Tyuki Imamura
Tyuki Imamura works at the intersection of art, urban planning, writing and curatorial projects.
He received his B.A. in Philosophy and Art History from Bard College, New York, and MSc in Sustainable Urban Development (with distinction) from the University of Oxford. He was also a research student of Professor Yoshitaka Mori in the Global Arts program at Tokyo University of the Arts.
His research interests lie in the theorisation of the relationship between place and human practices. Having worked for several years as a member of a community arts project in the 2011 Japanese tsunami affected area, Imamura became deeply concerned with the question of lived space, phantom of place, hauntology, space of affect, and the role of human expression in their formation. His research at Bard College focused on urban memory and the idea of fluid changes in perception with reference to contemporary Asian video artists, postmodernist phenomenology, Wittgenstein’s aesthetics, and Kyoto-school Zen philosophy, for which he received Heinrich Blücher Prize and John Bard Scholars Prize. Imamura proceeded to study Sustainable Urban Development at Oxford, where he explored the aforementioned fields of interest from interdisciplinary, social scientific perspectives in reference to ongoing urban discourse on sustainability. His dissertation was on the critique of the Japanese government’s treatment of culture in people’s everyday activities in the reconstruction attempts from the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami, with which he received a distinction.
He employs curatorial practice as a means of research and expression to unveil latent potentialities in our daily life and to invigorate community driven, grassroots actions in society. Over the years he has worked for curatorial projects between Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, including his work as researcher for the Artistic Director at Yokohama Triennale 2020 Raqs Media Collective and curatorial assistant at documenta fifteen with ruangrupa.
Supervisor: Anthony Gardner, Sho Konishi
