Hoor Al Qasimi’s Aichi Triennale Confronts Generative and Destructive Extremes

The Aichi Triennale, which opened last week, is a celebration of creativity’s power to reimagine, re-envision and, most importantly, reintroduce into circulation vital generative energies—even amid the destruction and despair that seem to define our time. At the helm is curator and cultural producer Hoor Al Qasimi, director of the Sharjah Biennial and artistic director of the upcoming Sydney Biennial. This edition of the Triennale brings together 62 artists across geographies, with a focus on an expanded notion of the Asian region that pairs artists from the Middle East with some of Japan’s most compelling voices.

The deliberately contained number of participants, whose work is spread across sites throughout Aichi Prefecture, ensures the presentation does not overwhelm, while the considerable budget (this year reportedly 1 billion Korean won, or about $6 million) has enabled more ambitious installations and productions, alongside a robust public program of performances, workshops and panels designed to engage audiences of every background.

While the Triennale as a whole addresses urgent global issues through a universal lens that questions the very terms of human and planetary coexistence, Al Qasimi, in her opening speech, did not hesitate to take a direct political position in relation to the times we are living in. “None of us will be free until we are all free. Free Palestine,” she said, explicitly framing the title in relation to the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. “A Time Between Ashes and Roses,” the Triennale’s title, draws on Syrian poet Adonis’s 1970 poem, where he wonders how trees can continue to blossom amid war and destruction. “A time between ashes and roses is coming. When everything shall be extinguished, when everything shall begin,” it reads, a resonance that could not feel more acute at this critical historical moment.

Articulated in three sections and spread across the main venue of the Aichi Arts Center, the Triennale places at its core the goal of imagining a future beyond divisions and discrimination. “It’s about our primordial connection to nature,” Al Qasimi told Observer in a recent interview. “I wanted to juxtapose these two extremes of our relationship with the environment—both generative and destructive.” Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the nuclear attack—an event that only Japan has endured in its full implications—the Triennale inevitably becomes a stage for confronting those ghosts, which feel all the more present today under the shadow of global conflict.

Greeting visitors at the entrance on the second floor of the Aichi Arts Center in Nagoya is a monumental mural tapestry by Kubo Hiroko. Against a vast expanse of deep blue, the artist draws viewers into a symbolic journey where local folklore entwines with urgent global issues. Through mythical archetypal characters and symbols, the work’s scale invites contemplation of vertical relations—earth and celestial realms in interconnected exchange—while reviving ancestral myths and spiritualities to reaffirm the universality of epics within a single piece. Playful in appearance yet epic in scope, it unfurls like a contemporary Iliad: a continuous stream of war and disaster, depicting communities destroyed by conflict, refugee camps, mushroom clouds, livestock as disease vectors and catastrophic flooding. Drawing attention to both the constructive and destructive aspects of human activity, it embodies the spirit of the Triennale itself: that from ashes roses may yet bloom, that in every genesis lies a seed of destruction and death, necessary to renew the cycle of life, creation and evolution.

More than one work in the Aichi Arts Center explores the tension between human and non-human creation. Yet it is notable how several artists focus on how human-making might mend and reconcile this rupture, which is critical yet often irreparable. Many works are animated by an attempt to commemorate and memorialize the vitality of nature through art making, through the power of human creation to echo and amplify—rather than destroy or overpower—the generative flow of matter.

Among the most vibrant examples is an installation by Indonesian artist Mulyana: vast, kaleidoscopic environments built from crocheted forms and recycled yarn, reimagining “the ideal sea as remembered.” Through this monumental craft, the threatened vitality of marine life is revived, drawing attention to the urgent need for environmental care and restoration.

Similarly, Abu Dhabi-based artist Afra Al Dhaheri—once a hairstylist—explores the tension between strength and fragility through rope, concrete and strands of human hair. Her tactile, visceral installations resemble animal-like shapes, carcasses or fossils: powerful forms that symbolize cycles of endings and beginnings, resilience and decay.

Elsewhere, the Aichi Triennale leans into an alchemical, spiritual and cosmic register, evoking the inescapable circle of creation, destruction, evolution and regeneration that governs all. A series of paintings by Native American artist Wendy Huber celebrates ancestral connection, their presence echoing against a monumental, luminous canvas by Ohkojima Maki: an overwhelmingly luminous work that imagines an ecosystem of energies and beings—an interconnected symphony of organisms thriving in symbiosis. The canvas becomes an epiphanic invitation to contemplate how “life circulates in a distorted way, becoming entangled, tangling, and unraveling,” a powerful meditation on existence’s fragile yet unceasing rhythms.

