All Living Things are
Breathing Now
Forthcoming
All Living Things are Breathing Now is the first solo exhibition in the British Isles by Japanese artist duo Kyunchome, Nabuchi (b. 1984, Mito) and Honma Eri (b. 1987, Yokohama). Curated by Keith Whittle the focus of the exhibition is a new series of work by Kyunchome that highlights the seas and it’s coastal ecosystems as dynamic ecotones and contact zones where humans and multiple species interact with intertidal rhythms.
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Publication Essay
Daisuke Ida
Publication essay by Keith Whittle for the National Arts Centre Tokyo exhibition, For Whom the Bell Tolls? by Japanese artist Daisuke Ida that delves into and explores perceptions of reality, physicality, changes in perspective, and our understanding of the world – historic, personal, economic, and technologically, reflecting on a global reality, in the post-coronavirus world and surveillance society.
Publication date 2025
Recent
Further her first UK solo exhibition at White Rainbow curated by Keith Whittle, artist Mari Katayama talks about her work recently acquired by and on display at Tate Modern. Katayama uses her body and the materials she finds around her to make self-portraits, embroidered objects and living sculptures.
Please click here to view or click here to read about her White Rainbow exhibition.
Talks
Keith Whittle
The first in a series of five talks, Keith Whittle gave a keynote on the concept of Bienalisation and related developments in the art world. These developments include the rise of global curatorial discourse, the diminishing boundaries between art and non-art categories, and the increasing prominence of contemporary art from non-Western countries such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Fram Kitagawa
Fram Kitagawa, the director of the Echigo-Tsumari Triennale, is a visionary art producer and curator who discussed the groundbreaking festival that has become central to the unique social art movement in Japan over the past 20 years. The Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, one of the largest art festivals in the world, is held once every three years in the expansive rural area of Satoyama, located in the Niigata Prefecture.
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Leah Gordon
In 2023, the Atis Rezistans | Ghetto Biennale exhibition at Documenta Fifteen was awarded the Exhibition of the Year by AICA Germany. Leah Gordon, an artist, curator, writer, and co-founder of the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti, discussed the biennale, which was originally designed to highlight issues of social, racial, class, and geographical immobility.
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Shubigi Rao
Shubigi Rao discussed her diverse artistic practice and her experiences as the curator of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which ran from December 2022 to April 2023. Her work encompasses various disciplines, including archaeology, neuroscience, libraries, archives, histories, literature, violence, ecology, and natural history.
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Lewis Biggs
Former Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the Liverpool Biennial, Lewis Biggs, discussed how the Liverpool Biennial emerged as a latecomer among the growing number of international biennials that began to proliferate in the late 1980s. He outlined the challenges faced by earlier biennials and described the creation of a model that holds significant importance for the city, its citizens, its artistic community, and the international art scene.
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Watch
Mari Katayama
White Rainbow and Japan Foundation presented an artist talk by Mari Katayama, to coincide with her solo show Broken Heart curated by Keith Whittle at White Rainbow Gallery, London. Katayama discussed her artistic process, touching on how her physical difficulty has informed her work and influenced her body image. The talk was followed by a conversation with Simon Baker, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.
Please click here to view.
Archive
Publication Essay
Essay by Keith Whittle for Division of Labour, a solo exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by Satoru Aoyama (b. 1973). The focus of the exhibition was a new series of work: ‘Map of the World (Dedicated to unknown embroiderers)’ (2012-). The works reference the Afghan craftswomen who assisted in the making of Alighiero Boetti’s ‘Mappa’ series (1971-1989).
Please click here to read the essay or click here to read about his White Rainbow exhibition.
Exhibitions
Shapeshifter, the first UK solo exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by acclaimed performance and video artist Chikako Yamashiro (b.1976, Okinawa, Japan).
Yamashiro, winner of the Asian Art Award 2017, dramatises the lesser-known aspects of Okinawa’s contemporary reality, while questioning dominant historical accounts of Japanese and American occupation of the islands.
