The Aichi Triennale, first launched in 2010, has become one of Japan’s most expansive international art festivals, transforming Aichi Prefecture into a site of exchange between contemporary art, performance, and public space. Staged every three years across venues including the Aichi Arts Centre, Aichi Prefectural Ceramic Museum, and Seto City, the Triennale engages both local and global audiences through a wide-ranging programme that combines visual art with theatre, dance, and music. The 2025 edition will run from 13 September to 30 November, presenting the work of more than 60 artists and collectives from Japan and around the world.
For its sixth edition, the Triennale is guided by artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi, President and Director of Sharjah Art Foundation. Al Qasimi has chosen the theme A Time Between Ashes and Roses, inspired by the Syrian poet Adonis. The verse evokes both the devastation of war and environmental collapse and the fragile hope that persists in their aftermath. Building on this poetic tension, Al Qasimi’s curatorial approach moves beyond binary extremes to consider the entangled relations between human and environment. By foregrounding indigenous knowledge systems and land-based practices, the exhibition challenges human-centred views of the natural world and seeks alternative frameworks of reciprocity and resilience.
Arab representation within the Triennale extends beyond the presence of Al Qasimi as its artistic director. Artists from across the region gather into the conversation, carrying with them practices that navigate memory, disappearance, materiality, and resilience. Mirna Bamieh turns to food, storytelling, and fermentation to reflect on the fragility of collective memory, while Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme layer sound, image, and performance to probe political imaginaries and the body’s place within them. From the Emirates, Maitha Abdalla brings the theatre into painting and performance to question folklore and the self; Afra Al Dhaheri meditates on repetition as both endurance and delay; Mohammed Kazem transforms sound and light into a record of perception and place; and Shaikha Al Mazrou pushes form and material to the edge of tension.
Elsewhere, Simone Fattal revisits myth and displacement through sculpture, Dala Nasser registers ecological violence through abstraction, and Selma and Sofiane Ouissi fold choreography into civic space and collective action. Hrair Sarkissian renders silence and absence into photographic and sculptural dreamscapes, while Bassim Al Shaker paints the moments after war’s destruction as sites of survival and renewal. Together, their voices trace an archipelago of Arab experience, underscoring both its diversity and its resonance within the global conversation of Aichi Triennale 2025.
Location: Aichi, Japan
Duration: 13 September until 30 November 2025