“The Radiants” Exhibition

Bortolami

poster for “The Radiants” Exhibition

This event has ended.

Curated by UNITED BROTHERS and Jacob King.

Bortolami and Green Tea Gallery present The Radiants, an exhibition organized by UNITED BROTHERS and Jacob King. Coinciding with the fourth anniversary of the earthquake and resulting crisis at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, this exhibition features new and
historical work by over twenty artists.

In physics, radiation describes the transmission of energy in the form of waves or particles moving
through space, traveling outward in all directions. An extremely broad category, it encompasses
both ionizing radiation (such as x-rays and gamma rays) which can cause atoms to gain or lose electrons,
breaking chemical bonds and dangerously altering vital biochemical molecules like DNA, as well as
weaker, non-ionizing radiation (such as visible light, infrared light, and microwaves), which mainly
generates heat.

Reflecting the multifarious nature of radiation — and both the ubiquity and anxiety which surround this
largely invisible force — the works in this show take on multiple forms and dispositions. Included here are
paintings by Enrico Baj from the postwar Arte Nucleare movement; drawings by Tatsuo Ikeda made in
response to the Lucky Dragon incident of 1954; Robert Barry’s “0.5 Microcurie Radiation Installation”
from 1969; a group of “photographs” which Sigmar Polke created by exposing photo-sensitive paper to
Uranium ore; a Michael Smith video from 1983 in which he follows instructions for building a
government-approved home fallout shelter/snack bar; and a painting which the Japanese
collective Chim↑Pom “added” without permission (in May 2011) to Taro Okamoto’s “Myth of Tomorrow,”
a mural in Tokyo’s Shibuya subway station that allegorizes the bombing of Hiroshima.
These works are presented together with new works made specifically for the show, which engage with
radiation and its effects and abstractions: Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda have made a painting using a
technical Nano Prussian Blue pigment developed to absorb radioactive material; Sergei
Tcherepnin uses a recording of a Geiger counter at Fukushima as the basis for a new sound
installation; Amy Sillman presents a new work which references various dreams related to encounters
with radiation (e.g. from medical devices); Ei Arakawa contributes a group of floor lamps modeled on the
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors after the incident; and a young artist and writer from Tokyo, Erika
Kobayashi, presents an installation related to her grandmother and Japanese research on radiation
during World War II.

Also on view are a variety of works that do not specifically thematize radiation or Fukushima, but which,
brought into this context, expand and complicate the dialogue around energy and abstraction (and the
visible and invisible.) These include paintings and sculptures by Richard Aldrich, Kerstin Brätsch,
Leidy Churchman, Jutta Koether, Sam Lewitt, Nora Schultz, and Anicka Yi.

Green Tea Gallery Worldwide was founded in 2011 by Ei Arakawa, a New York-based artist, and his
brother Tomoo Arakawa, who owns three tanning salons in and around Fukushima. As a response to the
crisis, Green Tea Gallery initiated a dynamic exchange between Fukushima and the international art
world, inviting foreign artists to engage with the representations and realities of the situation while, at the
same time, leveraging structures of the art world to bring relatives from Fukushima into new situations
and wider discourse. (Tomoo received compensation money from the power company after the disaster,
which he and Ei have used to produce work under the moniker UNITED BROTHERS.) Projects have
included a pop-up at the Arakawas’ cousin’s house in Kanagawa, Japan, a presentation at a friend’s
studio in Brooklyn, an office in Paris, a residency on the Big Island of Hawaii, and a booth at the Frieze
Art Fair in London, in which their mother cooked soup for visitors with vegetables grown in the vicinity of
Fukushima (“Does This Soup Taste Ambivalent?”). Masquerading as a global commercial enterprise, this
exhibition marks Green Tea Gallery’s Chelsea debut.

Please note that on March 11th the gallery will be closed, as a symbolic announcement of Don’t Follow
the Wind, a conceptually “inaccessible” international exhibition happening in the evacuated exclusion
zones in Fukushima with contributions from a number of international artists.

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