A sensation of familiarity in the face of a new experience, as if it had already been lived through. Commonly known as déjà vu, such sensations suddenly emerge in the fleeting moments of everyday life. While often attributed to the information processing or cognitive systems of the brain, the triggers and circumstances that give rise to this sort of an out-of-place sense of familiarity are diverse, which means that even contemporary science finds its mechanisms elusive. The paradoxical recognition of the new as familiar destabilizes what we take for granted, calling into question the reliability of memory and the continuity of the self.

This exhibition takes déjà vu as its point of departure to present a selection of works from the collection of the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Responding to a wide range of phenomena and themes, from personal memory to social transformation, artists have explored complex modes of perception that oscillate between the individual and the collective, memory and record, lived experience and virtual experience. A diverse range of approaches can be observed among this selection of artworks, including the interweaving of reality and fiction, the repetition of motifs and gestures, or dialogues with pre-existing imagery.

In recent years, our daily lives have been saturated not only with an overwhelming influx of information, but also with images, texts, and sounds generated from existing material through technologies such as AI. These processes exert an increasing influence on the very mechanisms by which we experience familiarity and recognition. Déjà vu may no longer refer solely to an inexplicable phenomenon that occurs within the individual psyche: it is becoming embedded in the fabric of our cultural environment.

The act of becoming attuned to the contradictions and dissonances that lie beneath the phenomenon of déjà vu may serve as a key to extending our sense of self and memory beyond the individual — outwards across cultural, regional, and linguistic boundaries — and producing resonances across different people, objects, places, and temporalities.