After some 25 years working in museums, including the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, curator Hiromi Kurosawa launched No Centre, a multidisciplinary project that moves from place to place. For its launch program, No Centre held the Japanese premiere of Moving Picture (946-3) Reich/Richter, a work combining moving images and music by Gerhard Richter and Steve Reich, at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo on November 6 and 7, 2026. Building on the legacy of the Sogetsu Art Center of the 1960s, No Centre plans to work without a dedicated permanent location, developing a fluid program that responds to the cultural context of each place. Artist and director Akira Takayama founded the theater group Port B in 2002 and established Port Urban Research Center in 2013. He has put audience members’ movements at the center of his work, extending the boundaries of theater into the city. Working outside the institutions of museums and theaters, the two discussed where they stand today and envisioned the future of No Centre at Taka Ishii Gallery.

　　　Moving Beyond Museums and Theaters as Institutions

Q　The No Centre statement asks, “Isn’t the creation of art rooted in experiences of space and time far more varied than museums and theaters alone can offer?” It also says, “Art institutions have created centers and peripheries through unified, hierarchical narratives.” Kurosawa-san, after some 25 years working in museums, how did you come up with the idea for No Centre?

 Hiromi Kurosawa　Museums, where I spent much of my career, have a very clear purpose, and everything they do becomes part of their history. But you can’t keep everything, so someone has to choose, and some things get left behind. Things that are hard to classify get labeled, and gradually the genres and categories become clearer. And lately I’ve found it stifling. The urge to preserve things has gotten so strong that it almost feels like works are being made just to be preserved. I’m a museum lover, so I’m not dismissing what they do. I think museums are really important. They preserve things as part of humanity’s intellectual heritage, giving us a way to think about the past, present, and future, and to ask, “Where have we come from, and where are we going?” But I don’t think that puts preservation above every other kind of value. I think all kinds of other things and relationships are taking shape beyond that. Or maybe I wanted to be part of that wider world myself.

Q　Kurosawa-san, you’ve described Takayama-san’s work as a kind of forerunner to No Centre. It seems to me that one feature of his work is that he travels to a place and makes the work come together there. Are you hoping to bring that kind of movement into No Centre as a platform for art?

HK　Takayama-san does make stage productions, of course, but far more of his work takes place outside theaters. To me, what he does is what No Centre is all about.

Q　Takayama-san, what led you to take your work outside the theater?

Akira Takayama　At first, I think I really wanted to work in a theater. I worked hard and eventually got to the point where I could put on a decent production. But when you’re working in an established theater, you find that it’s almost always the same people who come. I didn’t feel like I was really meeting anyone new. They had time to spare, good taste, and they understood what we were doing. Back then, we used Nishi-Sugamo Arts Factory in Sugamo as our rehearsal space. Just a short walk away was Sugamo Jizo-dori Shopping Street, which runs along the old Nakasendo route that used to link Tokyo and Kyoto, and farther along was Sarutahiko Shrine. I started thinking, why do we keep rehearsing indoors when we have all this just a short walk away? And then I thought about all the people who’d traveled the Nakasendo since the Edo period (1603–1868). One day, it suddenly came to me: why not make a piece of theater with the road as the main character?

At first, I couldn’t get much of a feel for the place just by walking through it. So I started walking the 500 meters or so from Togenuki Jizo (Koganji Temple) to Sarutahiko Shrine over and over, with a binaural microphone attached to my ears to record three-dimensional sound. I wondered what would happen if I walked it 500 times. I made 500 recordings and spent my days listening to them again and again. I have no idea what possessed me. But then I thought, if I could edit the recordings just right, maybe I could make a kind of “map” that would let other people experience the sounds and atmosphere of the city the way I had. Maybe I could recreate the road. Eventually, I staged a performance where audience members wore earphones and walked the same route. And then, on the final day, a monkey appeared! There was even a news story about a wild monkey turning up in Sugamo (laughs). Sarutahiko Shrine is dedicated to a god who guides travelers on the road, and monkeys are his messengers. So when one actually showed up, I took it as a sign I was meant to do this. From then on, I took my work outdoors.

