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.
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...
Edinburgh Castle on the Bin Bag features a model of the Edinburgh castle constructed by using shiny black cards placed on top of an open, full black plastic trash bag...
Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001...
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Seven family members and a cat all squeezed into the small five-room house, where Motoyuki Daifu grew up in Yokohama...
Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...
Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...
Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...
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...
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...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan...
Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013...
Nidhal Chamekh made the first drawings of the ongoing series Mémoire Promise in 2013...
Johanna Calle’s Abece “K” (2011) is part of a series of drawings (compiled into an artist book called Abece ) based on the alphabet...
Birdstones is a series of flat concrete slabs made from moldings of different shapes, each with two small holes...