Video Traces: Nadia Hironaka & Shinpei Takeda
From Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib, Pink Carnations, 2018-19, 9:50 min, 16mm and HD video, sound, color
In August, as the promotion of the Video Letter Exchange between artists Nadia Hironaka, Shinpei Takeda, Hikaru Suzuki and Yu Araki continues as part of our Community of Images project, we are thrilled to present to our members two more works from participating artists Shinpei Takeda and Nadia Hironaka, with her collaborator Matthew Suib. Both works use media as a means of exploring the ways traumatic histories reverberate in the present day, and how our understanding of these events is filtered through images captured, generated or found. Hironaka and Suib’s Pink Carnations (2018-19) is an experimental reflection on the history of the internment of Japanese Americans in the US during World War II, a story of which emerges through a layering of family photos, historical films, home movies, original 16mm footage and oral accounts. Takeda's Atomic Morphology is the record of a performance filmed inside a virtual reality environment whose design was drawn from vocal traces of interviews the artist made with people that have survived the atomic bombing in Japan. Although markedly different in method and style, both films explore the ways in which oral testimony is both fleshed out and refracted by the visual through a shared thematic of resonance and regeneration.
The Video Letter Exchange will be screened at Asia Art Archive in America, New York, on August 1. More viewing options will become available later on.
CCJ’s Community of Images programming is generously supported by Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.
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THE PROGRAM WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR VIEWING ON CCJ’S VIEWING PLATFORM.
This Members Viewing program is supported, in part, by a grant from the Toshiba International Foundation.
Program
Nadia Hironaka & Matthew Suib, Pink Carnations, 2018-19, 9:50 min, 16mm and HD video, sound, color
An experimental reflection of a Japanese American family’s history at an internment camp during World War II. Pink Carnations recalls the lasting effects that fear and racism have when implemented by a government upon its own people.
Through family photos, historical films, home movies, original 16mm footage and oral accounts from family members, Pink Carnations reflects upon the travesties visited upon Japanese Americans during World War II. A deeply poetic experimental film, it spins its narrative outward from a spiraling mirage of mutating garden vegetation. Beneath the surface of this garden are echoes of a past injustice fogged by time, but whose likeness lingers in the present. The voice of a young child tells the story—shaping personal and public history into a future memorial.
Included in the film are excerpts from Topaz, a movie compiled of illegally shot footage by Dave Tatsuno (1913-2006) from within the Topaz internment camp in Utah. It is one of only two amateur home movies in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. A decade after the war had ended and interned Japanese Americans had been released, Tatsuno returned to the site of the camp, as a tourist, and filmed the remains of what had been Topaz.
Music: Kajyadhi Fu Bushi by Jun Arasaki, recording from 1977, courtesy of Em Records.
Shinpei Takeda, Atomic Morphology, 2017, 3:20 min, digital, sound, color
Over the years, Shinpei Takeda has produced a significant body of work devoted to exploring the memory of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in 1945. Atomic Morphology is a moving image piece based on a prior installation entitled Alpha Decay 7: To erase memories, which was produced and exhibited at TJ in CHINA Project Space in Beijing, China in 2012. The installation consisted of ink-on-paper drawings based on the voice vibration of interviews the artist made with people that survived the atomic bombing in Japan. Five years later, the work was reinstalled in a virtual reality space, in which the artist created a virtual object to investigate how his memory of working with these stories morphed and shaped his present self on an atomic level. The work was made in cooperation with the VS VR Media Lab of Professor Jens Herder at University of Applied Sciences in Düsseldorf.
Nadia Hironaka
Nadia Hironaka creates counter-mythologies and post-humanist fables that play out as moving images, immersive installations and environments, and public artworks. She, along with her collaborator, Matthew Suib are recipients of several honored awards including a 2015 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, Pew Fellowships in the Arts, CFEVA, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and are the 2024 Public Works Artists In Residence.Their work has been widely exhibited at venues including, Fondazione MAXXI (Rome), New Media Gallery (Vancouver), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), UCLA Hammer Museum, PS1/MoMA, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the American Philosophical Society. They have been artists-in-residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Banff Centre, Marble House Project, Interlude, and the Millay Colony for Arts. Nadia Hironaka serves as a professor in the Studio Arts low residency graduate program and is the interim department chair of Animation and Game Design at the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Shinpei Takeda
Shinpei Takeda works and lives in San Diego, CA; Tijuana, Mexico; and Düsseldorf, Germany. Takeda is an artist/filmmaker, focuses on highlighting marginalized memories and challenge dominant narratives and perceptions working with a wide array of mediums like installation, film, participatory projects, texts, sound, performance, and Virtual Reality. He is a co-founder of The AJA Project, and has recently returned to the organization as the Executive Artistic Director. Since 2000, he has transformed an all-volunteer nonprofit working with refugee youth using photography to one of the only arts organization focusing on Social Justice in San Diego. He is also a co-founder of Antimonument e.V. another nonprofit in Düsseldorf, Germany, creating various XR projects on the intersections of technology, art and memory.
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s - 1970s
Community of Images: Japanese Moving Image Artists in the US, 1960s-1970s is an exhibition of experimental moving images created by Japanese artists in the U.S. during the 1960s and 70s, an area that has fallen in the fissure between American and Japanese archival priorities. Following JASGP's Re:imagining Recovery Project and its mission to support and engage diverse audiences through Japanese arts and culture in collaboration with local organizations, this project aims to discover, preserve, and present film and video works and performance footage by Japanese filmmakers and artists to the wider public.
This exhibition is on show at Philadelphia Art Alliance from June 14 - August 9.
The project and its online programming is generously supported by the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage & the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Toshiba International Foundation and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts’ Preserving Diverse Cultures grant.