Tyuki Imamura

His current research explores the practice and philosophy of mutual aid in contemporary art and culture. Engaging with anarchist praxis as a critical methodology of historiography, and attending to ways in which territoriality, temporality, and discipline might be reimagined, He examines how notions of mutual aid are formed and practiced, often spontaneously, in diverse cultural contexts. In particular, by thinking with and through contemporary movements such as lumbung—an organism of collectives that weaves together a wide range of activism, direct actions, and grassroots initiatives across different parts of the world—he seeks to delineate the resonance of the translocal convergence of such individuals and communities.

Tyuki’s trajectory has been shaped by his sustained involvement with community-based arts initiatives in Tohoku following the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami. There, questions of reconstruction unfolded as fragile processes of reconstituting place, memory, and shared life, igniting his wider awareness and interest in direct action, collective practice, hauntology, and the non-human world.

Tyuki employs curatorial work as a mode of thinking that foregrounds collective processes, seeking to invigorate community-driven actions while embracing diverse forms of knowledge-sharing. His projects span Asia, Europe, and the Middle East, including his work as a researcher for Brown Book magazine, researcher for Raqs Media Collective at the Yokohama Triennale 2020, and as a curatorial assistant at documenta fifteen with ruangrupa.

He studied Philosophy and Art History at Bard College, where his work engaged contemporary Asian moving-image practices—particularly those of Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries and Dinh Q. Lê—alongside postmodern phenomenology, Wittgenstein’s aesthetics, and Kyoto School philosophy, receiving the Heinrich Blücher Prize and the John Bard Scholars Prize. He completed MSc in Sustainable Urban Development at Oxford with distinction, critically examining the role of culture in post-disaster reconstruction and the limits of state-led narratives of “creative reconstruction.” Tyuki was also a research student of Professor Yoshitaka Mori in the Global Arts program at Tokyo University of the Arts.

His DPhil research at Oxford is supervised by Professor Anthony Gardner and Professor Sho Konishi. He is an Ertegun Scholar, a graduate scholarship awarded to postgraduate researchers in the Humanities at the University of Oxford.