Purchase tickets, goods, books, learn more about the exhibitions and sightseeing in Kyoto, and purchase artworks from our new “KYOTOGRAPHIE Collector’s Gallery”.

Also see Image & Sound Installation: Made in Dublin
Eamonn Doyle、Niall Sweeney、David Donohoe、Kevin Barry at Hachikuan as part of the KYOTOPHONIE program.

Established in 2004, Birdhead—an artist duo made up Song Tao (b. 1979) and Ji Weiyu (b. 1980)—quickly gained renown for chronicling the urban transformation of their hometown, Shanghai, at a time when China's economy and society were opening to the world. In the two decades they have spent working together, Birdhead have continued to push the technical and narrative limits of photography to rhapsodise, celebrate and critique their surroundings.

This survey is in two parts. Birdhead’s first exhibition in Kyoto, plays on the distinct character of the two spaces which make up the Kondaya Genbei, the 280-year-old manufacturer of obi sashes where the display will be shown. The Chikuin-no-Ma foyer of the main atelier, which was built between the Meiji and Taisho-era, will show Birdhead’s more traditional works, including what they termed as a new “matrix” of 124 photographs made during their recent travels in Kyoto and Tokyo. There are also six recent works from their Bigger Photo series, in which carefully assembled photographic images are silkscreened directly onto wood and fixed using a special lacquer technique.

In the hybrid modern architecture of the Kurogura, Birdhead presents their irreverent idea of “Phototheism,” an imaginary religion devoted to the mystical power of photography. This denomination, and its credo, termed We Will Shoot You, underpins the collaged images, installations and video that are presented in the exhibition. Taken together, these works offer a comprehensive introduction to an artist duo who have made a unique contribution to photography and to contemporary art in China and globally.

The bedroom of James Mollison’s childhood memories is a small room in the attic of his family’s home in England which he decorated with things he liked as he was growing up–from Action Man figures, a Batman car, and Mumsie and Diddle-Dash, two mice for whom he built a multistorey play area from wooden fruit boxes. Then army posters, to pages from Smash Hits magazine featuring Duran Duran and Madonna, surfer posters, Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones, and finally, posters from the rave scene. His bedroom’s changing contents had reflected his identity and interests as they evolved through his childhood.
Years later, when asked to come up with an idea for engaging with children’s rights, Mollison found himself thinking about his bedroom: how significant it was during his childhood, and how it reflected what he had and who he was. That gave him the idea of looking at the bedrooms of children from all kinds of different circumstances as a way to investigate some of the complex situations and social issues affecting children today. He initially called the project ‘Bedrooms’, but soon realized that his own experience of having a ‘bedroom’ simply doesn’t apply to many children. Millions of families around the world sleep together in one room, and millions of children sleep in a space of convenience, rather than a place they can in any sense call their room. He came to appreciate just how privileged he was to have had a bedroom to sleep and grow up in. Mollison has now photographed children for Where Children Sleep in forty countries, across five continents. Presenting children who are born into very different situations but not responsible for them. The project is a vehicle for thinking about complex contemporary issues, such as poverty, wealth, climate change, gun violence, inequality, education, gender, and the refugee crisis.

