JA
EN
TOP

EVENTS

 An Art Festival Experience That Doesn't Use Your Eyes / Listening to the Biennale with a Dialogue in the Dark Attendant

EVENTS

An Art Festival Experience That Doesn't Use Your Eyes / Listening to the Biennale with a Dialogue in the Dark Attendant

Ended
Type

Workshop

Tours

Sanpo

Venue

Yaesu/Kyobashi Area

Around the Kyobashi Saiku
(Artizon Museum/TODA BUILDING)

1-7-1 Kyobashi, Chuo-ku

[Map]

Date

12/10/2025 Wed.

13:00–15:00
Meeting point: In front of the Artizon Museum

Ticket

*8 seats
Adults: ¥3,000; Students (HS & under) ¥1,000
Children in elementary school and younger accompanying adults are free

Notes

Eligibility: Individuals who do not meet the following conditions are eligible to participate.
・Individuals who cannot understand Japanese (no interpretation support available).
・Individuals with hearing impairments (no sign language support available).
・Elementary school students or younger who cannot be accompanied by a guardian.

Dialogue in the Dark: Attending with Kinoppi (totally blind), we will experience Akio Suzuki’s “o to da te” at Tokyo Biennale 2025 and hold a discussion about our respective experiences.

What kind of world does Kinoppi, who is totally blind, perceive through sound? We will walk together, stand in that space, and listen intently. When installing the “Oto-date” work,  Suzuki the artist taught us how to capture sound with our entire bodies. Standing in that same space alongside Kinnoppi, who is totally blind, promises to be a valuable experience. It will awaken a sense of sound perception different from our everyday lives. The Tokyo Biennale is an international art festival rooted in Tokyo. We look forward to discovering how its appeal can be experienced “without seeing.”

 

Walking Area
We will explore the points of Suzuki Akio’s “o to da te” in Tokyo Biennale 2025 installed around Artizon Museum, then proceed to view Yonaha Shun’s TA･TA･TARO 2023 installed in the Tokyo Station Yaesu North Exit passageway.

 

Guide

Michinori Kinoshita

Known as Kinoppi. Dialog in the Dark attendant; totally blind. Born in 1979. Visually impaired from birth. Lost sight at age 16 and has been totally blind since. Graduated from the Acupuncture and Moxibustion Department of Tsukuba Technical College (now Tsukuba Technical University) in 2001. Active as a Dialog in the Dark (DID) attendant since 2004. Also handles corporate training sessions in darkness. Provided interview and research assistance for the book How Do Blind People See the World? by Aya Ito (Kobunsha Shinsho).

 

Kinoshita enjoying “o to da te” installed at Toeizan Kan’ei-ji Temple.

 


Kinoshita experiencing the art installation near the Artizon Museum.

 

What is Dialogue in the Dark?

It is a social entertainment experience where participants, guided by visually impaired individuals, enjoy various senses and communication beyond sight within “100% pure darkness” where all light is completely blocked. Conceived in 1988 by German philosopher Dr. Andreas Heinecke, it has been held in approximately 50 countries, with over 9 million people experiencing it. In Japan, since its first event in November 1999, over 300,000 people have participated. It is currently held at the Dialogue Diversity Museum “Forest of Dialogue” in Takeshiba, Tokyo.

At Tokyo Biennale 2025, we will dedicate time to learning about providing festival guidance for individuals with visual impairments and apply this knowledge to our visitor services. We have invited representatives from Dialogue in the Dark as instructors, listened to the perspectives of individuals who are fully blind and related stakeholders, considered what we can do, and have begun implementing initiatives.

 

From the records of the “Special Workshop” titled “Encouraging Participation in Art Festivals for Visually Impaired Individuals,” held for Tokyo Biennale 2025 operational part-time staff and volunteers (October 4, 2025).  Kinoppi (Michinori Kinoshita) and Shinsuke Shimura, Founder of Dialogue in the Dark Japan, attended and conducted the special workshop.

Buy Tickets

Artists

Akio Suzuki

Map

Meeting point: In front of the Artizon Museum

5 min walk from JR Tokyo Sta. (Yaesu Central Gate)
2 min walk from Tokyo Metro Ginza Line Kyōbashi Sta. (Ex. 6)
5 min walk from Tokyo Metro Ginza Line/Tozai Line/Toei Asakusa Line Nihombashi Sta. (Ex. B1)
6 min walk from Toei Asakusa Line Takaracho Sta. (Ex. A5)

