Artist-in-residence program provides opportunities for artists in the field of contemporary art to cultivate their artistic creativity and vision since 1994. Located around an hour from Tokyo, a residency at ARCUS Studio allows participants in the program to come into contact with the contemporary art scene in Japan as well as devote themselves to their creative endeavors in a calm environment while interacting with the local community. Through the support the program offers from its dedicated team of coordinators and regular tutorials with a curator, artists are able to search for and explore approaches in their practices and undertake new challenges in their artistic expression.

The program particularly emphasizes research-based practices and presents the initial results of these processes at open studios. It welcomes ideas for artworks and projects that develop out of encounters with people, the land, and culture, and aspire to form critical discourses that are open and international.

2025 Resident Artist

1. Avani Tandon Vieira
2. Ibrahim Kurt
3. Sato Koichi

ARCUS Project’s Artist-in-Residence Program received applications from 453 international applicants (from 77 countries and regions) and 19 applicants from Japan. Following a careful and thorough selection process, Avani Tandon Vieira, Ibrahim Kurt, and Sato Koichi have been selected as the 2025 artists-in-residence. The artists will participate in a 90-day residency at the ARCUS Studio in Moriya, Ibaraki, from August 29 to November 26, 2025. As the judges for this year’s applications, Osaka Koichiro, curator, and Kamiya Yukie, Chief Curator at The National Art Center, Tokyo who made the selection through a process of discussion with the ARCUS Project Administration Committee.

Born and based in India. Curator, writer, and archivist Avani Tandon Vieira uses her practice to query the relationship between space and form. With a focus on Asian contexts and a transnational frame, her approach spans interdisciplinary investigations, collaborative art-making, and dialogue-based research. As part of her practice, she runs the open-access archival project The Museum of Ephemera – a space of resistance – as well as the digital platform for young creatives from India and Pakistan, The Pind Collective. She has also participated in projects such as RAW Académie, Cameroon and the Gwangju Biennale, creating works that explore experimental rebuilding of maps that dismantle existing cartographies, and film on the theme of trauma and place memory. Other works include participation in the MMCA International Researcher Residency Program (Seoul, 2024) and writings in “Refractions: A Journal of Postcolonial Cultural Criticism” and “ASAP art.”

Kurt was born and raised in a Kurdish home in the mountainous region of Eastern Turkey, and is currently based in the Netherlands. Through video work, installation and performance, in his recent projects Kurt – himself an immigrant – portrays the multi-layered sense of belonging through the process of finding a “home,” inviting dialogue about diaspora and the experience of living separated from one’s birthplace. The methodology of linking both personal and the collective Kurdish experience is also evident in his film works. In the collaborative work Our house is only half finished, Kurt’s fragile and shifting identity is likened to the houses common in his hometown, repeatedly rebuilt and yet abandoned before completion. Past exhibitions and activities include Ijssel biennale 2025 (Deventer, The Netherlands, 2025) and Our house is only half finished（Netherlands Kurdish Institute, Amsterdam, 2024）.

Based in Tokyo, Sato explores society through the natural environment and living organisms, as well as production and consumption, and engages in creative work combining not only video but also scent and sound. The departure point of his work is a questioning of the environment or society, and he conducts on-site research in places where these issues manifest concretely. A recent work deals with PFAS contamination of tap water in western Tokyo, and how this contaminated water enters the body as a foreign object, unconsciously turning one’s own body into the “other.” From enquiry to research and artistic creation, Sato creates a holistic viewing experience that examines the relationship between the environment and living organisms from various angles. Past exhibitions and activities include Yebisu International Festival for Art and Alternative Visons 2023: Technology? (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, 2023), Thailand Biennale Korat 2021 (Korat, Thailand, 2021), and Third Landscape (21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2019).