Shiro Takatani

Shiro Takatani is a Japanese artist, born on October 15, 1963, in Nara. He currently lives and works in Kyoto. Co-founder and visual creator of the group Dumb Type since 1984, he also became artistic director of the group from 1995 and also started an active solo career in 1998.

Graduated from Kyoto City University of Arts, Shiro Takatani co-founded Dumb Type in 1984 with other students from different sections of the university, including Teiji Furuhashi, Toru Koyamada, Yukihiro Hozumi, Misako Yabuuchi and Hiromasa Tomari.

Dumb Type began touring around the world and got recognition with their multidisciplinary shows Pleasure Life (1988), and pH (1990–1995) and S/N (1992–1996)

After the death of the artistic director Teiji Furuhashi in 1995, some members left the company, while new ones joined it, as the composer Ryoji Ikeda. They continued working under Shiro Takatani's direction and created the performances OR (1997–1999), memorandum (1999–2003), Voyage (2002–2009), and the related installations OR (1997), Cascade (2000), Voyages (2002) and MEMORANDUM OR VOYAGE (2014).

Alongside his activities within Dumb Type, Takatani has created a number of installations and performances under his own name.

Since his first installation frost frames, created at Canon Artlab in 1998, Takatani has been invited by museums, festivals and theatres worldwide.

Among others, he was commissioned by the Natural History Museum of Latvia in Riga to create two video installations: Ice Core and Snow Crystal / fiber optic type, for the group exhibition "Conversations with Snow and Ice", dedicated to Ukichiro Nakaya' scientific work on snow and ice, in 2005. This exhibition was one of the nominees for the Descartes Award for Excellence in the Explanation of Scientific phenomena in 2007)

The following year he was hosted in residence in Australia and presented the installation Chrono in Melbourne, as part of the Australia-Japan exchange program "Rapt! 20 Contemporary Artists from Japan", commissioned by the Japan Foundation.

He also joined the three-week British expedition "Cape Farewell" (a cultural response to climate change) in the Arctic, with scientists, writers, journalists and other artists from different countries. The related group exhibition was presented at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation in Tokyo, in 2008.

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