Linking this shift from the human to a more cosmic and planetary perspective, many of the works on view engage with the notion of “Deep Time,” reflecting on geological temporality as a more accurate and generative framework compared to the distorted linear, anthropocentric conception of time that underpins the capitalist and extractive mentalities driving today’s most pressing crises. Among them, a witty living installation by Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou is staged in a jewelry-store setting, presenting ancient stones and gems he collected and refined, honoring the priceless value of deep time embodied in materials whose lives extend far beyond human existence and greed.

This attempt to propose another perspective beyond our transient earthly existence is echoed in Ogawa Machiko’s Moon Shard, a constellation of crystalline porcelain and glass fragments that evoke otherworldly, extra-planetary remnants. Other artists turn their focus to the fragility of human history itself and the constant threat of cultural erasure.

In Stolen Past, Damascus-born Hrair Sarkissian follows the fate of Raqqa Museum—once home to 8,000 artifacts spanning prehistory to the Middle Ages—after its collection was destroyed or looted during the Islamic State’s occupation from 2013 to 2017. Sarkissian reimagines 90 missing works as 3D-printed lithophanes, 48 of them lit from behind like ghostly apparitions, memorializing both loss and resilience. A similar terrain has long been explored by Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz, who addresses the displacement of cultural artifacts and people through colonialism, conflict and forced removal. For the Aichi Triennale, in addition to his signature practice of using found contemporary relics of mass consumption to recreate story murals from the Syrian city of Raqqa destroyed by ISIS, he also reconstructed an Iraqi café where he invites Japanese audiences to share Iraqi dishes, framing hospitality as a space for intercultural dialogue and reflection on war and exile, connecting present, past and future.

Similarly challenging human notions of time and perspective are the artists who turn to the sea and bodies of water as perpetual repositories of planetary and human memory—archives that embrace dissolution as the condition for new forms. Particularly striking in this context is the work of Koretsune Sakura, who explores the deep ties between humans and cetaceans in an unforgettable installation where fragments of whale bodies are evoked through a constellation of organic and human-made relics.

Her research traces Aichi Prefecture’s maritime history, where whale bones from the Jomon period testify to the early use of stranded whales. This practice, still remembered in regional festivals around Ise Bay, becomes a ritual of connection, honoring the wisdom of marine life and recognizing water as a vessel of continuity between past and present. Presented alongside historical illustrations and scrolls documenting these traditions, Sakura’s work stages a powerful alchemy of reconnection: ritual, memory and the sea merging into a vision where whales become vessels of ecological awareness and survival.

On a more political register, John Akomfrah’s three-channel video installation Vertigo Sea (2015) examines humanity’s fraught relationship with the ocean as a site of beauty, memory and trauma. Combining archival footage with cinematic seascapes filmed in Skye, the Faroe Islands and northern Norway, the work interlaces narratives of migration, the transatlantic slave trade, ecological devastation and industrial exploitation. Images of whale and polar bear hunts, drowned refugees, slave ships and nuclear tests transform the sea into a vast cemetery—an epic, mournful ledger of collective memory at this perilous stage of civilization, reckoning with its failures.

Several artists engage with the notion of Noah’s Ark as a vessel to preserve the memory of a lost nature. Among them is the striking intervention by Dala Nasser, whose Noah’s Tombs reimagines the flood myth within a contemporary geopolitical and cultural frame. The massive circular structure, recalling the three-tiered Ark and the Ouroboros serpent of eternal return, anchors three symbolic materials—rammed earth for Lebanon, a dome for Jordan and sandbags for Turkey—each linked to sites believed to hold Noah’s tomb and, at the same time, all “hot zones” of current conflicts. Nasser collapses war memory and geopolitical instability into transitional shelters that embody both impending disaster and the promise of salvation and rebirth, resulting in a post-apocalyptic yet hopeful meditation on continuity, resilience and survival.

This dramatic tension between life and death, creation and destruction continues throughout the Triennale, reaching a climax of tragic painterly beauty in a room holding the paintings of Iraqi artist Bassim Al Shaker. His canvases transform memories of the 2003 Iraq War bombings into explosions of petal-like brushstrokes, deafening blasts and the eerie stillness that follows. Beauty and destruction collapse into one another as detonations dissolve into storms of color, transmuting trauma into a haunting, almost epiphanic vision of gleaming intensity.

Across the Triennale, resilience and resistance most often reside in the sphere of ritual—particularly through the rediscovery of oral and sonic dimensions, something that was already strikingly evident in the Sharjah Biennale.

This sensibility is powerfully present in the multimedia work of the Korean collective ikkibawiKrrr, which illuminates rituality embedded in everyday life. Cafés, farms and festivals become living “villages,” and their O, Open the Door, I Pray captures the Hashinoshita community moving between bon odori and Korean folk dance. Shared gestures turn the ordinary into a collective celebration, open to all ages and abilities.

