Aichi Triennale is pleased to announce the theme for its sixth edition, A Time Between Ashes and Roses, on view from September 13, 2025 to November30, 2025. The 2025 festival and curatorial theme is organized by Artistic Director Hoor Al Qasimi and reflects upon fluctuating states and connections that exist between ecological environments, human activity and the narratives and theories that unite them. The title is borrowed from modernist poet Adonis, who wrote “How can withered trees blossom? / A time between ashes and roses is coming / When everything shall be extinguished / When everything shall begin again” following the destruction of the Six-Day War in 1967. Al Qasimi’s curatorial vision will bring together multiple regions throughout Aichi prefecture, guiding visual arts,
performances, and learning programs presented throughout the festival. In addition to Aichi Arts Center in Nagoya, the 2025 iteration includes special collaborations with Seto City and Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, which will highlight the continued presence of Japanese craft alongside international and modern-day ceramic projects. Transcending time, location, genre and artistic medium, the 2025 triennale will possess an aesthetic and theoretical charge to illuminate the creative prospects between apocalypse and blossoming, human and environment.
“Our hope for the 2025 Aichi Triennale is to create spaces for dialogue around our shared planet that move with urgency and a commitment to new horizons of ecological and interpersonal relation,” said Hoor Al Qasimi, Artistic Director. “Achieving a balance of
perspectives from internationally-based and Japanese artists as well as collectives, the works on view will propose alternative futures that decenter human modes of extraction and illuminate the complex relationships between Earth and its inhabitants.
Al Qasimi is joined by a curatorial team ranging from visual to performing arts, offering expertise in local traditions of Aichi and beyond. Iida Shihoko, Head of Curatorial leads the curatorial team across disciplines, supported by: Curator, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum Irizawa Masaaki, Curator (Contemporary Art); performing arts producer Nakamura Akane, Curator (Performing Arts); architect Tsuji Takuma, Curator (Learning); Associate Professor, Akita Public Art University Ishikura Toshiaki serving as a Curatorial Advisor; and Curator, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Cho Sunhye, also as a Curatorial Advisor. The 2025 Aichi Triennale will include cutting-edge contemporary art through exhibitions in several venues across the prefecture, including the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art, and through digital platforms, performances and dance from across the globe presented at Aichi Arts Center, and learning opportunities catered to diverse audiences. Collaboration sits at the heart of the festival, welcoming art universities and other community organizations throughout Aichi to participate in the breadth of programming. Additionally, projects from artists who will participate in the 2025 iteration of the Aichi Triennale will travel sites throughout the region in varying pop-up exhibitions.
The Artistic Director and curatorial team have selected a group of artists that approach the botanical world as a place of the unknown, unearthing new narratives and observing alternative perspectives along spectrums of the human-environmental pathway. Additionally, A Time Between Ashes and Roses will emphasise a futurity empowered by geologic time views, further questioning the boundary between human and environment with layered complexity. Artists invited include Adrián Villar Rojas (b. 1980, Rosario, Argentina) who embraces temporality as an aesthetic beyond brevity or duration; folding past, present, and future on themselves, Villar Rojas constructs large-scale and site-specific works that mourns a humanity at risk of—or already—disappearing from the hubris of our anthropogenic conditions. Ogawa Machiko (b. 1946, Tokyo, Japan) produces from a primordial knowledge inherent in the minerals that comprise clay. Having learned her craft in Paris and from indigenous practices in West Africa, Machiko embraces properties such as distortion and glaze crawling, creating utsuwa (vessels) that encompass the dichotomy of making and breaking. Dala Nasser (b. 1990, Beirut, Lebanon) encounters landscape through the slow violence of erosion (both environmental and political), reanalysing the colonial contours of landscape through indexical mark making by way of performance, painting and film. Finally, Oki Junko (b. 1963, Kanagawa, Japan) darns life into fabric collages that grow and fade between weathered materials and new purpose through the temporal landscapes embrace the uncertainty of chance with lyrical dread and bliss.
A Time Between Ashes and Roses enjoins a disparate world through a celebration of the puzzling connections that populate our world, and the 2025 Aichi Triennale bridges this distance by connecting audiences local and international through its provocative programming. The full list of artists will be announced at a later date alongside further details around programming and
educational initiatives.
Press release from Aichi Triennale
Image: Afra Al Dhaheri. Split Ends. 2020. Photography by Anna Shtraus. Image courtesy the Artist and Green Art Gallery, Dubai