This is the first exhibition in Japan dedicated to the collaboration between Brazilian artist and activist Claudia Andujar and the Yanomami people of Brazil.
The Yanomami are one of the largest indigenous groups in the Amazon, traditional inhabitants of a territory that stretches between Venezuela and Brazil.
Claudia Andujar was born in Switzerland in 1931 and grew up in Transylvania in a Jewish and Protestant family. A Holocaust survivor, Andujar emigrated to New York in 1946. Nine years later, she moved to São Paulo, where she began a prolific career as a photographer, with a special interest in vulnerable communities. In 1971, Andujar traveled to the Yanomami region in northern Brazil for the first time. The encounter would become a lifelong commitment, transforming her art into a tool for raising awareness and political activism on behalf of the Yanomami people.
One of the main spokespeople for the Yanomami is the shaman Davi Kopenawa (b. ca 1956), a survivor of the measles epidemic that decimated his community in 1967. Since the 1970s, Kopenawa has fought daily to defend his people from the greed and violence of non-indigenous society, sharing the wisdom of a society that lives in harmony with the fauna, flora and environment.
In recent decades, Andujar, Kopenawa and many other activists have joined forces in a daily struggle for the sovereignty of the Yanomami people, for the respect of their way of seeing the world and for the defense of their territory - whose rights were finally guaranteed with the demarcation approved in 1992.
In the first part of this exhibition, photographs taken by Andujar in the 1970s and 1980s, while she was trying to translate the Yanomami worldview for the non-indigenous world, are shown alongside Kopenawa's words, and with drawings and films made by Yanomami artists and shamans from yesterday and today. These works offer a multidimensional perspective of the Yanomami people of Brazil and an insight into the invisible dimension of their spiritual world.
In the second part of the exhibition, the audiovisual installation Yanomami Genocide: Death of Brazil (1989) denounces the threats suffered by the Yanomami people as a result of the advance of non-indigenous society over their territory, aggravated during the programs to occupy the Amazon promoted by the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985).
The problems faced by the Yanomami due to invasions and illegal activities in their territory, such as mining, logging or drug trafficking, go back a long way. These problems are shared with many other indigenous peoples in Brazil and abroad.
At a time when violence in the Amazon and the global climate crisis dominate the news, this exhibition also shows the contribution of art to expanding the knowledge and sovereignty of indigenous peoples around the world. More than an art exhibition, this project is a platform for the Yanomami people to continue to be seen and protected against constant and renewed threats.

Founder of Les Rencontres d’Arles, the first ˛international photography festival, Lucien Clergue (1934 – 2014) is a photographer known for his series of nudes in the sea, and for his close relationship with Spanish painter Pablo Picasso. He was the first ever photographer to be elected at the Institut de France-Académie des Beaux-Arts in 2006 for his art and his multiple contributions to culture. Arles, where he grew up and lived all his life, is an overwhelming heritage city built by the Romans as one of their decentralised capitals. Located in the South of France on wetlands, it has a peculiar light which attracted the painter Vincent Van Gogh, who produced some of his most famous paintings there. Arles is also home to many gypsy (Romani) families. Once a year in May, Roma from across Europe make a pilgrimage to the nearby village of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. This village is home to Saint Sarah, also known as Sara-la-Kâli, the patron saint of the Romani people.
Arles was the first resource for Clergue as a photographer in the 50s. This was shortly after World War II when many Roma were freed from internment camps, much later than any other group. Many made their way to Arles where Clergue forged a close relationship with the community given many were his neighbours in the famous Roquette district neighbourhood and along the nearby Rhône river where his mother had a grocery store.
Gypsy Tempo reveals the daily life of gypsy families; their nomadic lifestyle, the role of religion, and how music and dance is used to tell stories. Documentation of gipsies during this period is limited due to the discrimination they faced that continues on today. Clergue’s close ties to the community allowed him to be continually welcomed back over the decades.
During this time Clergue discovered, and then helped propel to fame, the gypsy guitar maestro Manitas de Plata and his friend Jose Reyes (who went on to found Gipsy Kings). Clergue himself was a trained violin player and held a deep appreciation for music. Manitas went on to become a major musician of the 60s and together with Clergue toured the world, including concerts in Japan.
Clergue took advantage of these trips to meet American west coast photographers including Ansel Adams andEdward Weston, considered the first stars of modern poetic and landscape photography. He invited them to show their work in Arles at the young festival he had just created in 1970 with his friend Jean-Maurice Rouquette. Adams and Weston’s presence was the real kick off point for the world’s first ever photography festival which later inspired KYOTOGRAPHIE and many others.
From Arles to New York Carnegie Hall, this is a rare look at some of Lucien Clergue’s best photographs.