Nearby, Priyageetha Dia channels colonial memory and labor histories in Southeast Asia through sound and the ritual of shared lament. Her LAMENT H.E.A.T. evokes the voices of Tamil migrant laborers on rubber plantations, weaving collective narrations into an immersive installation that restores presence to the forgotten and affirms collective mourning as a fundamental act of awareness and reconciliation with shared traumas.

Similar themes appear at the Aichi Ceramics Museum, where a particularly strong lineup of artists engages with earth translated into clay, the most primordial material of human creation, directly connecting with natural elements and their alchemical processes of transformation. Clay, one of the first artistic mediums and technologies, becomes a lens to explore change, human–nature entanglement and ancestral knowledge, while at the same time exposing the paradoxes of current models of creation. Here, visions of more symbiotic relationships with nature emphasize entanglement and collaborative making over domination, reconciling with the rhythms of natural process and standing in contrast to models of accelerated progress driven by industrialization.

In the workshop area—alive even on the Saturday of our visit, with the community gathered to experiment with ceramics—Ghana-based eco-conscious collective Hive Earth presented The Rammed Earth Project: Convex and Concave. Using local clay and traditional rammed-earth techniques, they transformed dug soil into seating block structures which, after the Triennale, will be returned to the excavation hole now visible in front of the museum, completing a cycle of creation and restoration. Simple yet symbolically powerful, the intervention highlights human engagement with the earth through primordial actions—digging, shaping, returning soil—inviting reflection on sustainable collaboration with nature in crafting and building the Anthropocene.

In a separate building, Izumi Kato takes over the entire space, presenting new works that explore evolution, hybridization and the interrelation of all living beings. His paintings and sculptures suggest primordial life forms—fetuses, reclining infants and sea creatures drawn from memory and field research—imagining humanity as equal among other species. His new series From the Sea envisions the evolutionary arc from aquatic to amphibious to human life, while also hinting at a possible reactivation, even an inversion, of this cycle as a path toward ecological survival. In a group of glass cases at the museum entrance, Kato’s works interact with historical ceramics from the permanent collection, using gaps and fragments as portals for reimagination and reflection on the entanglement of human and natural time.

Moving into the museum’s main building, Elena Damiani’s Relief series examines geological time and the slow transformations of landscapes shaped, dried and hardened by natural forces. With a practice that intersects geology, archaeology and astronomy, the artist exposes hidden rhythms that predate and outlast human presence, inviting reflection on temporal scales far beyond the anthropocentric.

A similar concern animates In Forest, conceived by Australian artist Yasmin Smith, who uses coal ash glazes to trace 3 million years of geological and ecological history. Each glaze reveals the minerals absorbed by ancient vegetation, transformed under heat and pressure into coal. At the same time, ashes from Australia and Nagoya link distant landscapes and human industry, making both deep-time processes and humanity’s destructive imprint on the earth visible.

Echoing these themes of contamination and environmental memory, Guatemalan Indigenous artist Marilyn Boror Bor presents ceramic portraits of significant women from her community, made with clay already contaminated by concrete. Her work highlights the tension between industrial “progress” and ancestral resilience, reclaiming ceramics as a medium of remembrance and resistance while questioning the capitalist notion of progress and its cost to land and tradition.

The idea that materials can be carriers of memory also sustains the practices of Simone Leigh and Simone Fattal, whose monumental sculptures rise from the underground floor at the heart of the building to honor Black women’s histories, resilience and resistance, drawing on African, Caribbean and American South vernacular traditions. Using shells and raffia, Leigh’s towering forms reference maritime trade, slavery and diasporic cultural memory, embodying both trauma and empowerment. Nearby, Fattal turns instead to the deep past, drawing on mythology, literature and archaeology. Her playful yet mysterious glazed ceramic mushrooms embody fragility, life cycles and renewal, bridging the mystical with the material while emphasizing our tactile bond with earth and clay.

This layering of ancestral knowledge becomes even more significant in the installation by Cannupa Hanska Luger, a member of the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara) and Lakota. In A Way Home, Luger embarks on a process of rediscovery, relearning ceramic practices from his homeland at Standing Rock alongside his children. A central clay figure manifests the land itself, embodying its knowledge and culture, showcasing a step-by-step process of recovering and transmitting these practices. Protected by museum glass, the installation transforms Indigenous knowledge and connection with that land—once dismissed or erased—into a revived legacy for posterity.

