21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa

A sensation that feels strangely familiar despite being encountered for the first time. The experience commonly referred to as déjà vu emerges suddenly in the midst of everyday life. Although déjà vu is often attributed to the brain’s information-processing or cognitive systems, the triggers and circumstances that evoke memories of the past are diverse, and its full mechanism remains unresolved even in contemporary science. The paradox of “feeling as though we know something we should not know” destabilizes the assumptions we take for granted, such as the reliability of memory and the continuity of the self.
This exhibition takes déjà vu as a point of departure to introduce a selection of works from the collection of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, spanning painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation. Responding to situations and themes ranging from personal memory to societal transformation, the artists explore the complex structures of perception that move back and forth between the individual and the collective, memory and documentation, lived experience and virtual experience. Across the works, viewers may encounter diverse approaches such as the interweaving of reality and fiction, the repetition of motifs and gestures, or dialogues with pre-existing images.
In recent years, our daily lives have been saturated not only with an overwhelming volume of information, but also with images, texts, and sounds generated from existing material through technologies such as AI—phenomena that increasingly influence the very mechanisms by which we experience familiarity and recognition. Déjà vu may no longer be limited to an inexplicable phenomenon that occurs within the individual psyche, but is becoming embedded in the fabric of our cultural environment. By drawing attention to the contradictions and discomfort that lie beneath déjà vu, this exhibition proposes a key for expanding our awareness outward: bridging consciousness and memory across cultural, regional, and linguistic boundaries, and inviting resonance among different people, objects, places, and times.