Through the support of the KYOTOGRAPHIE and MEP partnership, now in its fourth year, Viviane Sassen holds her first major solo exhibition in Japan, a retrospective spanning thirty years.
PHOSPHOR, Art & Fashion (1990-2023) is the first major retrospective exhibition devoted to Dutch artist Viviane Sassen. The retrospective retraces thirty years of Sassen's creative work through over 200 works drawn from different series, archives, previously unseen works, and video installations. The exhibition explores Sassen's complex relationship with images that oscillate between quiet contemplation and visual exuberance, between surfaces and interiors, highlighting the inherent ambiguity of representation.
After studying fashion design, Viviane Sassen (b. 1972, lives and works in Amsterdam) studied photography at the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten (HKU) in Utrecht, Netherlands. Graduating in 1992, Sassen then devoted herself fully to photography, both as an artist and as a fashion photographer. From this dual trajectory she has developed a singular and eclectic visual oeuvre, distinguished by the unique use of colour, movement, framing, and approach to subjects.
Much like a research project, Viviane Sassen's work delves into her own obsessions, following a highly coherent conceptual practice. Death, sexuality, desire, and connection to others are all motifs that structure a body of work that combines photography with video, painting, and collage. Equally inspired by her personal history as a child growing up in Africa, along with literature, and the history of art—in particular the surrealist movement, with which the artist shares a taste for play, ambiguity, and mystery—Sassen's work has many different facets, which this exhibition hopes to reveal.

There is mystery in seeds. Observing them unfurls the story of living organisms, fostering a reconsideration and recon-nection with a natural world that predates humankind. Their story is both a micro- and macro-journey through time and space. The first flowering trees emerged around 140 million years ago. The climatic tumults of the Tertiary Period meant adaptation and the conquest of new land was imperative. Like small cosmic capsules packed with the energy need-ed to withstand the many trials awaiting them, seeds developed travel strategies, enticing birds through colours; don-ning wings, or waterproof skins to be swept along with the waves or the breeze; layering up with hooks to grip onto fur... Through millennia, their journey has spawned a wonderful planetary diversity of plant species.

From their wild origins to their domestication and commercialization, seeds have also shaped human civilization. Their cultivation prompted Neolithic tribes to become sedentary, reshaping societal norms and landscapes. They fascinated in the classical period as study subjects; became objects for barter and collection in the Middle Ages; and travelled along-side modern explorers. Seeds circulate at the whim of agricultural, scientific, aesthetic, and commercial desires alike. The energy that plants contain transcends borders, celebrating planetary diversity through their macro-scale journeys. They reveal our intricate connection with nature, blending politics, science, and knowledge.

This exhibition is part of a decade-long project initiated in 2009 in collaboration with Xavier Barral and the France-based publisher Atelier EXB. The artist has photographed over 500 seed species from all over the world, most of which from the collection of the Muséum National d’ Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Captured using a macroscopic ste-reo magnifier designed by Olympus, and chosen and lit with the utmost care, the images reveal unsuspected forms and beauty. For this exhibition, Thierry Ardouin has produced new portraits of seeds from local Kyoto farmers who preserve
their ancestral origins. From the dawn of agriculture to the questions raised by today’ s hybrid seeds, Seed Stories presents to us anew the struggle for life in an interminably diverse world, speaking as much of our origins as the world we imagine for tomorrow.

Born and raised in Osaka, Tetsuo Kashiwada spent three years of his life attending a high school famous for its baseball program deep in the mountains of Miyazaki Prefecture. Surrounded by na-ture and banned from using mobile phones, Kashiwada developed a close relationship with the natural world around him, an experience that shaped him to the person he is today. After launch-ing his career as a photographer at the age of 19, nature inevitably became one of the main sub-jects of his work.
In 2023 Kashiwada submitted a series made during his residency on Yakushima Island to the KYOTOGRAPHIE International Portfolio Review and won the Ruinart Japan Award. In the autumn of 2023 he travelled to Reims to begin a two-week-long artist residency at Ruinart Maison, the first established champagne house in France. Visiting the local vineyard, walking through Ruinart’s preserved forests, and talking to local wine growers, Kashiwada learned first-hand how climate change is already impacting the local biosphere and agriculture. He witnessed how even the tini-est temperature differences can have a drastic effect on the sugar content of grapes. As he reflect-ed on this reality while walking through the vineyard, Kashiwada was caught in a spider’s web. He sensed a connection between the sudden palpability of the almost imperceptible spider web and the processes of global warming and decided to base his residency artwork on this motif.
For his series, Pulling the Void, Kashiwada created his own spider webs, made of coloured thread woven through the leaves and branches of the vineyard. Through these ethereal shapes built into the air, he traces the complex relationship between human action and the surrounding world, with humankind both affecting and being affected by the invisible phenomenon of climate change. In Pulling The Void, Kashiwada once again explores the strength and fragility of life, the diversity and preciousness of nature, and the boundless yet finite nature of the human world.