Q　What kind of response did you get from the audience?

AT　The response was really good. For one thing, a lot of people I’d never met came, including people from the shopping street. The head of the shopping street association came, along with other senior members I’d gone to introduce myself to. It made me think that if you can find an interesting way to look at a city, you don’t need actors. The audience can rediscover the city on their own. That’s how I felt at the time.

HK　I just really like Takayama-san. Even more than his work, it’s the way he lives that I love. If you look back at the history of what we call contemporary art, there have been all kinds of artists and ways of making art, and they’ve changed with the times. What always impresses me about Takayama-san’s work is how directly it connects with reality. There’s a certain distance between you and a painting hanging on a museum wall. It rarely intrudes on your everyday life. But with Takayama-san’s work, art and reality meet, and the boundaries between them start to disappear. I’m always struck by how well the work stands up to that. Without the protection of a theater or museum, there’s no separation from everyday life. His work feels closely connected to ordinary things like brushing your teeth, getting a good night’s sleep, going to school or the hospital, or playing games with friends. In a way, that’s my ideal. It’s not that you’re handed something, “Here you are,” and you say “Thank you.” Just being there makes something happen.

AT　All sorts of things happen. When you walk down a street, you experience it through your own senses, right? There’s a market right nearby, with fresh vegetables for sale, a fishmonger, and a shop selling Hokkaido specialties. At first, you can’t get enough of it, but after you’ve walked the same stretch 20 or 30 times, you start to get bored. But that’s actually when it can get interesting. Someone walking the same route over and over carrying a microphone is bound to look strange, so people start talking to you. Once I told them I was recording, they’d call out things like “Hokkaido in Sugamo!” as I passed. And then you’d know: Hokkaido specialty shop on your right, greengrocer on your left. Little clues started popping up all along the route. Just by walking, I was drawing everyone around me into it. So I recorded about 500 takes, pieced together the best parts, and ended up with a three-dimensional sound map.

　　　Walking with a Ghost

AT　At the time, it struck me that when audience members retraced my steps, it was almost like I’d become a ghost, possessing them and walking alongside them. Later, when I created another walking tour in Vienna, this really sharp older man asked me a question at a press conference. “Do you realize how violent what you’re doing is? You’re trying to control people’s movements and gestures through a doppelganger of yourself.” I thought, that’s a pretty astute thing to say. The man was Josef Szeiler, a director you read about in every theater textbook, and at the time I couldn’t answer him. It’s like I’m passing on my own sense of physical movement to someone else, and that shifts their everyday experience just a little. But it’s still so close to ordinary life. I kept thinking afterward about what to make of the violence involved in creating that small, strange shift. Now I think it’s okay. If anything, without a certain degree of violence, the shift wouldn’t happen. Something just a little different slips into your everyday way of seeing things, like a ghost possessing you, and the world starts to look different too. It’s not the same as being moved by a wonderful work of art or a great stage performance. For a moment, something familiar seems unfamiliar. I think what interests me more is the surprise and sense of wonder that come with seeing things a little differently. We think we’re in touch with reality, but we’re not really.

HK　Takayama-san, your work doesn’t really unfold in a straight line. It seems to spiral outward, growing as it goes. It’s not like following a script straight through from beginning to end. When I’m inside one of your works, I can feel myself moving up one level at a time, as if passing into a different phase. My own reality comes along with me, and by the end, I can’t quite see things the same way anymore.

AT　What does that feel like?

HK　Take McDonald’s Radio University, for example, where McDonald’s customers listen to radio talks by refugees and migrants. You listen to a talk from beginning to end, either recorded or broadcast live. But as you listen, I think little openings start to appear, something like the shifts you were talking about. You find yourself drawn into one, and then you discover another, and another. So instead of feeling like you’re just sitting there listening on your own, you feel as though you’re experiencing all these different times and places.

