PROGRAMRESEARCH FELLOWS

Purpose of Hosting Research Fellows

Please note that the Research Fellow program is suspended for the 2025 academic year.

ICA Kyoto welcomes Research Fellows who possess a broad and comprehensive perspective on contemporary trends and who aspire to play active roles in the global art scene. We expect that encounters in Kyoto with people from diverse cultural, historical, and social backgrounds, and with differing values, will serve as a catalyst for future professional development. Through creative production and research, Research Fellows are positioned to accumulate experience and expand their potential through close communication with people and environments that can be found only in Kyoto.

Institute of Contemporary Arts Kyoto
RESEARCH FELLOWS

Enrolled

Arieh Rosen

  • Nationality ：

    Israeli / British

  • Activity base/place ：

    Tokyo / Kyoto, Japan

  • Enrolled ：

    2022 Spring

Research theme ：

A deep and wide exploration of the unique and yet under-researched Japanese craft of broom making. The historic roots of the tool and its development in relation to Japanese society and culture and the connection and interpretations in contemporary art.

Outline ：

Kyoto, being a key meeting point between ancient tradition, religious hubs, diverse cultural communities and a vibrant contemporary art scene will be the focal point of my research. Through the extremely mundane tool and object - a broom - its many forms, uses, myths and users I wish to explore different elements in Japanese society. I wish to focus on discovering and developing contemporary art interpretations to the object as well as to the notion.

Cristina Gómez-Lechón Quirós

  • Nationality ：

    Spain

  • Activity base/place ：

    Valencia (Spain)

  • Enrolled ：

    2023 fall

Research theme ：

Philosophy in Cinema

Outline ：

My research is focused on the figure of women in Asian Cinema through the character of Noriko by Yasujiro Ozu. Throughout the research I address the importance of classical Japanese cinema as a means of portraying universal scope issues taking into consideration the increasingly need to deepen our understanding of the ever more globalised film-making region of Japan.

Daniel Abbe

  • Nationality ：

    USA

  • Activity base/place ：

    Kyoto

  • Enrolled ：

    2022 Spring

Research theme ：

My in-progress doctoral dissertation advances a corporeal theory of the photographer, through the photographs and essays of Nakahira Takuma (1938-2015).

Outline ：

I am exploring how the body itself plays a role in the practice of photography. From what positionality, in other words, do photographers engage with the world? Nakahira Takuma was extremely conscious of Japan’s imperial history, so for him being a photographer was something to be continually questioned. As a scholar working in the field of photography history, I see my research as a corrective to prevailing approaches to the medium that privilege ontology, or that otherwise take the more or less philosophical question, “what is photography?” as their starting point. Instead, I want to begin from the embodied position of the photographer.