What Should We Doubt? — What Is Politics, After All?

In this lecture, Yoshinori Niwa explores how seemingly ordinary actions and social encounters can become political. Through performative interventions, he questions power structures, social norms, and the systems that shape participation and visibility. Using irony and absurdity, his practice creates moments of disruption in which participation can become a form of resistance. At the same time, he asks how we can question the society we are part of, and whether irony can still function as a critical tool today.

Niwa Yoshinori
Zürich/Vienna-based Japanese performance artist
b.1982 in Japan. Lives and works in Zürich/Vienna.

At the intersections of performance, video, and installation, Yoshinori Niwa’s practice explores the transformative potentialities of social interventions within the public sphere and beyond. Animated by the urgency to draw new and uncharted lines of social possibilities, he radically critiques the premises that platform contemporary society. Interrogating the positionality of the social prescriptive normativity - to which he juxtaposes a nonsensical vernacular, mainly composed of absurd scenarios - his works employ self-explanatory titles, echoing the inherent performativity of the social interventions themselves. These performances extensively navigate the perpetual negotiation between social discourse and power structures, between the micro-perspective of the individual and the choral agency allocated to the broader community, reconfiguring social constructs and proposing alternative frameworks.
His work has been exhibited internationally; recent group exhibitions include Double Vision: Contemporary Art From Japan, Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Haifa Museum of Art (2012); Aichi Triennale 2013, Aichi Arts Center, Nagoya (2013); Roppongi Crossing 2013: OUT OF DOUBT, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2013), Historically Historic Historical History of Communism, Edel Assanti, London (2015), OUR BELOVED WORLD, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa (2015), Setouchi Triennale 2016, Naoshima (2016), MAM screen Yoshinori Niwa Selected video works, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo (2017), steirischerherbst’18, Graz (2018), Practice of Occupation of the Work, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw (2018), TIME FOR OUTRAGE! ART IN TIMES OF SOCIAL ANGER, Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2020), On Rehabilitation of Domination and Domain, Match Gallery/The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, Ljubljana (2021), Bucharest Biennale 10, Bucharest, Bucharest (2022), 8th Yokohama Triennale—Wild Grass: Our Lives (2024), steirischerherbst'24—Horror Patriae, Graz (2024) , 2024 Asian Art Biennia—How to Hold Your Breath, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art (2024), Yoshinori Niwa: Travelling Backwards Along the Paths Taken by People Who Left Their Country, Secession, Vienna (2026)  and his work is included in international collections including the KADIST Foundation, Paris/San Francisco, the Otazu Foundation, Spain, Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Wroclaw, Mori Art Museum and Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo.