Hiroshima’s Dogs in a Room Exhibit is Daringly Confrontational

The typical curator strives to create harmony amongst their artworks – they take a space, manipulate the artistry within it, and premeditate a navigable and digestible experience for the patron.

In discordance with this traditional form of curation is the itinerant group exhibit Dogs in a Room, whose inaugural show opened this past week in Onomichi, Hiroshima at Komyoji-kaikan. This group show, featuring nine artists, is an examination of the boundaries between art, its creators, the space in which it lives, and the people who witness it. It confronts those borders with assertion, finding their vulnerabilities through denial of their traditional existences, and excavating the latent discomfort that comes along with breaching them.

The exhibition is communal, interactive, chaotic, disharmonious, and challenging; it is feral and urban, lacking supervision. The space consists of creations made from abandoned furniture and construction materials, mobile works analogous to malicious, Orwellian creatures, deliberately reminiscent of the wild dogs that prowl the Onomichi countryside; the artists, then, have been invited (as the viewer will do) to interact with these constructions, posing their artworks amidst such disorienting spatial set-ups.

The show precipitates its visitors’ interactivity. By design, there is no passive witness to this unorthodox and highly engaging experience.

Dogs in a Room is the first show in the ONLY CONNECT exhibition series, which will be taking place in cities around the world over the course of the next five years. ONLY CONNECT is an Onomichi- based art project seeking to explore the theme of connection and its relationship to space and place. Each show in the exhibition series will seek to explore, in its own way, the varying displays of multiculturalism possible when the intrusive spatial aspect of a “display” of art is involved; each show will react, culturally and artistically, uniquely.

Yutaka Inagawa