Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Okumura’s eponymous exhibition at the Secession explores the empty state of its venue, the vast ground-floor space called Hauptraum, which is said to be the first white cube in history.
But no, it is not that he is presenting it literally as an empty room. Rather, the artist conceived three site-specific procedures structured through chance-oriented instructions and asked former and current staff members to play them out. Activating subjective memory and collective anticipation that fill the space as well as its architectural details and structures that invite potential actions, those game-like processes generated new narratives, objects, and situations.
In this lecture, while reflecting on his project for Secession, Okumura will discuss how an empty exhibition space is not devoid but full of life — especially when it comes to a historical room like the Hauptraum — and how one can serve as an agent or translator for such a non-human organism by lending one’s body and life to it in an egoless manner, as a holistic being.
The Inside Out Lecture Series at Leeds School of Arts, Leeds Beckett University is an incredible opportunity to present international cutting-edge research and arts practice innovation to our research and teaching community here and to the wider national and international public.
Yuki Okumura was born in 1978 in Aomori, Japan. Fascinated by one's confinement to a particular body and informed by his own experience as a translator, Okumura's work questions identity, individuality, and egocentrism by exploring language, memory, and chance, developing a new approach to the legacies of conceptual art, institutional critique, and action painting. Currently, his solo exhibition Yuki Okumura is being held at Secession, Vienna, which includes Big White Playground, a group exhibition he curates featuring site-specific works by various workers of the institution. Recent solo exhibitions include 136 Locations – 956 Intersections, 20 Albert Road, Glasgow, 2024 (organized by Cento) and The Man Who, An Ephemeral Archive, Keio University Art Center, Tokyo, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include Unguided Tour, Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, 2025; u – New Project Spaces, Kunsthalle Zurich Backrooms, 2024; Aichi Triennale 2022, Aichi Arts Center, Aichi, 2022; and Landslide to be lived off and/or tongues to be deadpan, MISAKO & ROSEN, Tokyo, 2021.
