Finger Pointing Worker

Film & Video (Film & Video)

During Summer 2011, few months after the nuclear accident, performance artist Kota Takeuchi got a job at the Fukushima Daiichi plant and kept a blog about the labour conditions of clean-up workers. In 2012, he exhibited an ‘anonymous’ video taken from the 24-hour live feed on TEPCO’s website that monitored the clean-up activities. The video, which then went viral in Japan and became known as the “Finger Pointing Worker”, captured someone in a protective suit, entering the frame and pointing his finger at the video surveillance installed by TEPCO on the nuclear plant site.

Halil Altindere

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Wonderland is a music video for the Turkish hip-hop group Tahribad-I Isyan (Rebellion of Destruction). The young hip-hop artists respond with anger and defiance to their forced expulsion from Sulukule, a historic Roma settlement in Istanbul, due to a redevelopment project. Their lyrics address issues of gentrification and inequality, while their actions show the possibilities for both violent and artistic rebellion.

Akira Takayama

Film & Video (Film & Video)

In Akira Takayama’s work Happy Island – The Messianic Banquet of the Righteous , five video screens perpendicular to the floor feature footage of cows grazing and resting in the rolling hills of a farmland. Renamed ‘The Farm of Hope’ by owner Masami Yoshizawa, the property is located 14 kilometers away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, and is part of a now restricted area that became highly contaminated with radiation after an earthquake and tsunami caused leaks from the plant in 2011. Most of the livestock in the restricted areas have either starved to death after being abandoned by their owners or have suffered from the effects of radiation.