T3 Photo Festival Tokyo 2023

Tokyo, October 2023

For the T3 Photo Festival Tokyo 2023, I was invited to curate three exhibitions by artists from outside Japan whose practice of—and with—photography illustrate three radically different ways of engaging with the medium today.

Lilly Lulay

The German artist Lilly Lulay presented work from two series, Mindscapes (2007–) a series of layered collages of still images that create reimagined composite landscapes. Presented in a space that is open onto the surrounding area, Lulay’s Mindscapes were placed in dialogue with the Tokyo cityscape. Lulay’s video pieces New York (2020) and Istanbul (2015), two loops made up of a constantly evolving layering of still images from multiple different sources and time periods, reflect the complex layering of fragments, both visual and imagined, contemporary and historical, that constitute every cityscape. As part of the T3 residency programme, Lulay produced a video piece on Tokyo which was first presented at Paris Photo 2025.

David Horvitz

Change the Name of the Days, the work presented by the Los Angeles-based artist David Horvitz, does not include any photographs. Instead, it is made up of a series of bilingual (English-Japanese) posters displaying “lessons” drawn from a long-form poem developed in collaboration with his five-year-old daughter, at a time when the world was confined indoors due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Spread throughout the Tokyo Midtown Yaesu building and in neighboring streets, Horvitz’s posters act like prompts, invitations or interrogations to passersby.

Elsa & Johanna

For their first exhibition in Japan, the French duo Elsa & Johanna showed work from their series Beyond the Shadows made in 2018–2019 in Calgary, Canada. Somewhere between Edward Hopper’s emblematic scenes of modern Americana and David Lynch’s unsettling atmospheres, Beyond the Shadows brings to life a series of characters cast adrift in the anonymity of modern life, whose trajectories seem to constantly intersect without ever colliding.

You can see a video overview of the full festival programme below.