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Festival 2026
The Erotics of Space: Hiroyuki Oki
Japan

Curated by
Keegan O'Connor
Running time
73 mins

When Hiroyuki Oki (1964-2025) passed away suddenly late last year, Japan lost one of its most singular and tireless artist-filmmakers. His amorphous work, traversing documentary and fiction, frequently harnessed smaller, more intimate forms of cinema (8mm, 16mm, video, the home movie) for their unique potential. This programme brings together four such ‘small’ works—short films in which a direct mode of filmmaking comes to express a sense of erotic desire and longing. In these portrait and landscape works, Oki provocatively explores the camera’s capacity to make contact with bodies and places. Small gestures and snapshot moments come together to produce a larger and denser expression of space and time.

This screening will be preceded by a short presentation by curator Keegan O’Connor and Japanese filmmaker Umi Ishihara.


Tickets


3 May 2026, 6:00 PM
Past Event
ICA 
Color Wind
1991
Directed by
Hiroyuki Oki
Running time
10 mins
This is one of the first landscape films Oki made in his beloved Kochi prefecture, where he moved in 1991. Thwarted desire takes on a fresh immediacy, as a panorama of melancholic and amorous feelings about a place come to imbue it anew.

Landscape Catching
1992
Directed by
Hiroyuki Oki
Running time
5 mins
Landscape Catching is a richly sensuous and erotic engagement with the Kochi landscape, in which fragments of reality and snapshots of daily life take on a sensuous and transcendent quality.

Color Eyes
1992
Directed by
Hiroyuki Oki
Running time
7 mins
Color Eyes is a silent portrait of various bodies inhabiting and moving through space. Three dancers perform on a rooftop, a couple embraces, and a naked man masturbates in this series of intertwined scenes.

Melody for Buddy Matsumae
1993
Directed by
Hiroyuki Oki
Running time
50 mins
Chronicling ten days at the seaside town of Matsumae-cho, Hokkaido, this intimate diary film documents five laconic days spent with a lover, as well as five days spent alone

Curator and speaker bios



Keegan O’Connor is a writer and film curator based in London. He holds a PhD in English from Queen Mary University of London and has programmed artist-filmmaker seasons at various institutions in the UK, Belgium, and Australia.

Umi Ishihara is a Japanese artist and film director based in Tokyo and London, working primarily in experimental narrative cinema. She exhibited her solo show Nocturnal Melody at Gasworks, London, this year.



Additional info



Content note: Contains nudity and non-simulated sex scenes