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/7673f292ed0a1d094f0f6b6fdf86d70d/Chim-Pom.05.jpg)
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/2620e6b60e25f8548e3096972dd2d345/Chim-Pom.04.jpg)
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/4de224ea3bc12e9494b8fbb6f9f41e77/Chim-Pom.02.jpg)
![Chim↑Pom, Archival installation from '道 [Street]' (2017), installation view at White Rainbow, London, UK, 2018 © Chim↑Pom, Image: Damian Griffiths](http://keithwhittle.org/wp-content/uploads/slider/cache/561cff7844e2b304be71941b384d7d59/Chim-Pom.06.png)
Why Open? – a solo exhibition at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by the renowned artist collective Chim↑Pom (formed 2005, Tokyo, Japan).
Comprising Ryuta Ushiro, Yasutaka Hayashi, Ellie, Masataka Okada, Motomu Inaoka, and Toshinori Mizuno, Chim↑Pom’s work includes interventions through performance, video, painting, installation, curating and organising events. Sharp social critique underpins the group’s work, and the collective is unafraid to cause controversy in the service of their message. As Christopher Y. Lew, Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum, New York, has stated: ‘the group negotiates a difficult line – they do not make the direct assertions of activists but rather offer an ambiguous voice that is both complicit and critical.
Please click here to read more.
My eyes are not in the centre, an expansive installation at White Rainbow, Fitzrovia, London by Taro Izumi. The artist’s first UK solo exhibition.
Comprised entirely of new work, Izumi’s exhibition constructs a complex web of interactions mediated through technology, evoking digital and new media’s dissociative effects on the senses. How does perceptible reality change when first hand experience is outsourced to a lens?
Talk
Keith Whittle
One Place After Another: What can periodical International Contemporary Art Projects share?
This talk at The Japan Foundation, London, Keith Whittle examined the rise of large-scale international recurrent exhibitions of contemporary art around the world. The talk and subsequent discussion focused on the factors that influence recurring international exhibitions, particularly in Japan. It explored key themes from several periodic exhibitions, using specific examples drawn from field research conducted as a Fellow at The Japan Foundation. Following the presentation, a panel discussion was held to further examine issues related to these projects. The panel included Keith Whittle, along with two internationally recognised curators: Yuko Hasegawa, who has curated several major exhibitions in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates, and Lewis Biggs, known for his work in Aichi, Japan. Also participating was Koki Tanaka, the representative artist for the Japan Pavilion at the 55th International Art Exhibition in the Venice Biennale, and Mark Rappolt, Editor of Art Review.
Residencies
Mata Ne, (See you Soon), a solo exhibition of video and mixed media at Fujiya Gallery, Beppu Japan by British Indian artist Sutapa Biswas (b. 1962, Shantiniketan, West Bengal,). The artist’s first presentation at a Japanese gallery.
Produced during a two-month residency in Japan, Mata Ne, (See you Soon), is inspired by the oral histories of women of Oita, Japan, who recount important moments in their lives. A method of recovering neglected histories, through a methodology exploring autobiographical practice centred on the subjectivity of the narrator. Oral histories focused on women’s experiences that demand revision of the historical.
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Yuko Mohri
Broadcast Media: A History of Machine Translation is an exhibition by Yuko Mohri (b. 1980, Tokyo).
The artist’s first residency and solo exhibition in the UK, produced and curated by Keith Whittle, culminated in Bairdcast Media: A History of Machine Translation. This exhibition explored the early history of broadcast media in the United Kingdom, with a particular focus on the work of John Logie Baird, the pioneering inventor of early television. It highlighted his invention, the “Televisor,” a semi-mechanical analogue television system that utilised a patented mechanical scanning method.
This project led to subsequent collaborations with Mohri, including a residency at the Victoria and Albert Museum and a solo exhibition in 2017 at White Rainbow Gallery in London.
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Commission
Phil Lynott Rocks is a work by Sonia Boyce (b. 1962) a British Afro-Caribbean artist and educator, living and working in London. She is a Professor of Black Art and Design at the University of the Arts London.
Boyce’s work explores art as a social practice and the critical and contextual debates that arise from this area of study. Boyce has been closely collaborating with other artists since 1990 with a focus on collaborative work, frequently involving improvisation and unplanned performative actions on the part of her collaborators.
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Conversations
Jonathan Watkins
Jonathan Watkins, former Director, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, United Kingdom interviewed by Keith Whittle.
Please click here to listen to an audio sample, or here to read a transcript of the interview.
Mami Kataoka
Mami Kataoka, Director of Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan interviewed by Keith Whittle.
Please click here to listen to an audio sample, or here to read a transcript of the interview.