When Yoriyas traveled around the world as a professional breakdancer and choreographer, he was often asked where he was from, and when he answered that he was from Casablanca, people immediately thought of the movie Casablanca, imagining camels, the desert, and an oriental atmosphere. Yoriyas felt a disconnect between his own Casablanca and the Casablanca that people envisioned, so he had to explain that Casablanca is in fact a city with a mix of tradition and modernity.

When a knee injury forced him to stop competing and practicing, he returned to Casablanca and began walking the streets of the city for rehabilitation, armed with a camera that he had used to remember the location of competition venues and hotels when he was touring the world.

Yoriyas shows us Casablanca from the inside, photographing the city “as if he were invisible.” As a Moroccan born, raised, and still living in Casablanca, he captures contrasting moments of East and West, tradition and modernity, community and individuality. His photographic expressions bring today’s
Casablanca into sharp focus.

He explains, “The camera frame is like a theater stage. The people in the frame are my dancers. By moving the camera, I am choreographing my subjects without even knowing it. When an interesting movement catches my eye, I press the shutter. My training has taught me to immediately understand space, movement, connection, and story. I photograph in the same way that I choreograph.”

The scenery and people of Casablanca, captured with the sensitivity of Yoriyas, convey to us the multifaceted nature of the city and the true value of its diversity. Yoriyas hopes that viewers will “not look at the photographs straight on, but lean and move around, as if they were dancing.”

Mahsa Amini, known as “Jina” by her Kurdish name, was a 22-year-old Iranian woman in September 2022. She dreamt of becoming a radio host and had just opened a clothing store in her hometown, Saqqez, in Kurdistan, western Iran. On September 13 of the same year, she was in Tehran, the Iranian capital, visiting with her family when she was arrested by the police for an appearance deemed “not Islamic enough.” On September 16, she died as a result of mistreatment she faced during her detention. Her death sparked the most powerful wave of protest in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran, established in 1979. On the day of her funeral, a simple block of concrete was placed on her grave with the phrase painted by her uncle: “Dear Jina, you donʼt die, your name becomes a symbol.” From then on, these words and their prophetic strength nourished Iranian society. The protest, initially led by young people who had not experienced either the revolution or the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988), now affects other age groups and almost all classes of society, women and men alike. Its goal is to “reclaim life,” away from the dictates of the authorities. It is written, read, and shouted in the slogan: “Woman, life, freedom!” The photos and videos of the protests published by citizens reached us through social networks. Indeed, Iranian authorities did not want to spread images of the movement through official information channels. Thanks to the newspaper Le Monde and two Iranian colleagues, Payam Elhami and Farzad Seifikaran, we authenticated the images published online. We know the date and location of their capture. For this exhibition, we also collected the work of Iranian photographers, still in Iran, sometimes anonymous. “You Donʼt Die” is an ode to the courage of Iranians and a manifesto that immortalizes an important episode in Iranian history, one that the authorities attempt to erase.

There is a fish tank in Jaisingh Nageswaran’s house. Whenever he happens to see the fish, he knows he is looking at himself. How does he know that he is a fish in a fishbowl? The fish can see that there is a world beyond the bowl. But every time he tries to touch that world, which lies beyond the one deemed appropriate for him to exist within, a wall appears. For him to leave the bowl alive, miracles have to happen. The caste system creates many such fishbowls. And the lower your caste, the smaller your bowl.