AT　I’m glad to hear you say that.

HK　And you can’t predict how it will affect you afterward. When you listen to a refugee’s story, it’s more than just taking in information, or even accepting what that person has been through. Something else happens right there, in that moment.

AT　If you’re not really in touch with your own senses, you can miss things like that. There was a time when the traditional theater setup, with a stage and an audience, worked really well. And I think it still does in some ways. But these days, there are things you just can’t experience in a theater like that. So we have to get out and move around to find things we don’t even know what to call yet.

　　　How Audiences Think

AT　Kurosawa-san, when we spoke before, you said, “Call me ambitious, but I’d like to collect works like McDonald’s Radio University.” I was really happy to hear that. Most of the time, people seem pretty suspicious of what I’m doing.

HK　Well, “ambitious” was just a figure of speech (laughs). Say a mother’s playing the piano at home and her child starts singing along, making up a song on the spot. That’s not the sort of thing that would normally be considered art. But does that make it meaningless? I don’t think so. For the people involved, it might be a really important moment, something they’ll always remember. Now imagine putting that same scene onstage. You bring in a piano, cast a mother and child, have the mother play, and give the child a line like “Mom, can I sing?” And then we go out of our way to watch it. Maybe the idea is to take an ordinary moment like that and turn it into something that says something about human nature. But lately I’ve been wondering, can a scene like that really tell us what people are like? I think audiences have changed too. Maybe that sort of thing just feels a bit predictable now. At least for me, I’m not sure I see much reason to go out of my way to watch it anymore. Theater is still being made as though it’s the artists who survey the times and lead the way. But those of us in the audience, with AI and everything else going on, have been updating the way we see and understand things, too. And I really notice how much we’ve changed when I go to the theater or look at art.

AT　What really interests me is how people experience things. Sometimes I think, maybe we don’t need to make anything at all. If we can just fully experience the world as it is, isn’t that enough? So I keep thinking about how we can become more open to what’s around us. What if I made that process part of the work? Even if there was nothing else there, just changing how the audience experiences things might be enough to make the world look different.

Q　Takayama-san, could you tell us about your recent project in Berlin?

AT　Berliner Festspiele is one of the top national cultural institutions dating back to the days of West Germany, and it’s the most firmly established institution I’ve ever worked with. Its director asked me how we could bring it to the former East. I thought, that’s interesting, let’s give it a try. The Berlin Wall is gone now, but the city has a circular railway called the Ringbahn, a bit like the Yamanote Line in Tokyo. And if anything, I felt it had become a new kind of wall. Roughly speaking, the area inside the circle is liberal and cosmopolitan, while outside there are more conservative Germans as well as many immigrants. So rather than taking the festival from the former West to the former East, I thought, why not move it onto the Ringbahn? It has 27 stations, and I thought we could turn each one into a little theater. Together, they’d form a network that would become one big theater for Berliner Festspiele. As for what went in them, Berlin has lots of what I call ghost projects, plans that were never realized. I chose 27 that seemed worth pursuing now, put one at each station, and created a Ringbahn tour with 27 guides.

HK　What kinds of ghost projects were they?

AT　Some of them were art projects. For example, Gordon Matta-Clark, who was known for cutting holes in buildings, had a plan to blow up the Berlin Wall. (laughs) But a friend told him he’d get killed if he tried, so he dropped it.

HK　(Laughs)

AT　These were projects that had tried to make an opening but never managed to. So how could we make them happen here in Berlin, now or in the future? One idea I proposed involved a row of apartment buildings beside the tracks next to Innsbrucker Platz station. They’re about 25 meters tall and stretch for about 200 meters, making a kind of wall that separates the inside of the Ringbahn from the outside. I suggested building a 30-meter observation tower on each side of the buildings. If people climbed both towers at the same time, they could look across at each other. And I thought, wouldn’t that be a way of making a hole in the wall? Kind of a childish idea, really. At the end, we asked people, “If you could carry out one of these projects in Berlin today, which would you choose?” and held a vote. So we introduced these ghost projects as possibilities for the future and used them to get people thinking about Berlin again. That has only just finished.

