Held in Okayama City once every three years, the Okayama Art Summit is an international exhibition of contemporary art. With Pierre Huyghe taking the reins as artistic director, the Okayama Art Summit 2019 brings the artistic touch to various historical and cultural sites near Okayama Castle and Okayama Korakuen Garden for two months from 27 September to 24 November, 2019. The event offers visitors the opportunity not only to see exciting exhibits but also to experience the thought processes of the artists, enabling a unique interaction with art that transcends time and space all from the historic city of Okayama.

Huyghe (the artistic director), entitled this year’s Summit IF THE SNAKE, promising to challenge visitors to rethink what constitutes art exhibitions. IF THE SNAKE is a living entity, through which navigate heterogeneous things, chemical and algorithmic processes, as well as different intelligent life forms. The inherent dynamic characteristics of the worlds, proposed by the artists, and the conditions of their co-presence, endlessly grow particular modes of uncertain and unpredictable continuity.The entity is an infant complex system in formation. People are exposed to its indifference. The exhibition is just one in an infinite possibility, one hypothesis, of its existence.