What happened in Hiroshima? What is happening in the world - 2023.8.2
「第11回広島賞受賞記念 アルフレッド・ジャール展」が広島市現代美術館で開幕。 広島の地に根ざした作品を中心に、ジャーナリズムの視点から世界の現状を問う展覧会。 ショーは2023年10月15日まで開催されます。(English) The 11th Hiroshima Prize Award Commemorative Alfredo Jaar Exhibition opens at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. Focusing on works rooted in the land of Hiroshima, the exhibition questions the current state of the world from a journalistic perspective. The show runs until 15 October 2023.
What happened in Hiroshima? What is happening in the world? See Alfredo Jaar's signpost at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art - 2023.8.2
The 11th Hiroshima Prize Award Commemorative Alfredo Jaar Exhibition opens at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. Focusing on works rooted in the land of Hiroshima, the exhibition questions the current state of the world from a journalistic perspective. The show runs until 15 October 2023.
//Summary - Level-C2//
The 11th Hiroshima Prize Award Commemorative Alfredo Jaar Exhibition at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art showcases the works of Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. The exhibition, influenced by the history of Hiroshima, explores global social, political, and humanitarian issues through various mediums. Jaar's works, such as "Tell Me How to Survive Our Madness" and "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima," provoke thought about the tragedies of war, the world's fragility, and hope for future generations. The exhibition also features works highlighting the global refugee crisis and the responsibilities of modern imagery.
A)
1)
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020, Jane Goodall said:
"Each of us has an impact on the planet every day. The size of that impact depends on the choices we make. How was it made, is it not damaging the environment, is there animal cruelty, is there child slavery because it is cheap?"
There are countless things to think about. By thinking like this and making wise choices, the collective efforts of people will move the world forward for the better.
B)
In 2023, Jah won the 11th Hiroshima Prize, established in 1989 by the city of Hiroshima, in the hope of lasting world peace. The exhibition commemorating this event was scheduled to take place in 2020.
Still, it was postponed for three years due to the spread of the new coronavirus and the renovation of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art.
The venue, Hiroshima, strongly influences the context of this exhibition. Jah said, "I didn't study art; I studied architecture. You could say I'm an architect who makes art. I built this exhibition out of that experience.
C)
First, "Tell Me How to Survive Our Madness" (1995-2023) is displayed in the corridor leading from the entrance to the venue.
The title of this work is taken from the title of a collection of short stories in which Kenzaburo Oe translated a passage from WH Oden's poem, and the words are expressed as neon signs.
Jah has already produced several works of the same name. His first work was created in 1995 when Jaa encountered Oe's work while doing jobs for the 50th-anniversary exhibition "After Hiroshima" at the same museum.
This work also expresses Oe's thoughts that his generation caused the tragedy of dropping the atomic bomb and that he is entrusting the next generation to overcome this failure and create a new world.
It shows that the nature of Hiroshima, the first city in the world to experience the atomic bomb, forms the basis of Jah's exhibition.
D)
When you arrive at the venue, you will find the work of the same title in the corridor, Teach Me How to Survive Our Madness (1995-2023).
This expresses Oe's message in English, and it is said that Jah came up with the typeface.
The design, in which the width of the letters gradually widens and narrows towards the end of the word, contains the question of how to keep one's sanity in a world where madness is spreading.
E)
The work "Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fukushima" (2020), in which three clocks are displayed at the end of the dark room, gives more concreteness to the message of this exhibition.
The three clocks indicate the time of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the time of the Great East Japan Earthquake.
F)
In this work, only the second hand continues to move, but its movement seems fragile and unsettling. It is said that 14 nuclear weapons are enough to destroy the world, but there are currently over 12,000 nuclear warheads worldwide.
The movement of this second hand conveys the fragility of the world we live in today.
"Reborn (2023) " uses a Nixie tube to convey tragedy as numbers through its flickering. A Nixie tube projects a number that counts down to zero. "It represents death," says Jah of the moment the number reaches 0.
G)
After the number reaches 0, " Umashimamenka '' comes to mind. This is a passage from Sadako Kurihara's poem about a new life born two days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, where a midwife received it in the basement of a building overflowing with victims.
