Biwako Biennale

I am happy to share my participation once again in this year’s Biwako Biennale in Omihachiman, Japan, headed by the amazing Yoko Nakata, with my installation 2nd Sky – Collective Dream and the performance On the Day of My Birth for its opening night on September 19th. You are warmly invited to join if you are in Japan!

Biwako Biennale, this year organized already for the eleventh time, was one of the first Japanese art events to be organized outside of a museum or a gallery, and it has undoubtedly paved the way for similar exhibitions and festivals that can be found all over Japan nowadays.     

Curated by Yoko Nakata, this art festival invites approximately 70 artists from Japan and abroad to collaborate with local citizens of Ōmihachiman and Hikone. In both cities, abandoned Japanese houses are repaired, cleaned and brought back to life with art: they are then opened to the public as BIWAKO Biennale venues.

I am presented this year at the very special  location where also the opening of the biennale takes place: in the 300 years old former brewery with  my multimedia installation 2nd Sky , Collective Dream, as well as with the performance On the day of my birth as part of the opening of the biennale.

This installation exists in flux—between sky and ocean, between breath and thread.

 Recycled lace and doilies, gathered across generations and geographies, form a fragile ecosystem suspended in space. These soft remnants recall invisible membranes that protect life—like the ozone above, or the microscopic skin of the sea that absorbs our excess.

 Scientists tell us: a living film floats at the ocean’s surface, thinner than hair, full of microbes that breathe with the planet. This ocean-skin is porous, protective, and perilously vulnerable.

 So too is this work. Each stitch is a wound and a weave, a soft organ of memory in motion. Lace hematomas—ruptured coral, hurt ozone—bleed gently through the air.

We live between the ocean and the sky.

 We swim in sky.

 We fly in water.

 We breathe in flux.

Copyright © Eva Petrič, 2025,Bildrecht Vienna, All rights reserved.