TOKYO.- Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025—Docs: Images and Records will be held mainly at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2025 over 15 days. Founded in 2009, the annual Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions is a comprehensive international festival of moving images and art taking place in Ebisu, Tokyo that combines exhibitions, screenings, live performances, and talk sessions.

This edition of the festival will focus on transformations in media and, by examining a wide range of works through the lens of images and words, will pursue a reconsideration of documents and the concept of documentary.

This year’s theme Docs: Images and Records

A document is a record of fact-based information, traditionally in the form of words but more recently also as images such as photographs and moving images. The word “documentary,” meanwhile, has come to be used not only as an adjective meaning “factual” or “consisting of documents,” but also as a noun referring to a film expressing facts.

The Lumière brothers’ Exiting the Factory (1895), which is a record of people leaving a factory, is widely recognized as the starting point of the history of motion pictures. People at the time were astonished to see scenes from their everyday lives being recorded and replayed before their eyes as if the events were actually happening right there. Today, 130 years after the invention of moving images, it is entirely unexceptional for people to record and share their daily lives through photographs and videos. Meanwhile, the definition of a photograph has been expanded to include digital images and that of moving images now encompasses digital video; in digital form, these media can be manipulated more freely than before, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous relationship between facts and the images that represent them.

TOP 30th anniversary: Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2025—Docs: Images and Records will extend across all floors of the museum. The program will include exhibitions of works by Japanese and international artists related to performance and the body in forms including moving images, photography, and documents, new works by the finalists of the second edition of the Commission Project, and works from the Tokyo Museum Collection, as well as screenings, performances, live events, talk sessions, and workshops. As such, the program will survey issues of words and images by presenting diverse forms of expression from the nineteenth century to the present and through a focus on archives and the recording of time.

Artists

Exhibition: Julia Margaret Cameron*, Tony Cokes, Priyageetha Dia, EISHO*, Masaki Fujihata*, Taku Furukawa*, Yuki Hayashi, Ito Tari, Liu Yu, Saito Eri, Hiroshi Sugimoto*, William Henry Fox Talbot*, Toshiya Tsunoda, Kawita Vatanajyankur, Andy Warhol*, Apichatpong Weerasethakul
*Tokyo Museum Collection