Collection Exhibition 3: Déjà vu｜21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Collection Exhibition 3: Déjà vu

2026.1.31 (Sat.) - 2026.5.10 (Sun.)

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Information

Period:

2026.1.31 (Sat.) - 2026.5.10 (Sun.)

Venue:

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Gallery 1-6

Admission:

Adults: ¥450 (¥360)
University students: ¥310 (¥240)
Students: Free
65 and over: ¥360
*Fees in parentheses are for groups of 20 people or more and web tickets

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Closed:

Mondays (except February 23, May 4), February 24, May 7

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A sensation of familiarity in the face of a new experience, as if it had already been lived through. Commonly known as déjà vu, such sensations suddenly emerge in the fleeting moments of everyday life. While often attributed to the information processing or cognitive systems of the brain, the triggers and circumstances that give rise to this sort of an out-of-place sense of familiarity are diverse, which means that even contemporary science finds its mechanisms elusive. The paradoxical recognition of the new as familiar destabilizes what we take for granted, calling into question the reliability of memory and the continuity of the self.
This exhibition takes déjà vu as its point of departure to present a selection of works from the collection of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Responding to a wide range of phenomena and themes, from personal memory to social transformation, artists have explored complex modes of perception that oscillate between the individual and the collective, memory and record, lived experience and virtual experience. A diverse range of approaches can be observed among this selection of artworks, including the interweaving of reality and fiction, the repetition of motifs and gestures, or dialogues with pre-existing imagery.
In recent years, our daily lives have been saturated not only with an overwhelming influx of information, but also with images, texts, and sounds generated from existing material through technologies such as AI. These processes exert an increasing influence on the very mechanisms by which we experience familiarity and recognition. Déjà vu may no longer refer solely to an inexplicable phenomenon that occurs within the individual psyche: it is becoming embedded in the fabric of our cultural environment.
The act of becoming attuned to the contradictions and dissonances that lie beneath the phenomenon of déjà vu may serve as a key to extending our sense of self and memory beyond the individual — outwards across cultural, regional, and linguistic boundaries — and producing resonances across different people, objects, places, and temporalities.

Related Programs

Curator-Led Gallery Tour

Dates: 2.14(Sat) *Japanese / 3.21(Sat)* English / 4.12(Sun) *English / 5.9 (Sat) *Japanese
Time: 14:00-14:45 (all sessions)
Venue: Galleries 1-6, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa
Meeting location: Behind the ticketing counter
Admission: Free (exhibition ticket required for entry) No reservation needed.

Exhibiting artists
(in alphabetical order)

Francis ALŸS
HOMMA Takashi
Runa ISLAM
IZUMI Taro
MARUYAMA Naofumi
Vik MUNIZ
OKUMURA Hiroyuki
Sputniko!

Exhibition Structure

Francis ALŸS, The Consequence of Ignorance, 1997
© Francis Alÿs
photo: Taku Saiki

Gallery1
Between Familiarity and Instability

Exhibiting artist: Francis ALŸS

This gallery presents paintings by Francis Alÿs, which are part of a series entitled “Déjà Vu.” Painted on intimately scaled canvases, while these works appear to depict sections of landscapes or fragments of larger narratives, they remain elusive, reminiscent of dream imagery or inner visions that elude clear understanding. The human and animal figures that inhabit these scenes are likewise caught in gestures that escape fixed interpretations, suspended as they are in moments of ambiguity.
While these images might speak directly to the viewer’s personal memories and the realm of the unconscious, their recurring motifs and suggestive titles also evoke broader social and political dynamics pertaining to borders and conflicts, migration and displacement, and forms of forced separation.
The uncanny feeling of having seen or experienced what is being encountered for the first time points not only to the complex nature of individual memory, but also to memories that are shared collectively. In this series by Alÿs, familiarity coexists with a sense of unease, while meaning remains perpetually unstable, evoking a sense of perception as something that transcends the domain of the self, quietly connecting the viewer to larger events as well as the lived experiences of others.
Runa ISLAM, Scale (1/16 inch= 1 foot), 2003
© Runa ISLAM
photo: Gerry Johansson　
courtesy: White Cube

