Mori Art Museum celebrates its 20th anniversary with the exhibition “World Classroom”

In 2023, Mori Art Museum is celebrating its 20th anniversary, presenting the exhibition “WORLD CLASSROOM: Contemporary Art through School Subjects” from April 19 to September 24.

Source: Mori Art Museum · Image: The main entrance to the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo. Photo by Matt Lucht, license  Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Since the 1990s, when the development of contemporary art began to be considered from multiple perspectives in different parts of the world, we have been seeing that contemporary art today goes far beyond the framework of arts and crafts and fine art in the school classroom. It is a composite field with connections to all subjects, including language and literature, arithmetic, science, and social studies. In each of these disciplines, researchers are exploring the “unknowns” of the world, delving into history, and making new discoveries and inventions from the past to the future in order to enrich our perception of the world. The stance adopted by contemporary artists that seeks to go beyond our preconceptions in a creative way is also connected to this exploration of these unknowns. In this sense, the contemporary art museum is something akin to a “classroom of the world” where we can encounter and learn about these unknown worlds.

World Classroom: Contemporary Art through School Subjects, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Mori Art Museum, is an attempt for the Mori Art Museum to encounter a world we have never seen or known from a wide variety of perspectives, using the subjects we learn at school as a gateway to contemporary art. Even though this exhibition is divided into sections such as “Language and Literature,” “Social Studies,” “Philosophy,” “Arithmetic,” “Science,” “Music,” and “P. E.,” each work, in fact, crosses over multiple subjects and domains. While over half the exhibited works will be drawn from the Mori Art Museum Collection for the first time ever, there will also be newly-commissioned artworks for this exhibition – altogether creating a “classroom of the world,” place of learning with works by some 50 artists/artist groups.

Among the artists represented in the exhibition are Ai Weiwei, Joseph Beuys, Susan Hiller and Shilpa Gupta, among others.