Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Throughout the series of sixty C-prints, Hatakeyama’s photographs depict scenes of torn landscapes and leveled homes, demolished villages and massive piles of detritus pummeled beyond recognition. The images serve as records of disaster, seemingly driven by an intense need to bear witness to collective trauma. Hatakeyama’s photographs, however, emerged from a painful and personal grief: the series focuses on the near-destruction of the artist’s hometown, an event which resulted in both his mother’s death and the deaths of many friends and neighbors. Rikuzentakata bears the ethical weight and responsibility of photojournalism even as its genesis comes out of a deeply felt loss and the ambiguity of survivor’s guilt. Hatakeyama suggests that what’s lost can never be fully recovered, but that with time, those wounds can slowly heal and life can begin again.
Naoya Hatakeyama is one of Japan’s leading contemporary photographers. His work frequently explores the relationship between natural and built environments, and he is particularly invested in examining how urbanization produces violent effects in surrounding landscapes. In 2012, Hatakeyama was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at SFMOMA titled Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories, an exhibition of large-scale photographs centered around themes of nature, destruction, and human will. His photographs have been acquired by many international collections such as the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Swiss Foundation for Photography, Winterthur; la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524...
Italy donates replica of Bull of Nimrud destroyed by Isis to Iraq Art market Museums & heritage Exhibitions Books Podcasts Columns Technology Adventures with Van Gogh Search Search Heritage news Italy donates replica of Bull of Nimrud destroyed by Isis to Iraq The 3D-printed reproduction of the Assyrian statue was previously displayed at the Colosseum in Rome and the Unesco headquarters in Paris James Imam 9 February 2024 Share The replica of the Bull of Nimrud at the Colosseum © Museo Archaeologico del Colosseo Italy has donated a reconstructed Assyrian statue to Iraq in what has been described as a “miracle of Italian cultural diplomacy”...
Weekly Picks: Indonesia (12 - 18 November 2018) | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Weekly To Do November 12, 2018 Top Picks of Indonesia art events in Bali, Bandung and Jakarta from 12 – 18 November 2018 If you’re in Bali, swing by the exhibition “Efek Samping” part of the Futuwonder Project : Masa Subur ...
Stolen Syrian art funds international terrorism – Why aren’t we talking about it? – Annenberg Media Skip to main content Arts, Culture & Entertainment Stolen Syrian art funds international terrorism – Why aren’t we talking about it? Stories about the trafficking of blood antiquities across an international black market don’t often appear in the average person’s news diet; Stories about the terrorist organizations that these antiquity sales fund do, though...
Pay and Display is a film of a performance, for which there was no audience, staged in the multistory Pershore Street car park in Birmingham, a brutalist building, arguably one of the most inhospitable environments for a musical performance...
Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78 - The New York Times Movies | Nancy Buirski, Award-Winning Documentary Filmmaker, Dies at 78 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/01/movies/nancy-buirski-dead.html Share full article Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Nancy Buirski, an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning documentary filmmaker whose eye was honed as a still photographer and picture editor, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan...
“Medium Rare”, “God or Dog” and the makings of a Singaporean monster | ArtsEquator Thinking and Talking about Arts and Culture in Southeast Asia Articles Courtesy of Asian Film Archive August 26, 2019 By Alfonse Chiu (1,700 words, 7-minute read) Content warning: References to violent or disturbing behaviour In late January 1981, the body of a young girl was discovered in a brown PVC bag about a metre high by a young man in Toa Payoh...
The Ballad of Special Ops Cody by Michael Rakowitz is a serio-comic stop motion animated film in which an everyday African-American G...
‘Tattoos are not a crime’ – how Iranian tattoo artists are leaving an indelible mark on a society that is slowly coming to accept body ink | South China Morning Post Advertisement Advertisement Art + FOLLOW Get more with my NEWS A personalised news feed of stories that matter to you Learn more An Iranian man shows his tattoos in Iran’s capital, Tehran...
Untitled (Wheelchair Drawing) is a ten-foot photo transfer of the image of a wheelchair with burning embers in its seat...