Gallery2
Where the Real Turns Around

Exhibiting artist: Runa ISLAM

In Runa Islam’s video installation Scale (1/16 inch = 1 foot), the techne and aesthetics of cinema — so often absorbed unconsciously — are referenced and reconstructed, materializing as a spatial environment composed of two projections each on a different scale. The work is set in a multi-level car park that formerly stood in Gateshead in Northeast England at the time of filming, a site also known as one of the locations for the British film Get Carter (1971, dir. Mike Hodges.)
The lexicon of suspense cinema, in the form of the actors’ gazes and gestures, camerawork, the switching between scenes, the lighting, and music, initially produces the sensation of rewatching fragments from a familiar film. Gradually, however, the boundaries between the actual structure and its constructed set, between architecture and scale model, begin to blur, intercut at an accelerated pace and propelled by a driving soundtrack. With screens positioned in one in front of the other, the audience becomes lost in a world in which the known and the unknown become perpetually entangled with each other.
MARUYAMA Naofumi, color of river, 2003
© MARUYAMA Naofumi
photo: SAIKI Taku

Gallery3
The Seepage of Memory

Exhibiting artist: MARUYAMA Naofumi

Naofumi Maruyama’s color of river is painted using the technique of staining, in which paint seeps directly into the canvas. A method the artist has pursued over many years, staining causes the painted image to blur and dissipate at the very moment of its making. As a result, the surface bears not only the artist’s intention and gesture, but also the inherent properties and agency of the materials themselves, coexisting alongside each other as visible traces. In this work, the fluidity of the river’s surface and its horizontal expanse are rendered in an ethereal manner through the spreading of water-based acrylic paint.
The pair of canvases feature a similar composition, inverted vertically, and appear at first glance to be mirror images. Closer inspection, however, reveals differences in how the paint bleeds. The brushwork of each also becomes apparent, producing an ambiguity as to which is the real image and which is its virtual counterpart. The way in which discernible, figurative motifs dissolve into an abstraction that lends breadth to the landscape produces a kind of reciprocal perception in which experience and memory act upon one another.
Sputniko!, Tech Bro Debates Humanity #2
- Data Control, AI, Populism,
and the Future of Democracy, 2024
© Sputniko!

Exhibition Zone Corridors
Generated Futures

Exhibiting artist: Sputniko!

In the “Tech Bro Debates Humanity” series by Sputniko!, two men appear on a monitor, engaged in discussions on themes such as labor and democracy — concepts that shape contemporary value systems and visions of our future society. The term “Tech Bro” referenced in the title is a colloquial expression that gained currency in the 2010s to describe young men working in the technology sector, particularly in Silicon Valley. The figures who appear in this work are personas modeled on this stereotype, while the artist’s own appearance and voice are transformed into those of white male Tech Bros, with both images and speech generated using AI models.
Within the context of this work, the Tech Bro is given a highly specific profile: typically a white male in his twenties or early thirties, an engineer at a technology company or a startup founder, deeply invested in fields of technology, often inclined to overestimate his own expertise, to value high income and social status, and to revere the figure of the successful entrepreneur. In an era where technology permeates nearly every aspect of daily life, the fact that systems and infrastructures affecting vast numbers of people worldwide are shaped by the decisions of a narrow industry or a subset of society constitutes an urgent concern.
At the same time, the work underscores the fact that AI-generated images, texts, and audio are never neutral: they are produced from specific source materials and conditions. The question of what these systems reproduce within society and which existing structures of power and influence they reflect lurks beneath this familiar and apparently intelligible surface of déjà vu and presumed knowledge.
Exhibition view of Taro Izumi, << Pan >>,
Palais de Tokyo (03.02 - 08.05.2017).
Exhibition supported by SAM Art Projects. Photo by Aurélien Mole.
©︎IZUMI Taro, courtesy of Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois,
Paris, and Take Ninagawa, Tokyo.

Gallery4
Suspended Cognition

Exhibiting artist: IZUMI Taro

Taro Izumi’s “Tickled in a dream… maybe?” series comprises an installation of video and sculpture. In the video, a magazine photograph capturing an athlete in a fleeting moment is placed next to footage of a person sitting still atop a sculpture in order to mimic the athlete’s posture. Standing in front of this video is the same sculpture seen inside it, now left vacant.
The three works in this exhibition draw on photographs of soccer players captured in acrobatic poses. Even images that capture such implausible, almost unreal moments tend to be absorbed without resistance when repeatedly circulated through the media; in this series, however, their strangeness is thrown into relief through juxtaposition with videos that attempt to reenact the depicted figures. The sculpture, which appears in a doubled form both within the video and as a physical object, is adapted from existing furniture, modified in collaboration with a furniture maker to accommodate the postures depicted in the photograph.
If this photograph of the dynamic athlete occupies a suspended state that is neither entirely real nor fictional, its reenactment might then be understood as a process by which a body captured within a media image reverts to a living, physical body. By exposing subtle displacements and incongruities within what is ordinarily taken for granted, Izumi attempts to probe the conditions of complex perception through humor and friction.
OKUMURA Hiroyuki, Historias (Stories), 1999
@ OKUMURA Hiroyuki
photo: SAIKI Taku