HK　Is it difficult to get socially engaged projects like that off the ground in Japan?

AT　In the past 15 years or so, I’ve had exactly one invitation from a theater in Japan. Thankfully, I get more invitations from the art world, but I really want to work with theaters. That one time, a theater in Yokohama invited me to do a project and gave me a free hand. And that was it. I was out! (laughs) It was a hip-hop project.

HK　(Smiles wryly)

AT　People seem wary of anything they don’t understand.

HK　Things seem to have been turned upside down, don’t they? Theaters and museums used to be seen as exactly the places where you could do the kinds of things Gordon Matta-Clark did. Now they seem so conservative that there’s no room for experimentation. I went to an exhibition just last week, and everything was so neat and orderly, with nothing to disturb anyone. I found myself wondering who would go out of their way to see it. Things really have been turned on their head.

Q　Do you see No Centre as a way of making space for that kind of experimentation?

HK　These days, it seems like everything has to be called a “project,” and then it gets talked up as something grand and judged almost immediately. But how can you tell so quickly whether something’s meaningful or valuable? I suppose I’m poking fun a little at how proper everything has become (laughs). With No Centre, I’d rather just try all sorts of things without making such a big deal of them. We don’t even know yet whether they’ll be worthwhile, or any good, so why act as though we’re making some definitive statement? I wish people would just say, “Let’s give it a try and see what happens.” That’s what I’d like No Centre to be about. Not putting on big, spectacular projects, but starting with informal conversations with artists, exchanging ideas and figuring things out together. Takayama-san walks the same route 500 times, day after day, to see what he can discover. Well, we should be willing to walk those 500 times with him, finding common ground as we go. I’d like us to share those experiences, think about them, talk them through, and enjoy trying to make sense of what happened together.

AT　I’d love it if people could share that sense of fun with me. The trouble is, once institutions get involved, everything gets managed to death. I always think, why can’t they just work alongside us? Surely things would work out if they did. And even if they didn’t, so what? Why not just give it a try, like going for a walk? After Berlin, I went to Indonesia, where we made something together even though we’d only had one meeting a month earlier. Their ideas kept changing, and mine did too. We just went with it until something came together, and then we said, “Okay, let’s do this.” We even changed the performance date and time just a few days beforehand, and the venue changed too. It was a real eye-opener for me, seeing how well things could work with that kind of flexibility. When you’re working on projects in Germany, it’s easy to forget that.

HK　I used to think that, whatever the concerns, if people really wanted to go somewhere or try something, that desire would win out over institutional restrictions (smiles wryly). But these days, everything seems to be about management. Self-management, anger management, you name it. Sometimes it feels like we even approach art as something to be managed. I wish we could be a bit more relaxed about things. Like that project about The Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido note1 , the old post towns between Edo and Kyoto, for example.

AT　I really want to do that. In fact, I went back and read through it all again just the day before yesterday. The main route from Kyoto to Tokyo is the Tokaido, but there’s also the Nakasendo, which goes from Kyoto past Lake Biwa, through Gifu, Nagano, and Saitama, and on to Tokyo. I find Utagawa Kuniyoshi’s The Sixty-nine Stations of the Kisokaido note2 fascinating. There’s something about the energy of those pictures. It almost feels as though the influence of Western modernity was starting to creep in. And most of the pictures are basically puns! You’ve got all these stories from Japanese classics, like the Kojiki, The Tale of the Heike, The Tales of Ise, and the Otogi-zoshi, and they’re linked to place names like Magome, one of the post towns, through wordplay. Sometimes the actual scenery around the post town is tucked away in a little corner, while a dramatic kabuki pose takes up most of the picture. So I’d love to turn the Nakasendo into a road full of stories. It’s fun when you get to a post town, but the stretches in between are just ordinary road going on and on, and they can get pretty boring. So I thought, what if you could listen to the stories Kuniyoshi depicted as you walked? A lot of them were adapted for kabuki in Edo. You’d be following a road where you can still experience traces of the Edo period, discovering all these wonderful stories along the way. And if the Nankai Trough earthquake strikes, like they’re saying, travel along the Tokaido will probably be disrupted for a while. So if you’ve already walked the Nakasendo with the idea that it could be an alternative route, you start to know it almost instinctively. It’s not quite like an animal trail, but the route becomes something your body remembers. So maybe we could even think of the project as a way of creating an evacuation route.

