Shun Ikezoe Part 1
Poster for Shun Ikezoe, See you in my dreams (2020).
For our first screening of 2026 we are delighted to present a series of works by Shun Ikezoe, a contemporary moving image artist based in Tokyo. Although Ikezoe’s recent works have been installations, the program presents three traditional film works. Firmly rooted in a sense of place, they center around the losses and lacunae inherent in communication and memory.
The films in this program, all from 2020, each bear the quality of vivid memories marked by lapses. In the outdoor pavilion in which the structural film Dissociative Amnesia is shot, black rectangles, ambiguously integrated into the work’s diegesis, rift the coherence of the image yet also pose as suggestive pathways towards meanings outside or beyond the work’s filmed record of the world. Oscillation, presents a haphazard portrait of Hong Kong, constellating “small fragments of feeling” gleaned from the city just before the 2019 protests. See you in my dreams conveys recollections from Ikezoe’s grandmother, whose memory is fading with age, refracted through a fractured suburban architecture.
In the post-COVID era, the human body and its possibilities of dialoguing with the outside world, with others, and with its own past are increasingly scattered and dispersed through complex communications media. Yet Ikezoe’s lush, Super 8 or 16mm images — the sparkle of light on water; the textures of food; softly animated interiors — generate a sense of the persistence of material life within the rigid or fragmented formal structures which contain them, from the architecture of the modern city to the prism of imperfect memory. This dramatic interplay between images and cuts lends Ikezoe’s works a kind of melancholy severity, in which a desire for continuity is constantly frustrated, and the viewer must determine alternative modes of cohering the world they project.
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Program
Dissociative Amnesia (あの人の顔を思い出せない), 2020, 2min, 8mm film transferred to video, color, sound
The more you try to see the things, the less you can see them correctly. People tend to see only what they care about and make one’ s sense only with what they see. So sometimes we can’ t go back on the right track anymore when we realize the truth. I experimented to see where the viewer would turn their focus to, by making some images missing on screen. (Shun Ikezoe)
Sound design / Izumi Matsuno
Director, Cinematography, Editing / Shun Ikezoe
See you in my dreams (朝の夢), 2020, 18:30min, 8mm film transferred to video, part color, sound
By the time you wake up, they might be gone―
For me, “mother” means my grandmother, who raised me with undying affection. She is gradually dying. I thought that I would definitely regret it if I didn't listen to my grandmother’ s story, so I started going to her house and collected her voices little by little since summer two years ago. She told me the story of her first romance. She get worse at the beginning of last year. Seeing that she talks as if her memory is muddy, “She is now dreaming of memory,” said my father.
At that time, the house that I lived with her was about to be lost. I mixed the voice of her memories and the breath of the house in a soundtrack. And then, I shot the sequence of the dream with 8mm film. I have heard that “the dream you see in the morning is a message from the pure land (a kind of heaven in Buddhism)” , but what kind of world is pure world? What kind of dream does my grandmother have? This film is dedicated to my “mother” grandmother.
Story
We see a woman lying down. She awakens from a dream of a festival she visited in her youth to a scene that feels familiar. Remniscing on her first love, her marriage, giving birth, and meeting the love of her life, she wanders for a while. Was the place she met him again a dream, or was it Heaven? Was the one she met her first love, or the love of her life? This is a story about love, and about one woman. (Shun Ikezoe)
Cast / Yukino Murakami / Shinya Ueno
Monologue / Teiko Ikezoe / Yukino Murakami
Music / duenn
Sound design / Takuya Kawakami
Cinematography / Shin Yonekura / Shun Ikezoe
Title Design / Riku Hoshika
Subtitle / Linnea Welden
Director, Editor / Shun Ikezoe
Oscillation (揺蕩), 2020, 3min, 8mm film transferred to video, part color, sound
Shot on the eve of the 2019-20 Hong Kong protests broke out. The scenery I saw during my trip to Hong Kong was nostalgic, like something I had seen in a dream a long time ago. The shopping streets and markets stretched under the skyscrapers in the small island. The city is very futuristic but also has the atmosphere where time is regressing. After returning to Japan, I saw the news videos showing many Molotov cocktails were thrown around in the city. People and the world changes easily in accordance with the way wind blows. Was it the dream that I saw in the city? I collected small fragments of feeling on the other side of the wall next to our daily life. (Shun Ikezoe)
Sound design / Izumi Matsuno
Director, Cinematography, Editing / Shun Ikezoe
Shun Ikezoe 池添俊
Shun Ikezoe was born in 1988 in Kagawa, raised in Osaka, and is currently based in Tokyo. He is a filmmaker and artist whose work focuses on shedding light on voices often overlooked in society and history by gathering personal stories and memories and reconstructing them into universal narratives. Using a wide range of media – including film and digital formats – he produces both films and installations, pushing the boundaries between cinema and contemporary art on a global scale.
He was selected for the Project to Support Emerging Media Arts Creators, Creators in Japan Production Support Program (2024) and is currently developing a new project addressing mental illness. His work Waiting to hear from you (2022), which explores the border between society and mental illness, received the Mizuki Takahashi Prize at “MIMOCA EYE” (Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, 2022). What is it that you said? (2021) was screened at the 59th New York Film Festival, and See you in my dreams (2020) was screened at the 31st FIDMarseille International Film Festival.