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Japan

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10:00 AM-7:00 PM

Professional Secrets

Exhibition|Diego Tonus’s sculptural series
Curated by Luca Cerizza

  • Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa (Library), Kyoto

  • Admission free

Diego Tonus Studio, Professional Secrets Photo: Diego Tonus Studio

Exhibition view of Professional Secrets at Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa, Kyoto, 2025 Photo: Diego Tonus Studio

On occasion of the public program Art Collaboration Kyoto (ACK) 2025, co-curated by Martin Germann and Kimura Kokoro, the Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa will present Professional Secrets, an exhibition by artist Diego Tonus and curated by Luca Cerizza. The show will feature the latest selection of sculptures from the series, specially installed within the library space.

Professional Secrets is a sculptural series embedding secrets.
Each sculpture in the series is shaped like a contract page, based on a professional secret shared with the artist. It is the result of a negotiation in which the disclosed elements are decided in collaboration with the person involved. In this work, the object, the title, and the secret message shared with the artist form a contract acting as a Confidential Disclosure Agreement.

According to the shared secret, the sculptures are shaped using encoding techniques and encryption algorithms to embed messages using coded languages, ensuring that the story will not be deciphered in the future. The creation of these objects and their patterns are therefore influenced by methods of recognizing visual codes, not only as decorative elements but also as contributors to defining these sculptures as active objects.
 
The result is an ongoing series of hybrid objects conceived as unique pieces, displaying professional secrets that are exposed within the work without being revealed. The use of wooden essences contributes to creating a hybrid object camouflaged within the context in which the work will be displayed.
 
The work culminates in a data bank of concealed secrets, in which the artist collects, processes, and transforms data/secrets, acting as an organization/institution and storing them according to a personal method of archiving as part of a secrecy agreement, ensuring that these stories remain private.

Diego Tonus was in residence at Villa Kamogawa from January to April 2025, through a fellowship supported by the Mondriaan Fund.

With the Support of:
The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands
Mondriaan Fund – the public fund for visual art and cultural heritage
STROOM Den Haag
ACK Art Collaboration Kyoto

Artist

Diego Tonus

Diego Tonus  lives and works in The Hague (NL). 

Within his artistic practice, Diego Tonus focuses on reproduction as a tool to question control systems and power structures by transforming images, objects and collective experiences and presenting their underlying structures of codification and normativity. Tonus’s mix-media practice is based on archiving seen as an obsessive and creative gesture. This method characterizes the artist’s way of observing events, through creating sculptures, photographs, performance and film.

Tonus studied Visual Arts at IUAV University, Venice and at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam. Solo shows and presentations include those at the Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa (2025); Ca’ Pesaro Venice (2024); CSAC Parma (2023); Whitechapel Gallery London (2020); Van Eyck Maastricht (2019); Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (2013). He has participated in group exhibitions internationally including at MAXXI Rome; MAMbo Bologna; Moscow Biennal; WIELS Brussels; Palais de Tokyo Paris; CCA Singapore among others. 
Among his recent publications: From State To State (Electa); Never Again (Mousse Publishing); Fragments of a Conversation with a Counterfeiter (Roma Publications) and The Presidents’ Hammers (Roma Publications).

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