Join artist Umi Ishihara and Rosa Tyhurst, Curator at Gasworks, for a guided tour of Nocturnal Melody at esea contemporary. The tour will explore the nuances of the exhibition and the narratives that unfold across Ishihara’s films, following the lives of two dancers in Tokyo whose worlds of music, nightlife and desire come alive after dark.
This event enters the exhibition’s nocturnal world, where animal calls, distorted club music and dream-like imagery unsettle the boundaries between reality and fantasy. The tour will explore how Ishihara’s nocturnal animals, alongside the stories of Eri and Catalina, move through spaces where performance, labour, intimacy and sociality collide.
A conversation between the artist and curator will follow, offering an opportunity to delve further into the ideas, processes and experiences behind the exhibition, including Ishihara’s personal journey of artistic practice and her connection to the alternative worlds explored in Nocturnal Melody.
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Umi Ishihara (b. 1993, Tokyo, Japan) is based in London and Tokyo. She gained an MA in Artist’s Film & Moving Image from Goldsmiths, London in 2024, and a BA in Fine Arts (Inter Media Art) from Tokyo University of the Arts, Japan in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include Thundergod, Gallery Butaiura, Tokyo (2024); Gravity and Radiance, Shiseido Gallery, Tokyo (2021); Mire of Dickhead Demon, TAV Gallery, Tokyo (2017).
Recent group exhibitions include Home Sweet Home, Marugame Genichiro-Inokuma Museum of Contemporary Art, Kagawa; Struggle, Fukuoka Art Museum (both 2024); Home Sweet Home, The National Museum of Art, Osaka (2023); Coming of Age, Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris (2022); Bloomberg New Contemporaries, South London Gallery (2019).
Ishihara’s works have been screened internationally at venues including Centre Pompidou, ICA London, BFI Southbank, Locarno Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, CPH:DOC. In 2024 she was awarded a GQ Global Creativity Award. She is a participating artist at the 2026 Busan Biennale and her work will be featured in 2027's Yebisu International Festival for Art & Alternative Visions at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.
Rosa Tyhurst is a curator from South Wales and based in South London. She currently works as curator at Gasworks, London, where she collaboratively devises and delivers a programme of exhibitions, residencies, public programme and participation projects. Prior to Gasworks, she worked at Nottingham Contemporary and at Spike Island, Bristol. Rosa has curated exhibitions and programmes internationally, at the Wattis Institute, San Francisco (US); Cloaca, San Francisco (US); Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Oakland (US) and DREI, Köln (DE). In 2019 she participated in Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo’s Young Curator’s Residency Programme in Turin, Italy. Her writing has been published in Art Monthly, Elephant, Hyperallergic, Contemporary Art Reviews Los Angeles, ArtPractical, and she has contributed to publications on Veronica Ryan, Candice Lin and Peggy Ahwesh. Rosa is a graduate of California College of the Arts’ MA in Curatorial Practice.
