SIDE CORE Living road, Living space

The art collective SIDE CORE has been developing projects across Japan while maintaining its base of activities in Tokyo. Underlying their practice is the realization that “urban cities depend on other areas and regions in every aspect of life,” something that they have realized especially in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake. SIDE CORE has redefined street culture not merely in terms of “artistic expression in urban public spaces,” but as “the street,” a notion which mediates between different places and values. In other words, they are attempting to redefine street culture beyond the streets of the city, as an artistic movement based on chain reactions of movement and culture, connecting local areas and regions to each other. This exhibition focuses on such modes of artistic expression that connect different places to each other, as seen from the lens of roads and movement. In addition to exhibiting works based on the themes of the roads and movement, the exhibition physically facilitates “another road” within the museum, through free spaces that take over sections of the ticketed Exhibition Zone during the exhibition. In addition, SIDE CORE invites guest artists, who through expressions of street culture like skateboarding, graffiti, and music events, invent daily practices that elude institutional frameworks and connect with global communities. By turning the museum into a place where a diversity of values and ways of life intersect―a truly “living space”―, this is a proposition for new possibilities for artistic expression in a museum context.