MAR 10, 2017 - APR 4, 2017
This exhibition showcases works that herald a significant shift from the fetishistic silence, ruin, and unspeakable destruction that the tsunami and nuclear radiation have inspired across numerous artworks produced on the theme since 3.11. Japanese artists Yuki Iwanami and Kishi Kota have no interest in posthumous homage or purely poetic conjuring. Instead, they take on disaster through love, pseudo-architecture, and fiction. Their explorations of elemental human acts intimately linked with how people use land reveal precisely what could have been possible had nuclear cataclysm been kept at bay.
Parenthetically, the exhibition juxtaposes 3.11 with the little known but longstanding disaster of Japanese poverty, erased from exports of quirky Japanese culture and sophisticated electronic merchandise, addressing deceptively simple questions along the way.
What does love look like after the apocalypse? How do the unsung and disenfranchised mark a place? Is recovery at all worth the trouble?
Since the 1860s, when photography first met landscapes in Japan, cataclysm and erasure have occupied a special place in its photographic imagination, perhaps natural in a land where earthquakes and tsunamis visit often. However, it might well be that Japan also constitutes the permanent address of unforeseen unnatural disaster — attested by the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945. Indeed, if adversity wields a seductive magic in the Japanese imaginary, so does the power of its nemesis. However insidious the adversity, the resilient Japanese will emerge out of the depths and shine, as they have done since 1945. This is what we have been led to believe.
Pretty as it is, this delusion has been shattered since 3.11.
On 11 March 2011, a monster tsunami set off by the 9.0 magnitude Great East Japan earthquake, or 3.11, demolished entire towns along hundreds of kilometres on Japan’s northeastern coastline. Claiming over 20,000 lives across various prefectures (provinces), about 2,500 still missing, the tsunami also triggered a triple nuclear meltdown at the TEPCO-operated Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima prefecture on 14 March, 2011. The flight of 160,000 from their homes catalysed worldwide debates and protests about the human and ecological cost of nuclear energy. Meanwhile nuclear radiation still seeps into sea and soil in and around the nuclear plant in Fukushima, and dozens of kilometres away. The unliveable evacuated 20 km exclusion zone around the nuclear plant is peppered with ghost towns. What this double disaster (tsunami and radioactivity) means for the evacuees of the exclusion zone is to never return home.
The talk will offer a contemporary view of nuclear landscapes in contemporary photography from Canada, Australia, and India, and discuss what it means to create socially and politically-engaged images of landscapes in the wake of the 2011 nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, Japan.
Venue: FOCUS Hub @ Ministry of New, Kitab Mahl
Curious to know more about the FOCUS Photography Festival in Mumbai? Join us for a free coffee and a tour of the exhibition in the Museum with curator Prajna Desai tomorrow at 10:30 am!
Sign up for our Camera Obscura workshop and learn how to build a hand-held pinhole camera!! Conducted by Michael Cutts, Curator of Education activities for FOCUS Photography Festival.
Age Group: Open to all over 15
The Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai City Museum seeks to serve the community as an Institution dedicated to excellence in cultural education through exhibitions and unique visual and intellectual media
An Institution of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai. Supported by the Jamnalal Bajaj Foundation. Restored by INTACH, Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage
Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum
Veermata Jijabai Bhosale Botanical Udyan and Zoo (Rani Baug),
91/A, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar Road,
Byculla East Mumbai 400027 India
T: +91 22 23741234
10:00 am - 5:30 pm
Closed on all Wednesdays and select public holidays.
