about dislocate
dislocate is an ongoing art project primarily based in Tokyo, Japan. While taking a fluid form which continues to evolve with its context, its central concern has always been what may be termed the “ground beneath our feet”. Seeking to invest an invigorated awareness towards the spaces we directly inhabit and attempting to reassess our very sense of agency within these, dislocate proposes through various artistic interventions the creative potential invested in us on an individual and collective scale to construct the spaces and communities around us and challenge our assumed ways of seeing the world. It asserts the importance of questioning and freedom of expression in our daily enactments of civil society, and hopes to open up debate upon the role of so called democratic processes in the politics of the everyday.
First conceived around the relation of “art, technology and locality”, dislocate continues to hold these points as its axis while questioning their very meaning and interpreting them in an ever broadening sense in which art is an expression, technology is a technique and locality is the context in which we engage these.
Establishing a residence program in 2009 dislocate has since annually invited principally young artists from the surrounding Asian region to join in a 1-2 month program in which they actively engage with the surrounding community, sharing skills and ideas, building new relationships and collaborations which allow for insightful, often challenging dialogues to be formed, providing mutual inspiration to all involved.
dislocate is a space of both thinking and action, a space of affirmation and criticism, a space of commonality and difference, integration and collision. It is more than a simple art project, something other than “community engagement”, distinct from direct activism, it creates its own space in the hope that others will also be inspired to do so.