distinct aesthetic sensibilities of the Cordillera Mountain groups, including the Ifugao and Kalinga, who have long used wood and fiber to create objects for both utilitarian and ritual purposes. Juxtaposed against these traditional items, the exhibition features contemporary works by notable voices like National Artist Napoleon Abueva and designer Claude Tayag, who utilize Philippine hardwoods such as narra and molave. Addressing the modern scarcity of natural resources, the project highlights how artists continue to create meaningful, practical objects. This presentation encourages visitors to appreciate the enduring beauty, tactile quality, and profound functionality inherent in the world’s simplest materials.
Why should you watch this?
Eloquent Simplicity in Wood and Fiber illuminates how human creativity transforms humble natural materials into objects of enduring beauty and purpose. By placing traditional Cordillera pieces alongside contemporary works by Napoleon Abueva and Claude Tayag, the exhibition highlights the dialogue between ancestral craft and modern design, revealing the ways material, hand, and intention shape culture across generations. Visitors are drawn to striking details — the flowing curves of a carved molave bowl, the clarity of a geometric wooden sculpture — that invite touch, reflection, and wonder. In the process, it underscores a timeless human connection to nature, craftsmanship, and meaningful daily life.
Sourtna. Carte Blanche to Yoriyas. Moroccan Photographers of Today and Tomorrow
Morocco
Rabat
2021
10
The exhibition Sourtna. Carte Blanche to Yoriyas. Moroccan Photographers of Today and Tomorrow opens Morocco’s first National Museum of Photography, showcasing contemporary Moroccan image-makers. Inaugurated in January 2020 within Rabat’s historic Fort Rottembourg, a landmark built in 1888, this institution makes art accessible to diverse neighborhoods. The project expands cultural access, reflecting Morocco’s commitment to visual self-expression and societal reflection through its artists. Curated by acclaimed photographer Yassine Alaoui Ismaili (Yoriyas), it consciously bridges generations, presenting established and emerging talents. Visitors discover how local photographic voices capture a nation’s evolving identity and foster community connections.
Why should you watch this?
The film Sourtna shows how a new museum and a young curator-photographer can redraw a nation’s visual story, making photographic practice public and collective. Set in Fort Rottembourg and curated by Yoriyas, it stitches together established names and smartphone images, moments of youth, family, and bold questions of identity. Seeing a rooftop portrait side-by-side with a grainy phone frame feels both intimate and political; listening to artists talk about transmission between generations moves from pride to urgency. The film leaves a clear charge: when communities claim their image-making, they reshape history and open space for conversation and belonging.
“Rage and Desire — The Beating Heart of Men” by photographer Gérard Rancinan and writer Caroline Gaudriault
Morocco
Rabat
2021
11
This exhibition, Of Rage and Desire, The Beating Heart of Men, presents a unique photographic and literary confrontation exploring the state of humanity in the modern era. Conceived by international photographer Gérard Rancinan and French author Caroline Gaudriault, the project uses monumental imagery and reflective texts to critically examine the profound social contradictions and transformations that have defined life in the 20th and 21st centuries. The display features Rancinan’s striking, metaphor-rich photographs, which often reinterpret classic masterpieces, alongside Gaudriault’s powerful calligraphic installations. Organized into three immersive parts, the exhibition charts our complex relationship with Modernity and societal upheaval. Visitors leave having considered the full range of human feeling — our hopes, rages, desires, and responsibilities — within the continuous transformation of the global world.
Why should you watch this?
The film Of Rage and Desire, The Beating Heart of Men speaks directly to our fractured present by pairing Gérard Rancinan’s monumental, often operatic photographs with Caroline Gaudriault’s hand-written texts, forcing a conversation between image and language about power, longing, and social fracture. Moments such as a staged tableau that echoes a classical masterpiece and a nearby wall of looping calligraphy confront viewers with feeling and argument at once — beautiful, unsettling, and hard to look away from. The effect is both visceral and cerebral: it provokes anger, invites reflection, and asks a final responsibility of us all — to name what we want and what we must change.
Hyogo Prefectural Yokoo Emergency Hospital
Japan
Kobe
2020
18
The exhibition Hyogo Prefectural Yokoo Emergency Hospital explores the profound connection between artist Yokoo Tadanori’s body, his life, and his creative output. Spanning his journey from sensory childhood experiences to confronting old age, the exhibition highlights Yokoo’s unique philosophy of trusting physical sensation over mental states, even in the face of numerous illnesses and injuries such as asthma and facial palsy. The museum is transformed into a hospital setting, featuring works, diaries, and sketches by Yokoo, including his prophetic With Corona series of 2020 which addressed masks. Viewers are invited to reexamine their own relationship with the physical and consider how challenges, including those of a global pandemic, can inspire resilience and artistic force. This presentation underscores the body as a truthful guide for life and art.
Why should you watch this?
Hyogo Prefectural Yokoo Emergency Hospital reframes illness, aging, and crisis as sources of creativity rather than decline. In transforming a museum into a functioning hospital, the exhibition unsettles yet captivates by asking visitors to confront the fragility of the body — the same fragility Yokoo has long turned into art. His sketches made from a sickbed and the eerie humor of his With Corona collages capture the tension between vulnerability and resilience with startling clarity. The experience ultimately reminds us that the body, in all its imperfections, can guide not only personal survival but also shared imagination for the future.
Yokoo Tadanori: State of Emergency Declaration
Japan
Kobe
2020
22
Yokoo Tadanori: State of Emergency Declaration explores the artist’s prescient depictions of tense situations where the line between fact and fiction dissolves. Long before the novel coronavirus crisis, Yokoo Tadanori repeatedly created works that now resonate with contemporary global events, reflecting a timeless human experience of uncertainty. This exhibition features his impactful paintings alongside an installation of his recent online series, With Corona, which incorporates imagery like masks in a direct artistic response to the virus. Visitors can observe how Yokoo’s vision, spanning from earlier works to current creations, challenges perceptions of reality, encouraging reflection on art’s power to interpret and shape our understanding of the world during moments of profound change.
Why should you watch this?
The film State of Emergency Declaration resonates now because it captures the unsettling feeling of living through crises that blur the edges of truth and imagination. Long before the pandemic, Yokoo Tadanori painted scenes where reality fractured under pressure, and his recent With Corona collages — filled with masks and cavernous mouths — extend that vision into our present. Confronting these images can be disquieting, even surreal, yet they also sharpen awareness of how art can mirror collective anxiety while offering a space to process it. The takeaway is stark yet universal: in uncertain times, art helps us face fear and reimagine survival.