This word, which expresses the strong will to "make it happen no matter what", conveys the hope of creating life even in the tragedy of death when the count reaches zero.
H)
"Hiroshima, Hiroshima (2023)" is a work in which images of the city of Hiroshima taken by a drone are projected onto a large screen.
The video eventually becomes a shot of the Atomic Bomb Dome from directly above, and the camera slowly approaches the dome, which is now only a skeleton.
I)
Finally, when the screen is raised, a circulator on the other side blows a strong wind towards the audience.
Visitors looking at beautiful images of the city of Hiroshima, which somehow lack a sense of reality, suddenly have a powerful experience through their bodies. Using nuclear weapons awakens the imagination of a nightmare that is not a memory of the past.
J)
"Music (Everything I know I learned the day my son was born)" (2013-2014/2020-2023) is a work exhibited in one of the spaces symbolic of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, "Kotei".
K)
Maple trees, the prefectural tree of Hiroshima, are planted in the centre of the room filled with green light. A digital clock showing the current time is installed on the garden wall.
This is a birth cry recorded at a maternity hospital in Hiroshima, and the voice is played when the child is born.
L)
This work embodies the message in jobs such as "Teach Me How to Survive Our Madness" and "Reborn". It contains a simple wish to entrust hope to future generations from the generation of tragedy.
All the works exhibited so far have been inspired by the land of Hiroshima. On the other hand, at the end of this exhibition, three works selected from Jah's previous results will be exhibited, posing the universal problems that occur in countries and regions worldwide and are contemporary.
100 Nguyen (1994) was made in 1991 by Jia, who arrived in Hong Kong as a boat person when refugees from Vietnam were flooding into the city.
Four photographs of the changes in the expression of a girl named Nguyen Thi Thuy, whom Jia met in a refugee camp in Hong Kong, are arranged in different orders to show the natural face of one refugee girl and the other.
There is a line of sight. The number of refugees worldwide is still growing and is estimated to be around 110 million. It reminds us that these are not just numbers but countless people with different facial expressions, as this photograph captures.
M)
"Sound of Silence (2006) is a structure in which LED lights are lined up and emit intense light. It can be entered from the back, where a film about Kevin Carter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning South African photojournalist whose photograph of a huddled starving child as a vulture watches, is shown.
A look at the life of Carter, whose photo was published in the newspaper, then denounced and finally committed suicide under a blazing LED light, makes us think about the responsibilities that modern images create.
N)
The final work in the exhibition, Shadows (2014), is an installation centred around a series of photographs taken by Dutch photojournalist Kuhn Wessing in Nicaragua in 1978 after the murder of a farmer.
Six contact sheets are displayed in the first room, showing people being arrested, a dead man and people mourning his death.
O)
The final photograph in the series, of two daughters mourning the death of their father, is displayed in a separate room after being stretched to the size of a wall.
Jah cuts these two girls out of her photographs and impresses those who see them by making their silhouettes intensely luminous. The moment the picture is taken, he imprints the sadness and suffering in the hearts of the visitors to this exhibition.
P)
Chile, where Jah lived until 1982, was under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet until the 1990s. Behind these dictatorships, as in many Latin American countries, was the interference of the United States under the guise of anti-communism, against which the people secretly built a resistance movement for freedom and equality.
I continued. At the root of Jah's journalistic eye, which can be felt throughout the exhibition, must be at least a small part of his experience of the situation in his hometown.
On the other hand, while Japan experienced two atomic bombings, it achieved economic development under the US nuclear umbrella and established its current international position. However, 78 years after the war's end, have the sadness and anger of the massacres caused by the overwhelming violence of the atomic bombings passed on?
Q)
Jah's works in this exhibition are full of tricks that awaken the viewer's eyes, and it seems to be a message to the Japanese who have visited this place. Ōe, whom Jah quoted at the beginning of the exhibition, expressed his thoughts on anti-war and anti-nuclear weapons throughout his life.
In any case, I would like you to experience, think and talk in this place.
What happened in Hiroshima? What is happening in the world? See Alfredo Jaar's signpost at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art - 2023.8.2
https://bijutsutecho.com/magazine/news/report/27556