Jaisingh’s grandmother was born in 1928 in Usilampatti, a small village in Tamil Nadu, to a family of Dalit descent. Dalits occupy the lowest stratum of the Indian caste system, which dates back thousands of years. Known as ‘untouchables,’ people of Dalit descent face discrimination, exclusion, and violence. In Usilampatti, they wouldn’t let Jaisingh’s grandmother break her bowl. So she moved to Vadipatti, where she founded an elementary school that Dalits, who had no school, could attend. She was the Nageswaran family’s first miracle. Later, Jaisingh attended this school.

When Jaisingh decided to become a photographer, he thought the only way to leave his caste behind, to forget his Dalit-ness, would be to leave for the city. His father warned him that discrimination would follow him.

For a long time, Jaisingh thought he was the second miracle. He moved from one cosmopolitan city to another, photographed celebrities, and pursued a career in film.
But the more photographs he took, the more he realized that Dalits are practically non-existent in the visual consciousness of India. One day he suddenly fell ill, which wiped out his savings, and then COVID-19 forced him to return to his hometown.

Now, Jaisingh sees the beauty of the place where he grew up, and feels an intimacy that had eluded him his entire photographic career. He now knows that the two things he will lose last in this world are family and home. He says:

“My work is to call out the ongoing atrocities in the Dalit community. Every day I wake up to news of people from the Dalit community being hacked to death and witness various caste-related violence. I realize that a deeper story lies beneath the awareness that I have come to through my art. Until the caste system is eradicated, I will continue to feel like a fish in a fishbowl.”

In 1965, twenty years after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese photographer Kikuji Kawada published his debut series The Map, a highly metaphorical contemplation of Japan’s collective war memory. The work had a sensational impact on photography and defined the artist’s early style. Since then, Kawada has continued to stimulate our senses with his vivid, original, and foreboding images.

This exhibition brings together three of Kawada’s series: the aforementioned The Map, a highly symbolic work about Japan in the years immediately following the war; The Last Cosmology, which captures Japan between the end of the Showa period and the end of the millennium; and Los Caprichos, a series begun during the economic boom years and recently revived by the artist. While all three series have previously been presented separately, this is the first time they have been brought together in a single venue for an exhibition spanning sixty-five years of the artist’s work.
How does the time and world depicted by Kawada, the logic of which is a product of his highly personal perspective, synchronise with the world of the viewer?

The word ‘source,’ the theme of this year’s KYOTOGRAPHIE, in addition to referring to origins and causes, also has the meaning of obtaining something. Kawada, whose late style sourced an ‘invisible map,’ continues to capture the catharsis of an ever-changing modern world, using the medium of photography to freely move back and forth between time and place in pursuit of a comprehensive view of ‘this time, this place.

Rinko Kawauchi is a photographer who is highly acclaimed both in Japan and overseas for her delicate sensitivity that reveals the fragility and fundamental vitality that reside within the subjects of her works. For this exhibition, which takes the form of a dialogue between two photographers, Kawauchi has chosen to exhibit with Tokuko Ushioda. Kawauchi says of Ushioda, “I respect the fact that she has been active as a photographer since a time when it was difficult for women to advance in society, and that she is sincerely committed to engaging with the life that unfolds in front of her.” This exhibition brings together photographs taken by each of them of their families.

Kawauchi will present two series. Cui Cui, on the theme of the family cycle, is a collection of photos taken over a 13-year period that covers the death of her grandfather, with whom she had lived with since she was born and whom she photographed as a practice subject during her days as a student, and the birth of her nephew. as it is captures children and familiar scenes she encountered during the three years after she gave birth herself.