Gallery5
Chains of Memory

Exhibiting artist: OKUMURA Hiroyuki

Hiroyuki Okumura studied sculpture at Kanazawa College of Art before moving to Mexico in 1989. He currently lives and works between Xalapa, Mexico, and Kanazawa. Xalapa is rich in stone sculptures from ancient Mesoamerican civilizations, and the influence of the weathered ruins from these cultures can be discerned throughout Okumura’s practice. In ancient societies, the act of carving and shaping stone functioned as a form of communal expression. Okumura extends this lineage through public sculptures in Veracruz and large-scale outdoor works for the Oku-Noto Triennale, consistently examining the relationships between the individual, the community, and the sculpted form.
Working with abstract motifs, Okumura carves Mexican stone and meticulously reassembles its fragments, imbuing the works as a whole with surfaces that appear to have been naturally eroded by time. Historias (Stories) evokes civilizational narratives that seem to reside at the margins of collective memory: each cube suggests layered communities and the repetition of human activity across generations. At the same time, the stacked cubes, pierced by countless apertures, can be read as a sign that transcends specific regional cultures. The act of tracing the marks of stone carving as one might follow brushstrokes make the continuity of time and the chaining of memory itself palpable to the viewer. In Trayectoria (Trajectory) and Ollin (Movement), a sense of geometric clarity and a vital, animate energy emerge from solid masses of stone, producing a kind of visual rhythm.
Vik MUNIZ, Picture of Air, Viewing from Berlin, Germany Longitude: 13°19'59” Latitude: 52°31'00” 11/09/1989 6:57 PM (Local) Gaze: Az: 93°7.126' Alt: 90°0.000', 2001
©︎ Vik MUNIZ

Gallery6
Seeing, Believing

Exhibiting artist: Vik MUNIZ, HOMMA Takashi

In Vik Muniz’s “Pictures of Air" series, large-scale photographs depict an expanse of countless luminous points of light. These images do not capture actual landscapes. Instead, they visualize the positions of celestial bodies that would have been visible where pivotal moments in world history unfolded, such as the first human landing on the Moon, or the fall of the Berlin Wall, calculated using software developed by NASA. The star charts themselves are constructed through a distinctive process in which air is blown into a layer of transparent hair gel. Muniz is widely known for recreating a wide range of images, from press photographs to canonical works from art history, using all kinds of familiar materials from chocolate to garbage, which he then photographs.
The stars that unfold in these large-scale photographs evoke a bodily sensation of being enveloped by the night sky. At the same time, precise information regarding these star charts is inscribed at the bottom, including the name of the place, its coordinates, and the date the photograph was taken, quietly asserting the fact that these images have been objectively constructed on the basis of historical records. The photographic surface confers equal value onto both the humble material of hair gel and the distant light of stars billions of light years away. Here, multiple layers of perception — material substance, inscribed data, and memories of historical events evoked by those records — are compressed into a single pictorial plane.
Takashi Homma’s Tokyo and My Daughter is composed of photographs that trace a young girl’s growth, juxtaposed with images of Tokyo’s urban landscapes. Scenes of domestic interiors and how the girl gazes at the photographer hint at the presence of a family member behind the camera, lending the series the appearance of excerpts from a family album. The title further invites the assumption that the work documents the artist’s own daughter. In fact, however, the relationship between the photographer and the girl differs from what the title implies: the series juxtaposes photographs taken by Homma himself with those taken by the subject’s family members and acquaintances.
Photographs that record the growth of a child typically function as traces of time and space shared only within a limited circle of people, most often the family. In this work, however, the artist’s intervention — accomplished through processes of selection, re-photographing, and recontextualization — detaches each image from its original framework and turns it into a kind of interchangeable fragment. The ease with which viewers believe they have grasped reality through the interpretation of visible images is itself one of the distinguishing characteristics of photography. Through a deceptively simple yet profoundly resonant strategy, Homma lays bare the fundamental conditions of “seeing” itself.