HK　That’s great. Maybe if we walked it together, we could travel through time and space. It sounds like fun. I’d love for you to create a new work for No Centre.

AT　It would also be interesting to travel on foot along the mountain roads described in
Before the Dawn, Toson Shimazaki’s novel about the early days of modern Japan.

　　　Traveling in the Opposite Direction

HK　With a few exceptions, modern Japanese art isn’t really in fashion in the art world these days. But I think artists have done so much rich and varied work, from the modern period right up to today. And these days, you hardly get a chance to learn about it unless you visit a museum’s permanent collection display.

AT　It’s the same with theater. The Tsukiji Little Theatre helped modernize Japanese theater, and the year before last was 100 years since its founding. But nobody seems to be talking about it.

HK　I’m not sure we could go all the way back to the beginning of the modern period, but I’d at least like to take a closer look at more recent history, including postwar Japanese art, through lectures and things like that. When I was thinking about No Centre, I kept coming back to the Sogetsu Art Center. It was so important historically, but you hardly hear about it these days. Everything was really casual, almost like a salon, and yet you had people like John Cage, Yoko Ono, and Toru Takemitsu taking part. And I love the idea of Hiroshi Teshigahara, who ran the center, just saying to his friends and acquaintances, “Why don’t we do something together at our place (Sogetsu)?”

AT　I see. Actually, I was in Indonesia recently partly for a theater festival called Terap Festival. But I was also working on another project, the School Excursion Project. Kyoto University of the Arts had asked me to put together an art study trip for students, so I started thinking about where to take them. For the first trip, I thought of the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar meet. Thailand has largely moved away from opium production and is now making tourism and art central to its national policy. Cross the Mekong River into Laos, and you find a special economic zone developed with Chinese investment. You’ve got huge casinos and hotels, and a new Chinatown nearby, but behind all that you’ve got scam operations and human trafficking. And when you enter Myanmar, you’re under military rule. But around Zomia, in the highlands, anarchists have come in from all over, and things are pretty chaotic. It’s a fascinating place where you can’t simply take art for granted. For the second trip, I chose Bandung in Indonesia. There’s an elite university there, the Bandung Institute of Technology, where the approach to education was originally modeled on the Bauhaus. It’s produced a lot of curators and artists who’ve been heavily influenced by Western modernism. Meanwhile, collectives developed in Jakarta and Yogyakarta partly in reaction against that tradition. And in Bandung, you find people from these different backgrounds all mixed together, and I thought the students really ought to see that. For the third trip, I’m thinking of India, with Tenshin Okakura (known as Kakuzo Okakura) as the focus. Now, going back to the first trip, to the Golden Triangle, we will be visiting a temple that hosts Chiang Mai Social Installation, a public art project focused on making art with locally available materials. Montien Boonma, the Thai artist who led that project, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. So he too went through the West before returning home. And Tenshin Okakura did something similar. He was one of the people who helped establish Japan’s modern art institutions, but he was also a Pan-Asianist who believed that “Asia is one.” He traveled to India several times, looking for the roots of that idea. Tokyo University of the Arts takes students to Kyoto and Nara on a “Kobiken Trip” (Ancient Art Research Trip). But I thought it would be interesting to go the other way, tracing the influences on Japanese art back to India, and see for ourselves what Tenshin Okakura saw in Bodh Gaya, where the Buddha attained enlightenment. On a study trip to Kyoto and Nara, you hear things like, “This Buddhist statue shows Indian influences,” or “This building shows traces of influences that came through China and Korea.” But what if you went the other way, from Japan to India? I think that could open up a whole different way of thinking. I want students to understand how art became modernized and institutionalized, and then decide for themselves whether they want to work within those institutions or outside them. And I want them to reconsider Pan-Asianism critically, not just in theory but through their own experiences. That’s what I’m planning to do with these three trips.