Related exhibition

  • Sound-walk

Akio Suzuki: “o to da te” in Tokyo Biennale 2025

Akio Suzuki, known as a pioneer of sound art in Japan, has pursued the relationship between sound and space since the 1960s, developing “self-study events,” performances, and installations both domestically and internationally. For this festival, we are presenting o to da te, a representative project focusing specifically on “listening” within Suzuki’s wide-ranging activities, at six locations (16 points) across Tokyo. o to da te is a project where participants, like in the “nodate” tea ceremony held outdoors, can open their senses by listening carefully as they get a sense of the scenery at designated points. Each point was discovered by Suzuki himself as he explored the city, seeking out locations where unique environmental sounds and reverberations could be heard.     At these selected points, markers are installed featuring a form readable as both feet standing together and ears listening. Participants visit these points using a map, which includes places like an ancient tree facing a historic temple precinct or areas surrounding bustling streets lined with museums and galleries. Standing quietly alone on a mark switches on your auditory awareness, allowing you to listen intently to the sounds present in each moment. There, all of us become active as both listeners and composers, as we spend time in this engaged state.   Special Support: Ishibashi Foundation
Ended 10/17/2025 - 12.14 / ①②③④ Around the Kyobashi Saiku
(Artizon Museum/TODA BUILDING) / ⑤⑥ Around Etoile Kaito Living Bldg. / ⑦ Myojin Otoko-zaka Stairs (Kanda Shrine) / ⑧⑨ Around Suehirocho Station / ⑩⑪ Around Matsuzakaya Ueno / ⑫⑬ Benten-do Temple / ⑭⑮⑯ Toeizan Kan'ei-ji Temple Kompon Chu-do
  • Painting-drawing

Shun Yonaha: TA･TA･TARO 2023

During his studies Shun Yonaha developed a deep passion for folkloric music and spent a year in Bolivia immersing himself in traditional South American music. Upon returning to Japan, he experienced a period of psychological difficulty, during which he spent 10 years compiling his thoughts into what he calls his “Brain Notes.” In 2013, he began creating art in earnest, developing an improvisational style that fuses text and imagery. He has since gained domestic and international attention, and in 2021, one of his pieces was acquired by the Centre Pompidou (the national museum for modern art of France). Yonaha’s colorful paintings feature intricate motifs and text rendered in oil-based markers and ballpoint pens, covering the entire canvas. These are rooted in the social conditions, concerns, and associations he captures from his experiences. In recent years, he has expanded his range of expression to include formats like wall art. For this work shown at Tokyo Station—the gateway to Tokyo—Yonaha will display a large-format print of the major work TA･TA･TARO (2023) on the floor surface in front of Daimaru Tokyo Store at the Yaesu North Exit, where many people constantly pass through. The artist states, “I’ve made thought, ideas, emotion, love, friendship—all things vital to a living human—coexist simultaneously on a single sheet of paper.” His expression and desire to travel across the world from the American continent to the Eurasian continent with his own “meaning of ART”, makes us connect his work to a grand scale.   * A related display is also on view on the 10th floor of Daimaru Tokyo.   Sponsor: Daimaru Matsuzakaya Department Stores Co, Ltd. Cooperation: East Japan Railway Company   Reference Image: TA･TA･TARO, 2023 (detail)  ©Shun Yonaha
Ended 10/17/2025 - 12.25 / Tokyo Station Yaesu North Exit in front of Daimaru Tokyo

Reference image: An Encouragement of Dawdling; "o to da te" and "no zo mi," 2018–2019
Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
Reference Image: An Encouragement of Dawdling "o to da te" and "no zo mi (ki zu ki – 2),", 2018–2019.
Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo
← →

Courtesy of Beethoven Foundation for Art and Culture Bonn / Photo by Meike Boeschemeyer

Akio Suzuki

Sound artist. Born in 1941. Since his infamous Throwing Objects Down a Staircase event at Nagoya Station in 1963 and the self study events which followed, where he explored the processes of “projection” and “following” in the natural world, Suzuki has pursued listening as a practice. In the 1970s he created and began performing on a number of original instruments, including the echo instrument Analapos. In 1988 he performed his piece Space in the Sun, which involved purifying his ears for twenty four hours in nature on the meridian line that runs through Amino, Kyoto. In 1996, he began his “oto da te” project where he seeks out echo points in the urban environment. Has performed and exhibited at many venues and music festivals around the world, including Documenta8 (Germany,1987), the British Museum (2002), Musée Zadkine (France, 2004), Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany, 2018), Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo(Tokyo, 2019), etc.

http://www.akiosuzuki.com/

Participating Event

Hiromi Miyakita ･ Akio Suzuki | Performance "Garden of the Appellation / Maze Walking"

Listening to the Tokyo Biennale

An Art Festival Experience That Doesn't Use Your Eyes / Listening to the Biennale with a Dialogue in the Dark Attendant

Participating Project

Akio Suzuki: “o to da te” in Tokyo Biennale 2025

Ueno/Okachimachi Area

Kanda/Akihabara Area

Nihonbashi/Bakurocho Area

Yaesu/Kyobashi Area

①Toeizan Kan'ei-ji Temple Kompon Chu-do

⑫⑬ Benten-do Temple

⑩⑪ Around Matsuzakaya Ueno

⑧⑨ Around Suehirocho Station

⑤⑥ Around Etoile Kaito Living Bldg.

①②③④ Around the Kyobashi Saiku
(Artizon Museum/TODA BUILDING)