[Related Symposium] November 7 & 8 | Shimmering Light: Women Sculptors in Postwar Art Practice
This symposium is co-organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT) and AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions, as part of the special programme accompanying the exhibition Tada Minami—Still, shimmering light.
Taking Tada’s practice as a point of departure, the symposium will examine the contributions of women artists to sculpture after World War II, highlighting the cross-disciplinary relationships between art, architecture, and design. Bringing together scholars and curators from Japan and overseas, the symposium will explore post-war spatial practices related to gender issues from a variety of angles, focusing on materiality, abstract sculpture and public space.
Day 1 — Saturday, November 7, 2:00–4:00 PM
This session focuses on art-historical perspectives on women’s contributions to the renewal of sculptural materials and language after World War II.
Speakers
Charlotte Matter (Art historian, Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel)
Izumi Nakajima (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University)
Annalisa Rimmaudo (Curator, Department of Contemporary Collections at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou)
Day 2 — Sunday, November 8, 2:00–4:00 PM
This session explores the relationships between sculpture and architecture in public space, the social and spatial environments in which works were situated, and questions surrounding their preservation.
Speakers
Nodoka Odawara (Artist and critic)
Naoyuki Umemura (Curator, Sapporo Art Museum)
Gabrielle Schaad (Art historian, Lecturer in Fine Arts, Zurich University of the Arts)
Information
- Date & Time
November 7 & November 8, 2:00–4:00 PM
Doors open: 1:45 PM- Venue
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo, Auditorium (B2F)
- Capacity
180 visitors (no reservations required, first-come-first-served basis on the day)
- Admission
Free
- Moderators
Nina Volz, Marina Amada (AWARE)
Hikari Odaka, Mariko Tamura (Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo)*Simultaneous interpretation (Eng/Jp)
Day 1 — Speaker Profiles
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photo by Lukas Wassmann.
Charlotte Matter
Charlotte Matter is Laurenz Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Basel, Switzerland, and a member of the governing committee of eikones – Center for the Theory and History of the Image. Her book, Feminist Substances: Plastics in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Manchester University Press, 2026), examines the use of plastics from a feminist perspective, with case studies on Carla Accardi (Italy), Lea Lublin (Argentina/France) and Alina Szapocznikow (Poland/France). She is a co-editor of Sculpture Journal, and her writings have appeared in ASAP/journal, Critique d’art, kritische berichte, RACAR, Texte zur Kunst, and Third Text.
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Izumi Nakajima
Izumi Nakajima is Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities, Osaka University. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art history and gender studies, with a particular interest in the relationship between art institutions, critical discourse, and gender in postwar Japanese art. She is the author of Anti-Action: Postwar Japanese Painting and Women Artists (Brücke, 2019; expanded paperback edition, Chikuma Shobo, 2025), which received the 42nd Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities.
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Annalisa Rimmaudo
Annalisa Rimmaudo is assistant curator at the Contemporary Collections Department of the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. In 2003, she earned her PhD in contemporary art history at the Sorbonne University, Paris I. She curated numerous exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou including “Annette Messager Christian Boltanski”, Malaga, 2026; “Enormement bizarre. Jean Chatelus Collection”, Paris, 2025; “Christian Boltanski Faire son temps”, Paris, 2019; Jim Dine at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and Malaga and at MaMM, Moscow, in 2018; “L'œil écoute”, Paris, 2017. She cocurated with Camille Morineau Elles@centrepompidou in 2009 and has collaborated on several exhibitions and catalogues with European institutions. She is also a member of the editorial board of Aware where she has published multiples articles notably « Minimal and Post-Minimal Sculpture Beyond the White Cube », 2024.
Day 2 — Speaker Profiles
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Nodoka Odawara
Artist and critic. PhD in Art Studies. Publisher and faculty member at Yokohama National University. Born in Miyagi Prefecture in 1985, Odawara lives in Kamakura, Kanagawa. Taking sculpture as a point of departure, her practice encompasses writing, art-making, and social activism. Through both theory and practice, she reexamines art history from the perspectives of gender, anti-imperialism, and the public sphere. Her major solo exhibitions include those at the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre [ACAC] and the Tsunagi Art Museum. Her principal monographs include Sculpting / Overcoming Modernity (Kodansha) and Toward a Theory of Monuments: Sculpture as a Critical Problem (Seidosha). She is a Visiting Researcher at the National Center for Art Research, Japan (NCAR) for FY2026.
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Naoyuki Umemura
Born in Sapporo in 1987. Umemura graduated from the Hokkaido University and completed a master’s degree at the Hokkaido University before leaving the doctoral program prior to completion. While a graduate student, he studied at the University of Munich in Germany. He joined the Sapporo Art Museum as a curator in 2017 and was seconded to the Japan Foundation for Regional Art-Activities in 2021. In 2023, he became a curator at the Hongo Shin Memorial Museum of Sculpture, Sapporo, and returned to his current position in 2026. Exhibitions he has curated include Sapporo Art Exhibition: Bikky Sunazawa—Wind— (2019) and Takeo Yamauchi: 50 Years after His Death (2025). His major publications include Bikky Sunazawa: The Sculptor Who Carved the Wind, A History of German Castles: Pavilion of Infinity, and Takeo Yamauchi: Resonant Sculpture. His recent research focuses on collaboration between artists and architects from the perspective of artists.
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Gabrielle Schaad
Gabrielle Schaad is an art and architectural historian and lecturer in Fine Arts at Zurich University of the Arts, where she leads the program Exhibiting and Making Public. Her research examines postwar to contemporary art and feminist spatial practices through materiality, environment, gender, and transnational entanglements. She earned her doctorate at ETH Zurich and was a MEXT Scholarship recipient at Saitama University (2013–2015). Her forthcoming book, Concrete and Code: Material Politics of Art and Environment in Postwar Japan, examines Gutai, Metabolism, and Expo ’70. She serves on the board of the Shizuko Yoshikawa and Josef Müller-Brockmann Foundation, Zurich.
About AWARE
Co-founded in 2014 and directed by art historian Camille Morineau, AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research & Exhibitions was a non-profit association until 2026, when the project joined Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne. Composed of an international team, the AWARE unit works to make women and non-binary artists visible by producing and publishing free content on their work on its trilingual website (French/English/Japanese).
AWARE brings together a diversity of voices, with texts written by more than 500 researchers, curators, feminist art historians, art critics, and activists from around the world. This unique resource gathers content dedicated to women, trans, and non-binary artists in the fields of visual arts, design, and architecture, without limitations of medium or country.
In order to widely disseminate research on women, trans and non-binary artists and gender studies, AWARE also organizes conferences, round tables, and seminars in partnership with institutions, universities, museums, and other independent organisations on an international scale, and publishes its own publications.
https://awarewomenartists.com/en/aware_japan/