HK　Those kinds of changes and encounters with other cultures used to unfold much more slowly, didn’t they? And I think that gave people time to think things over, be changed by the experience, and form new relationships along the way. But now everything seems to appear and disappear in a flash, no matter where you go. Maybe a school trip somewhere far away would give students a chance to take their time, rather than feeling they have to come up with answers right away.

AT　Yeah, because I think taking the long way round matters. So much so that I almost think it’s the only way.

HK　You mentioned Thailand earlier, but take Korea and Japan, for example. They went through modernization at different times, and it took different amounts of time in each country. When it all happens so quickly, I wonder if people tend to accept what they’ve seen and heard as the only version of events. These days, people all over the world can get hold of all sorts of things and absorb them without taking nearly as much time. So I suppose the course of history isn’t the same as it was in earlier eras.

AT　And everything happens at an unbelievable speed.

HK　Things that once took hundreds of years to reach us from overseas, you can now get by tomorrow on the internet.

　　　When Things Shift

AT　No Centre doesn’t have a space of its own, and neither do I, really. But do you have a base of operations, so to speak?

HK　Not at the moment.

AT　That’s great. I’ve always liked the idea of working with other people, too. But rather than bringing everything together into one, I find myself more interested in taking things apart.

HK　Going forward, I’d like No Centre to see what we can do with people working at NPOs (nonprofit organizations) around the country, or with people who have spaces of their own. We don’t have to organize absolutely everything ourselves.

Q　Kurosawa-san, why did you choose the performance of Moving Picture (946-3) by Gerhard Richter and Steve Reich for the No Centre’s launch at Sogetsu Hall in Tokyo on November 6 and 7, 2026?

HK　We worked out the program as a team of four: Martin Germann, Fumihiko Sumitomo, me, and the gallerist Takayuki Ishii. We took the program Hans Ulrich Obrist had put together as our starting point and talked about which performers and pieces of music would work best in Japan. There are several versions of this program. When I saw it in New York, there was a choir. The audience stood in a space with no seats, and the singers moved around them as they sang. Depending on where you were standing, you might hear these rich harmonies, or just a single voice. The choir kept moving around the audience, watching where people were standing, so the sound kept shifting, almost like waves. There was room for chance. And the audience was woven right into the work. I think it’s amazing that an artist could come up with something like that. It reminds me of what you were saying earlier, Takayama-san. People might say you’re taking control of other people’s bodies, almost as though you were possessing them. But the people experiencing the work aren’t empty vessels, either. They bring something of their own, and that means all sorts of things can change right there in the moment.

AT　Things start to shift.

HK　Exactly. And something happens as a result. It’s not like the audience is just having something forced on them. They’re constantly reacting to what’s going on.

AT　And it becomes something completely different for each person. So I think my answer to Josef Szeiler’s question would be, “Yes, and that’s fine.” The first step might be violent. But after that, the audience can take it in a different direction, make it their own, or even walk away. I guess it comes down to trusting what the audience can do. It’s like walking a loop. You end up right back where you started, but somehow you feel as though you’ve arrived somewhere completely different. I think that happens quite often in my work, and it’s certainly not something I’ve planned or designed. It’s what each person brings to the experience that opens up a different world for them.

HK　Yes, I think so too.

Q　What programs do you have coming up?