Ushioda began her career as a freelance photographer in 1975. Soon after the birth of their daughter Maho in 1978, she and her husband, photographer Shinzo Shimao, moved to a Western-style house (formerly the Theodora Ozaki residence) built in 1888 in Tokyo’s Gotokuji district. This exhibition includes My Husband, a series of photographs she took of her husband, daughter, and their lives in this Western-style home over the seven years following Maho’s birth, and ICE BOX, a series of photographs of refrigerators belonging to relatives, acquaintances, and friends, taken over a twenty-year period, that originated from fixed-point observation of her own refrigerator as a means of documenting her life.
Family, home, daily life, death and birth—the gaze of these two photographers, who carefully capture presences and activities that are familiar yet ever-changing, find their own light in small moments that lie hidden within our daily lives, transcending the ages.

Rinko Kawauchi is a photographer who is highly acclaimed both in Japan and overseas for her delicate sensitivity that reveals the fragility and fundamental vitality that reside within the subjects of her works. For this exhibition, which takes the form of a dialogue between two photographers, Kawauchi has chosen to exhibit with Tokuko Ushioda. Kawauchi says of Ushioda, “I respect the fact that she has been active as a photographer since a time when it was difficult for women to advance in society, and that she is sincerely committed to engaging with the life that unfolds in front of her.” This exhibition brings together photographs taken by each of them of their families.

Kawauchi will present two series. Cui Cui, on the theme of the family cycle, is a collection of photos taken over a 13-year period that covers the death of her grandfather, with whom she had lived with since she was born and whom she photographed as a practice subject during her days as a student, and the birth of her nephew. as it is captures children and familiar scenes she encountered during the three years after she gave birth herself.

Ushioda began her career as a freelance photographer in 1975. Soon after the birth of their daughter Maho in 1978, she and her husband, photographer Shinzo Shimao, moved to a Western-style house (formerly the Theodora Ozaki residence) built in 1888 in Tokyo’s Gotokuji district. This exhibition includes My Husband, a series of photographs she took of her husband, daughter, and their lives in this Western-style home over the seven years following Maho’s birth, and ICE BOX, a series of photographs of refrigerators belonging to relatives, acquaintances, and friends, taken over a twenty-year period, that originated from fixed-point observation of her own refrigerator as a means of documenting her life.
Family, home, daily life, death and birth—the gaze of these two photographers, who carefully capture presences and activities that are familiar yet ever-changing, find their own light in small moments that lie hidden within our daily lives, transcending the ages.

Every year since 2020, when the DELTA/KYOTOGRAPHIE Permanent Space first opened in Demachi Masugata Shopping Arcade, KYOTOGRAPHIE has invited a young African contemporary artist to be an artist-in-residence, directly connecting Kyoto's local shopping district with diverse Africa. In 2024, KYOTOGRAPHIE invited Moroccan photographer Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, known as Yoriyas.

Yoriyas spent a few weeks here in the Demachi Masugata shopping area in November 2023. This was his first visit to Japan, but he has deep ties to the country, having watched a lot of Japanese anime when he was a child, spent countless hours playing the character Yuri in the game The King of Fighters as a teenager, and collaborated with a dance group in Kansai as a breakdancer and choreographer. He says that his stay in Japan has been a time for him to reflect on his childhood and adolescence.

During his stay in Kyoto, Yoriyas, who doesn’t speak Japanese, communicates through body language, photographing people and scenery around the Kamogawa River, young people on the streets, and shoppers in Demachi Masugata Shopping Arcade. For Yoriyas, who used to express himself physically as a dancer, his encounters with maiko and geiko were especially interesting. He was drawn to way they move and carry themselves, and he photographed them while moving along with them, creating together a work of impromptu physical expression.

Yoriyas always uses his physicality when taking photographs, and in Kyoto he experimented with different angles while shooting. He says, “I hope that people looking at my photos will not just look at them straight on, but will move around and dance with them.”

The title ‘KIF KIF KYOTO’ means ‘Morocco and Kyoto are the same.’ Yoriyas feels that Japan and Morocco have much in common, and he captured with his camera similarities between Kyoto and Morocco in colors, living environment, family ties, cultural richness, and respect for traditional craftspersons. Photographs he took in Kyoto and Morocco will be displayed in pairs, bringing a new breeze into the shopping arcade.