NAGOYA--At the Aichi Triennale 2013, renowned contemporary artists look at the unpredictable nature of our world and society through works that reference the Great East Japan Earthquake.
NAGOYA--At the Aichi Triennale 2013, renowned contemporary artists look at the unpredictable nature of our world and society through works that reference the Great East Japan Earthquake.
With the theme “Awakening--Where are we standing?--Earth, Memory and Resurrection,” the international art festival runs through Oct. 27 in Nagoya and Okazaki, in Aichi Prefecture, covering contemporary arts, performing arts, opera and architecture.
New York-based Alfredo Jaar visited coastal areas in Miyagi Prefecture last year, and the provisional housing in Ishinomaki and disaster-prevention buildings in Minami-Sanriku that he saw served as inspiration for his work. His methodology is to walk around specific places until an idea emerges, he said.
Born in Chile in 1956, Jaar has created many works using photographs and videos to draw attention to social problems. His “Rwanda Project” is based on filming of the 1994 genocide at refugee camps and other sites in Rwanda. He has also shown works with an atomic bombing motif.
He said he was interested in the theme of the ongoing art exhibition as his homeland, Chile, is also a seismic country.
While gathering information for his project, he thought that figures such as the time and date of the earthquake, the number of deaths and missing people, and the height of tsunami were being treated just as data.
He strongly felt that it was his duty to translate the numbers into something evocative.
For example, when he visited a tsunami-hit junior high school, he realized abandoned blackboards in classrooms were telling the length of time children had spent there.
He was provided with 12 blackboards from schools in the disaster areas that were to be closed.
In his installation “Umashimenkana” (We shall bring forth new life), visitors are surrounded by the blackboards hanging on the walls, as if to remind them of what the blackboards had seen while students were facing them during classes.
The title is derived from poet Sadako Kurihara’s famous poem of the same name about a severely injured midwife who helped a young woman give birth to a baby in a dark, crowded room on the night of the atomic bombing on Hiroshima in 1945.
The words “Umashimenkana” appear on the blackboard at regular intervals.
Jaar said the words are a message of hope that everyone can move forward even if they are facing extreme hardship after the earthquake and tsunami.
Aernout Mik, a Dutch video artist, focused on an experience of disaster victims.
In his movie “Cardboard Walls,” Mik recreated an evacuation center, gathering some 500 extras at a hall in Fukushima Prefecture, including some who actually spent days or weeks as evacuees. The film conveys the complex feelings of living away from home.
Not all the works are directly related to the disaster, however.
Taro Igarashi, art director of the festival and professor of architectural history at Tohoku University's Graduate School, said that the exhibition's Japanese title "Yureru daichi" (the shaking Earth) refers to the earthquake, but the organizers wanted it to be interpreted in a wider context as it attracts artists from around the world.
This is part of the reason the organizers gave it the English title “Awakening” with the subtitle “Where are we standing?”
Igarashi said about the present situation: "Social foundations that have been taken for granted are collapsing all over the world, and we are facing a social crisis.”
In his installation “The Senkaku Islands belong to Birds and Fishes,” Hong Kong visual artist Kacey Wong created a floating monitoring post to observe the activities of birds and fish as an art object to illustrate a wariness born out of nationalism.
Unlike the Setouchi International Art Festival, in which contemporary art is viewed amid lush natural surroundings on scenic islands in the Seto Inland Sea, the Aichi Triennale may have difficulty appealing to visitors as it is held in urban venues.
However, Igarashi, the artistic director, says the Aichi festival does have its merits.
“The strong point of this festival is that it conveys a social theme with exhibits being concentrated in two urban museums.”