Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Film, video, performance, sculpture
Website: ttakemoto.com
TT Takemoto (they/them) is a queer Japanese American artist and scholar who lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over the past two decades they have worked at California College of the Arts, where they are currently Interim Provost and Professor of Visual Studies. They are represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco. Their awards include the Grand Jury Prize for Best Experimental Film at Slamdance Film Festival and the Best Experimental Film Jury Award at the Austin LGBTQ+ International Film Festival (aGLIFF). They have received grants from Art Matters, ArtPlace, the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Lucas Artists Program at Montalvo Arts Center, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. They were co-founder of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts and a member of the Queer Cultural Center’s Board of Directors from 2008 to 2023. Their critical writing appears in Artforum, Art Journal, GLQ, Performance Research, Radical Teacher, Theatre Survey, Women and Performance, and multiple anthologies.
Takemoto explores hidden dimensions of same-sex intimacy and trauma within Asian and Asian American archives through experimental film and video, performance, and handmade objects. Their labor-intensive process involves painting, lifting, and manipulating 16mm and 35mm film emulsion using clear tape, razor blades, and nail polish — a physically intimate and time-consuming engagement with the material surface of the archive. Working primarily with found footage and archival materials, they conjure immersive queer historical fantasies that honor Asian Americans who lived, loved, and labored together during the pre-war era and beyond. Their most celebrated body of work, the Queer Camp Trilogy — comprising Looking for Jiro (2011), Warning Shot (2014), and On the Line (2018) — centers on specific queer Japanese American individuals whose lives were shaped by incarceration during World War II. Their work was included in Documenta 15 (2022) and the Gwangju Biennale (2024).
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