I Say Yesterday, You Hear Tomorrow. Visions from Japan
Installation view of Junya Oikawa, Voice Landscape –Ta ka ta ka Crickets in the Little Garden, 2018. Sound installation © the artist. Photo by Marco Pavan, Gallerie delle Prigioni.
Exhibition
July - November 2018
Following a new journey through the Imago Mundi project featuring Japan and debuting the Hiroshima / Nagasaki and Ainu Collections, I Say Yesterday, You Hear Tomorrow. Visions from Japan explores how the past is revisited and re-imagined to inspire a brighter future. Starting from the beginning of the atomic age up to today and beyond, the exhibition unveils the various ways in which the dialogue between nature, technology, tradition, and time is interpreted in Japanese contemporary art.
Many pieces within the Imago Mundi collections on display use recurring motifs, such as clocks, radioactive warning signs, the mushroom cloud, or a phoenix. In The View, artist Kou Maeda captures the atom bomb as it hovers between a flying dragon and the city below, suspended in the critical moment between peace and devastation. By bringing these works together in one space, they become reminders of the lessons we can learn from humanity’s prior mistakes.
In Japanese culture, earlier events are used as catalysts for progress and modernization. In roughly seventy years, the nation achieved an economic renaissance and rebuilt society from the ashes of war’s destruction. Exploring this notion further, the exhibition includes the first photographs in Nagasaki after the explosion by Yōsuke Yamahata, the documentary “Nagasaki Journey” by Chris Beaver, and a series of sketches by Katsushika Hokusai.
I Say Yesterday, You Hear Tomorrow presents how the cyclical process of action, reflection, and innovation is juxtaposed with an enduring respect for nature. Elements of traditional Japanese practices are incorporated into the visitor’s journey throughout the building, highlighting the subtle connections between life, ritual, and temporality.
The invited artists – including Nobumichi Asai, the curatorial collective Don’t Follow the Wind, Jacob Hashimoto, Keita Miyazaki, Adoka Niitsu, and Junya Oikawa – respond to historical events and personal narratives, revealing wider changes in society or self-identity.
From installation, painting, video, photography and sculpture, the diverse range of creative techniques draws awareness to collective traumas, evokes nature, raises questions about current national and environmental affairs, experiments with new media, and celebrates the present. In the end, we are asked: what do you truly hear when someone mentions yesterday, or tomorrow? The exhibition invites us to consider our own relationship to time, nature and humanity, and to imagine alternative solutions to the problems of today for a better tomorrow.
- Suzanna Petot, curator
All photos by Marco Pavan, Gallerie delle Prigioni.
