EXHIBITION
SIDE CORE is an art team that develops art projects in public spaces and on the streets. While their activities have been attracting more and more attention in recent years, and this exhibition is their first major solo show in Tokyo.
Including video works that film highways, railroads, and underground waterways in a unique way, installation works that use streetlights, guardrails and road construction signs in public spaces as materials, and a documentary video of a rat puppet simply walking around Tokyo at night, SIDE CORE creates works by focusing on the unique public nature and the system of cities and intervening / negotiating with them. Their way of expression is constantly expanding and updating, making them an artist in progress not to be missed.
This exhibition is not only be inside the museum, but also develops in the surrounding environment, allowing you to see how their imagination of the city is expanding through art.
Someone said, "In the basement of a certain building in the city, you can hear the murmur of a culverted river late at night.” When we actually visited there, we found that during the daytime we could not hear it because it was blocked by the hustle and bustle of the city, but when the city quieted down at night, we did indeed hear a sound like flowing water. In fact, this may be the sound of wastewater flowing through a sewer pipe. But standing still in the pitch-black basement, you feel as if you are inside your own head, or as if you are asleep but only your consciousness is awake. Then someone's story, "This is the sound of a river," draws you in, and the endless expanse of the invisible underground water vein vaguely appears in your mind.
When one spends time underground, in tunnels, in construction sites, on streets in the middle of the night, and in other dark areas of the city, one perceives the shape of the city through one's internal/physical senses, and the city as defined on a map becomes distorted. This visualization of loophole-like spaces/situations in the landscapes that we normally see in our daily lives spurs us to take action that deviates from the norms of our daily behavior. However, this is not the result of our own imagination alone, but rather an act of inheriting a vision of the city that someone once saw and passing it on. It is a reaction like the butterfly effect, a phenomenon in which a small game born somewhere in the world is incorporated into the urban systems of countries around the world through the actions of people from diverse backgrounds. Street culture is precisely such a phenomenon in which imagination and actions born from the dark side of the city become a common global sense, and while maintaining its specificity as a single movement, it has permeated diverse phenomena in unpredictable ways, from literature and film to architecture, urban planning, activism, and art. WATARI-UM, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art is a place where such veins of street culture are mixed within the history of art.
This exhibition will feature a group of works categorized into three themes based on the keywords of our perspective, action, and storytelling. In the perspective section shows a new series of three-dimensional works that model urban cycles, primarily using materials from the street. The action section presents video and photographic documentation of actions/expressions that intervene in urban situations and cycles. And the storytelling section features the latest version of "under city," a project that has been ongoing since 2023, exploring Tokyo's underground spaces with skateboards. Exploring the dark side of the city, accumulating small actions, and feeding back noise to the urban landscape. Such a series of actions constitutes an intervention of the vision of a small unit of individuals into the urban system of Tokyo, but at the same time, it is a way to touch the chain reaction of cultural activism that transcends borders and time, and to create a connection with someone unpredictable.
SIDE CORE
WORKS
PROFILE
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photo: Shin Hamada
- SIDE CORE
Featuring Takasu Sakie, Matsushita Tohru, and Nishihiro Taishi, SIDE CORE launched in 2012. Harimoto Kazunori also participates in the collective as a video director. Unraveling the rules of public space, its practice which unfolds both indoors and out, explores ways to expand expression in urban space with the aim of changing mindsets, intervening in interstices, and broadening expression and actions, through the lens of street culture. Recent major exhibitions include “Hyakunengo Art Festival” (Kisarazu / Sanmu, Chiba, 2024), “8th Yokohama Triennale “Wild Grass: Our Lives”” (Yokohama, 2024), “Yatsugatake Art Ecology 2023” (Yamanashi, 2023), “BAYSIDE STAND” (BLOCK HOUSE, Tokyo, 2023), “Oku-Noto Triennale 2023” (Suzu, Ishikawa, 2023), “rode work ver. under city” (CCBT Art Incubation Program) (Empty Site next to Meguro Observation Well, 2023), “Roppongi Crossing 2022: Coming & Going” (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022), “Reborn-Art Festival” (Ishinomaki, Miyagi, 2022, 2019, 2017), “RIPPLE ACROSS THE WATER 2021” (WATARI-UM, The Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, 2021), “Out of Blueprints by Serpentine Galleries” (NOWNESS, London, 2020).