NYAB Event - “Sights and Sounds: Japan” Exhibition

“Sights and Sounds: Japan” Exhibition

The Jewish Museum

This event has ended.

In 2011 Japan was shaken to its core when an immense earthquake and the tsunami caused a nuclear accident in Fukushima. We realized that, despite having experienced the devastation of nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki some seventy years earlier, we had grown increasingly indifferent to the environment and placed too much emphasis on modernization and economic development. For the subsequent five years the country has grappled with the huge question of where to go from here. Overwhelmed by the crisis at the outset, local artists gradually faced the reality of the situation and the challenges it posed. They began to reconsider history and embrace social and political subjects. The moving image functions as a mirror, reflecting their urgent, critical pursuits.

The artists shown here examine history and other grand narratives with a focus on familiar, personal events in a human scale. Their approach, whether documenting a performance or the process of artistic production itself, is rooted in their own bodies. The works are not defined by a declarative, regional framework, but are instead abstract and expansive, so that anyone can share in the experience, triggering the viewer’s imagination. They are imbued with a transnational perspective that resists closure.

Yukie Kamiya
Curator

Yukie Kamiya (b. Kanagawa Prefecture, 1967) is Gallery Director of the Japan Society, New York. She was previously Chief Curator of the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2007–15) and Associate Curator of the New Museum in New York (2003–5). Kamiya has also served on the advisory boards of the Yokohama Triennial 2014; Parasophia 2014, Kyoto; and Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong (2011–13). Her writing has appeared in Creamer (Phaidon, 2010), among other international publications.

Media

• Video installation

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