HK　Right now, we’re reaching out to around 10 artists, including you, Takayama-san, and the three of us curators are each seeing what we might be able to do together. And Takayama-san, how about putting out a book, too?

AT　That’s a great idea.

HK　At No Centre, I want to rethink what it means to archive things. Things survive because someone makes a conscious decision about what to keep and is determined to preserve it. I want us to bring that same determination to what we do.

Q　Kurosawa-san, there’s something you said during a conversation on the online talk series RAM Channel, that’s really stayed with me: “Takayama’s work is incredible, but the market might not recognize its value yet, because it’s a market where everything is bought and sold. But I’m convinced that one day, things you can’t put a price on will matter more. I think our whole idea of what’s valuable might eventually be turned upside down. Or maybe it’s only when we’re dying that we realize what really matters. Our love for things that can’t be replaced, things we can’t bear to let go of, grows deeper every day. That’s why I want to invest in those things now, before their value is widely recognized.”

HK　I suppose, in the end, it’s about how we spend the time we’ve got, because we’re all going to die someday. One reason art fascinates me is that there’s so much I don’t understand. Another is that somehow, being around artists makes me believe in a kind of value that has nothing to do with whether something costs about $10 or $1 million. It makes me feel like I’m spending my time on something that no amount of mass-produced stuff could replace, not even 300 Tesla cars. Artists do such extreme and bizarre things that I can’t look away. And I want to share their work because I hope it might open up a crack somewhere, a glimpse of something different. I’ll ask artists about their work and think, “Oh, I get it.” I might even go off and write about it. But the truth is, I’m still left wondering. Why did they paint that particular picture? What exactly is it? I just don’t see things the way they do, and I’d never come up with an image like that myself. And that’s what makes it so exciting. It’s the same when I listen to you, Takayama-san. I keep wondering, “What makes you think of things like that?” But when I hear what you have in mind, I can’t help wanting to join in. And all the while, I’m still wondering what makes you think the way you do.

Note

No Centre is an interdisciplinary, itinerant project that develops artistic practices and cultural programmes in Japan and elsewhere in the world. In each location we engage with the histories, materials, and cultural conditions particular to that place, treating them both as subjects of artistic work and as the conditions that allow such work to come into being. The programmes we plan and realise are wide-ranging and not bound by genre.

Our work attends to the communities that surround it, to the social and economic forces acting within them, and to the materials and ecologies that exist beyond human activity. Taking these as the ground of creation, we explore how new forms of knowledge and value might emerge from the relation between art and its environment.

Point of Departure

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Might the making of art, and the encounters it occasions, be rooted not only in museums and theatres but in a far wider range of spatial and temporal experience? No Centre continues a lineage that had no need for the divisions of genre — the lineage of the Sogetsu Art Center, where from the late 1950s through the 1970s music, film, visual art, and performance met in a single place.

Without a Centre

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Artistic institutions have produced centres and peripheries through integrative, vertical narratives. No Centre moves horizontally across places, genres, and cultures, and works through programmes that remain fluid and adaptable.

Circuits That Run Both Ways

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For those who take part through membership, we design circuits along which interests travel in both directions: inviting artists and sending them out, co-producing work, and making documentation public. Beyond the presentation of completed works, we share the process of making through talks, open rehearsals, workshops, and the continuous release of documentation.

No Centre 1

Moving Picture (946-3) Reich/Richter

［Date］ November 6 (Fri) – 7 (Sat), 2026 [2 performances]  *Ended

［URL］ https://www.no-centre.art/

No Centre 2

Avec Le Balcon, Lecture & Performance

In January 2027, we will hold a preview of new works and performances that emerging artists at Tokyo University of the Arts have conceived and developed with Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire as a starting point.

Member-Exclusive Event

[Le Balcon × Dai Matsuoka] Croisements: Lecture & Performance

［Date］ January 11 (Mon, National Holiday), 2027, 2:00 p.m.

