Rather than taking a narrow view of the moving image, the Festival keeps its focus wide, attending to the many possibilities around it and reconsidering the diversifying forms of moving-image practice and the ways it is received. The Festival continues to serve as a platform for fostering and sustaining the alternative visions that art and the moving image can generate. Each edition sets a theme to explore “What is the moving image?” and presents work from Japan and abroad, all amid shifting conditions and diversifying frameworks and technologies in the field.
For the 2026 edition, while continuing to question the roles of the moving image and photography, the Festival considers social change from a more open and responsive perspective. As a platform for a polyphony of voices and practices, the Festival introduces new programs in sound and theater alongside moving-image and photographic work. In the 3F exhibition gallery, a presentation featuring works by Komori Haruka—recipient of a Special Prize in the second Commission Project—and works from the Tokyo Museum Collection will be on view, in dialogue with the overarching theme of the Festival. By staging edition-specific juxtapositions, the Festival creates space for multiple perspectives.
Contemporary society upholds the value of diversity, and yet even where people, cultures, and languages seem to share affinities, misunderstandings and misreadings inevitably arise. Armed conflicts persist, structural inequalities remain unresolved, and the frictions of our time multiply without prospect of conclusion. We inhabit an unstable and intricately entangled social condition. The overarching theme of Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026 begins with Taiwanese language, introduced by the lead curator, Yu-Hsuan Chiu.
Taiwanese is a language that first spread orally, later shaped by phonetic symbols developed in the 19th century and by written forms using Chinese characters in the 20th century, producing a wide range of literature—including the Taiwanese (Formosa)–Japanese Dictionary, published in 1931. It shares many affinities with Japanese and continues to coexist with multiple systems of notation.
This Taiwanese phrase, composed of the words Jīt-hue1 (日花) and Siann-im2 (聲音), conjures an image of beams of light filtering between trees into a space alive with innumerable voices, none identical to another. Around us too, different voices move and intermingle, overlapping like an ensemble to form a resonant polyphony3. Guided by Taiwan’s language, itself layered with various cultural accumulations shaped by shifting historical currents, Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions 2026 seeks to gently illuminate the layered modalities of interaction through which diverse cultures and languages influence one another in contemporary society. Through photography, moving image, sound, and performance, thoughts and presences meet in intersection, resonating and overlapping, albeit sometimes dissonant, to unfold into an intricate visual and auditory polyphony. Individual voices and their states of being will not be effaced; rather, multiple perspectives will converge and expand together. Beyond the museum walls, through the myriad works you encounter within the multilayered spaces of Ebisu, we invite you to savor your own quiet reflections.
Launched in 2023 as an ongoing initiative of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Commission Project selects Japan-based artists and premieres commissioned moving-image works as outcomes of the Festival’s renewed direction. For the 2026 edition, a special presentation by Komori Haruka—recipient of a Special Prize in the second Commission Project—will be presented in dialogue with the Festival’s overarching theme.
The Tokyo Museum Collection comprises materials and artworks owned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and administered and stewarded by six metropolitan museums: the Edo-Tokyo Museum; the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum; the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum; and the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum. For the 2026 edition, a curated selection from the Collection will be presented in alignment with the overarching theme of the Festival, centred on the 3F gallery of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. Experience the breadth and richness of this civic collection.
Grounded in the overarching theme of the Festival, the exhibition brings together moving image, photography, and sound-led practices from an anthropological perspective. While engaging with long histories of shifting languages and cultures, and the complex environments we face today, the exhibition examines how these relations might be reconfigured. The route begins in the B1F gallery with “migration,” from which, in intermingled environments, many barely audible voices radiate in distinct directions. On the second floor, the gallery revisits social rules and the forms of language, probing the “slippages”—misreadings and misunderstandings of identity—that can arise even when diversity is welcomed within a shared space. Inside and beyond the gallery spaces, formless sound resonates to form a dense visual and auditory polyphony, opening into layered spatial fields.
At the 1F hall of the museum, the Festival presents a daily screening program assembled especially for this edition. The lineup ranges from narrative features to experimental films—including Japan premieres—and brings together works from Japan and abroad. Post-screening talks with directors and guest speakers will follow.
At the Museum’s 1F hall, studio, and galleries, the Festival presents performances, workshops, and artist talks that expand the frame of the moving image. In 2026, as a new initiative, the Festival introduces a theatre program and adds sound performances. Experience programs unique to this venue—work that extends the fields of the moving image and photography.
To keep the Festival open to all, we offer a range of educational programs—workshops, gallery talks, and more—designed to bring audiences closer to the artists and works of the Festival.
Working across digital and analogue media, the Festival features exonemo—renowned for experimental projects within internet art—and FAMEME, whose practice examines individual and collective identity through video, performance, and other media. Their works unfold at Yebisu Garden Place Center Square and along the Ebisu Sky Walk, offering outdoor encounters that open up new modes of viewing for all visitors.
This year the program widens its scope beyond previous editions, adding multiple cultural institutions in and around Ebisu. Each venue presents a curated program of exhibitions and a variety of events. A sticker rally connects participating sites; collect stickers at these sites to receive a Festival-exclusive souvenir. Take this opportunity to explore the neighborhood.
In line with the overall theme, あなたの音に｜日花聲音｜Polyphonic Voices Bathed in Sunlight, the symposium program explores multicultural perspectives on the moving image and photography, the roles of language, and offers an in-depth look at the Commission Project and the moving-image archive. With speakers from Japan and overseas, and unfolding as a wide-ranging series of symposia, the program considers, from multiple angles, the polysemy and potential of the moving image, photography, and sound.