At the entrance of the building, Wangechi Mutu’s unsettlingly imposing Sleeping Serpent (2014-2025) pushes this engagement with ancestral and cosmic narratives into mythic terrain linked to the collective subconscious. Described by the artist as marking a liminal moment between her collage practice and her move into sculpture, the work was forged from studio remnants—shredded and reassembled in a cathartic process that conjures a mythological hybrid creature. The serpent swallows fragments of dreams and subconscious matter, manifesting them into clay figures before letting them dissolve in its belly, returning to the generative realm of dreams. Mutu’s haunting sculpture embodies an endless circle of catharsis—birth, death and rebirth—where destruction becomes the most fertile ground for creation.

Alongside the sculpture, Mutu’s three-channel panoramic video The End of Carrying All (2015) visualizes the crushing weight of human labor and environmental crisis, intertwining African identity, mythological tropes and archetypal narratives to examine the burdens disproportionately borne by women and vulnerable communities. The work is confronted by a large-scale mural with a statement from a Kenyan professor and environmentalist—“when the British came they didn’t understand the trees”—a line that underscores the entanglement of human rights, feminism and ecological awareness, and the fragile balances that colonialism and capitalism have so violently disrupted.

Reattunement in Seto City

Rituals of care and healing aimed at restoring disrupted balances, as well as the contemplation of alternative temporalities, animate some of the most striking installations spread across the lively provincial town of Seto, which during the opening weekend was also celebrating its annual ceramic festival—a shared moment of local knowledge and tradition turned into a powerful reminder for visitors of the importance of community rituals.

Inside an old bathhouse, Sasaki Rui stages a haunting installation of luminous, ghostly biological forms suspended in a fluid, porous space. Transformed into a site of regeneration, the installation becomes a meandering archive created in collaboration with local communities, memorializing how the region’s biological heritage intertwines with human lives and the memories associated with its plants.

Further up, in an abandoned school, Argentinian artist Adrián Villar Rojas, with Terrestrial Poems, wraps the building in chaotic wallpapers and digital mashups to create an immersive, earthy environment reflecting both vitality and transience. The cacophonous work traverses layers of history and memory, drawing on archaeology’s centuries-old capacity to reconstruct the past while imagining dystopian futures. Through processes of erasure and digital intervention, Villar Rojas questions how schools and educational spaces shape discourse on history and ancestry, highlighting the speculative, political nature of how human history is established—most often against the deeper heritage of the planet.

This tension between temporalities reemerges in Robert Andrew’s installation at the Kasen Mine, a historic clay site that is normally difficult to access. A descendant of the Yawuru people of Western Australia, Andrew creates two monolithic structures from clay sourced on-site, exposing natural processes of slow erosion as strings pull away layers of clay, pigment and soil. His work underscores the interplay between human constructions and natural forces, suggesting once more a reflection on deep time, material resilience and how past, present and future are inscribed in the land.

The fragility of human and historical memory and the transient nature of beauty itself are poetically evoked in an installation of fragmented cherry blossoms by Tomiyasu Yuma. Reversed into a room, the blossoms slowly dissolve into dust and ashes, covering domestic furniture with the patina of obsolescence, even as some are preserved in fridges—an ultimate yet futile attempt to crystallize their fleeting beauty.

Though it is impossible to encompass the richness of the works presented in a single article, the Aichi Triennale as a whole is a continual reminder of its central motif: “A Time Between Ashes and Roses” contemplates perpetual historical cycles of destruction and renewal as necessary to the conception and realization of the future.

This message found a visceral echo in a performance hosted in a local club with local musicians and performers, on an opening night that stood as a raw counterpoint to the traditional art-world after-party. At the Aichi Arts Center, the installation by Lebanese-Palestinian duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme may at first strike with overwhelming loudness, a cacophony too raw, too faithful to the chaos of our times. Yet during the night, in their performance with NBaraari, Haykal and Julmud, Enemy of the Sun, that noise revealed itself as the manifestation of one of the most primordial forces: anger and rebellion, echoing and resisting the rhythms of destruction that reverberate through the restless soundscapes of our cities. Within this release of energy emerges the most genuine form of creativity—a voice rising from chaos and distraction, reclaiming the power of life and creation over tragedy.

This is the true lesson of the Aichi Triennale: that art, even in the face of devastation, carries the capacity for quiet, meditative resilience. It reminds us of long-trodden terrains we must learn to inhabit differently, transforming fragility into resonance, ancestral wisdom into a recipe for survival and artistic creation into the most genuine and universally attuned path to claim fertile creativity over destruction, long disguised as the promise of capitalist progress.

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Hoor Al Qasimi’s Aichi Triennale Confronts Generative and Destructive Extremes

Reattunement in Seto City

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