Ieva Raudsepa solo exhibition - Tokyo Highway Scene

The exhibition features the artist's video work Tokyo Highway Scene, inspired by the 1972 film Solaris by film director Andrei Tarkovsky.

One episode of the film shows an imaginary city of the future, with its vast and rapid transport network filmed from a moving car on Tokyo's highways in 1971. The rapid technological developments and large-scale infrastructure projects that were implemented in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s contributed to the image of Tokyo as the city of the future in global culture. Construction of the Shutoko, the metropolitan expressway, began in Tokyo in 1959 and the system continues to expand to the present day.

We meet the narrator of Tokyo Highway Scene as she sits in a taxi on her way to a conference to present her research on fictional images of Tokyo - how late 20th century cinema represented the city of the future. How did people once imagine 'the future', and what can we think about it today? The heroine of the story is faced with uncertainty: is anyone looking forward to the moment that will follow?