Eiko Otake and William Johnston “A Body in Places: Queens Edition”
Topaz Arts
[Image: Eiko Otake at Indian Point Energy Center, New York, photo by William Johnston]
This event has ended.
TOPAZ ARTS presents A Body in Places: Queens Edition – an exhibition by renowned artist Eiko Otake and photographer William Johnston. The exhibition at TOPAZ ARTS presents new images from the photographic series where the collaborators visited Indian Point Energy Center, the nuclear plant in Buchanan, New York in 2016, along with selected images from A Body in Fukushima (2014-16), which shows their extensive work in irradiated areas in Fukushima, Japan after the 2011 nuclear meltdowns. The photographic series accompanied by a movement workshop and live performance by Eiko form a poetic response to disaster and proximity.
TOPAZ ARTS is thrilled to host a live performance by Eiko at 4pm during the exhibition opening reception from 3-6pm. Admission is complimentary.
Free workshop with Eiko: Saturday, May 6, 1-3pm
Only a few spots left for the workshop – please rsvp@topazarts.org
Delicious Movement Workshop is designed for all people who love to move or who want to love to move with delicious feelings. You don’t have to be a dancer to enjoy the experience. The workshop is appropriate to all levels of training and ability. The exercises employ images, body articulation, floor work, and largely slow movement.
“Move to experience a body as part of a landscape and landscape as a body; both breathe and move,” a statement from the Delicious Movement Manifesto, aptly describes Eiko’s A Body in Places. The photographs by Johnston capture Eiko’s movement and gestures among evolving landscapes, from Fukushima, Japan to the Indian Point Nuclear Plant in New York, drawing upon distance and potential disaster as a malleable experience.
Eiko and Johnston met in 2005 and, prior to this artistic collaboration, had co-taught courses in Wesleyan University on the atomic bombings and mountaintop removal mining. Eiko first conceived of the photo project A Body in Fukushima as a part of her fist solo project A Body in Places, which began in October 2014 with a series of three-hour durational performances of A Body in Station at 30th Street Amtrak station in Philadelphia. Eiko had previously visited Fukushima alone in 2011 soon after earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdowns hit the area. She invited Johnston to collaborate.
In 2014, Eiko and Johnston made two extended visits to the irradiated areas surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors, where all residents had been evacuated. Following the abandoned train lines, Eiko and Johnston visited the empty stations and their neighborhoods, places that formerly bustled with life and people. In these locations, Eiko embodies bitter grief, anger and remorse, sometimes in vulnerable gestures and at other times dancing fiercely. They returned to the area again in the summer of 2016 and found many of the places they had visited in 2014 have been radically changed. New sea walls have been built, and many workers have been brought in to clear houses and buildings. They decontaminate the fields and roads. Fukushima has become a very dusty and busy place though people have not returned to live there. The only places left untouched by bulldozers are shrines and forests. Eiko danced in these places that remain highly irradiated.
By placing my body in these places, I thought of the generations of people who used to live there.
Now desolate, only time and wind continue to move. — Eiko Otake
By witnessing events and places, we actually change them and ourselves in ways that may not always be apparent but are important. Through photographing Eiko in these places in Fukushima, we are witnessing not only her and the places themselves,
but the people whose lives crossed with those places. — William Johnston
On May 17, 2016, Eiko and Johnston visited the area surrounding Indian Point Energy Center, nuclear plant in New York and created the images exhibited here, to draw the connection between a disaster far away and a potential disaster close to home.
Media
Schedule
from May 06, 2017 to May 28, 2017