［Venue］ The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts (12-8 Ueno Park, Taito-ku, Tokyo)

［Speakers / Performers］ Gaspard Kiejman (Le Balcon), Alphonse Cemin (Le Balcon), Dai Matsuoka, and others

［Organized by］ No Centre, Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts

［Registration］ Details and booking via the Membership page.

Related Program: Avec Le Balcon Preview Performance

Over approximately six months, emerging artists working in different fields such as music, movement, moving image, and the visual arts have taken part in workshops and developed work together under the guidance of members of the French musical ensemble Le Balcon and Dai Matsuoka, a dancer with the butoh company Sankai Juku. They will share the results of their collaboration at a preview performance scheduled for Sunday, January 10, 2027, at the Ueno Campus of Tokyo University of the Arts. The event is part of Avec Le Balcon, a development program for emerging artists run by the Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts.

［Date］ January 10 (Sun), 2027, 5:00–7:00 p.m. (schedule subject to change)

［Venue］ Ueno Campus, Tokyo University of the Arts

［Admission］ Free

［Organized by］ Graduate School of Global Arts, Tokyo University of the Arts

［Sponsored by］ No Centre

［Supported by］ Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan, Subsidy for the Promotion of Culture and the Arts (Performing Arts General Support Project – Artist Training Program); Japan Arts Council

［URL］ https://alb.geidai.ac.jp/

［Contact］ alb@ml.geidai.ac.jp

No Centre 3

Cinema: Leonor Teles / Paul Verhoeven

［Curated by］ Takashi Sawa

［Organized by］ No Centre

［In cooperation with］ Embassy of Portugal in Japan; Camões Portuguese Cultural Centre; Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Japan

［Venue］ TBA

［Date］ Scheduled for April 2027

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Further details of the program will be announced on the No Centre website.

［About Membership］ https://www.no-centre.art/membership/

［Follow Us / Instagram］ @no_centre.art

Hiromi Kurosawa

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After graduating from Boston University (USA), Hiromi Kurosawa worked at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito (Mito) and the Sogetsu Art Museum (Tokyo). In 2003 she joined the preparatory office for the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, where she worked on the building and on planning and installing its commissioned works. Since the museum’s inaugural exhibition in 2004, she has curated exhibitions of many contemporary artists working in Japan and internationally, including Olafur Eliasson, Fiona Tan, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, and Mark Manders. She has also selected works for the museum collection and developed education and outreach programs for a wide range of audiences, including partnerships with schools. She served as chief curator of City_net Asia 2011 (Seoul, South Korea), OpenArt 2017 (Örebro, Sweden), and Culture City of East Asia 2018 Kanazawa. Since April 2025 she has been Chief Art Officer (CAO) of HERALBONY Co., Ltd. and Director of Rabbit Hole (Okayama), Ishikawa Cultural Promotion Foundation.

Akira Takayama

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Takayama formed the theater company Port B, and since then has been producing installations, touring performances and social experiments utilizing urban spaces as a way of engaging with cities and societies across the world. In recent years, collaboration with those from other fields including visual art, tourism, literature, architecture, and urban research has seen the scope of his practice broadening further, and he has applied his theatrical philosophy and methodology to opening up new possibilities in a variety of fields. Major works include the Wagner Project (Yokohama, Oita, Frankfurt), McDonald’s Radio University (Frankfurt, Berlin, Tokyo, Kanazawa, Hong Kong), Heterotopia (Tokyo, Athens, Taipei etc.), Compartment City – Vienna (Vienna), Referendum Project (Tokyo, Fukushima, Vienna etc.), and The Complete Manual of Evacuation (Tokyo, Frankfurt). He has participated in major exhibitions, such as Yokohama Triennale (2014), Maison Hermès (2015, Tokyo), Roppongi Crossing (2016, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo), Sharjah Biennial (2017), Biennale of Sydney (2018) and WAGNER PROJECT (2022, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa).

Photo: MOROKOSHI
Editor: Kyoko Nitta
Translation: Christopher Stephens