Group Exhibition "Peaceful Use of Time and Machines"

Thinking about "peace" through the passage of time. A group exhibition by Tamentai.

Based in Hiroshima, Tamentai develops projects that focus on the relationship between artworks and place or space.
YUGEN Gallery will be holding a group exhibition curated by the gallery, featuring four artists: Koji Kato, Noriko Doi, Shinya Yoshida, and Tatsunori Yamaguchi.

Koji Kato has produced works that question how viewers living in the present day can approach the stories of others. The works in this exhibition, which develop a technique using three-dimensional images, are centered around a video piece in which the body of a clock rotates while the position of the hands is fixed, and symbolically trace the periphery of "history" while connecting the clock as an object with personal history.

Noriko Doi has been presenting two-dimensional works of abstract expression with layered structures. The work shown in this exhibition is a new work that develops the silkscreen prints on acrylic boards that she has been working on in recent years, with the motif of a horse and its shadow. This work, which projects the horse's shadow into space, suggests the changes in the relationship between man and horse due to the development of machines and video media.

Yoshida Shinya has left behind images that capture traces of people's activities, such as the history, culture, and climate of the land. The works on display in this exhibition were created in Aomori Prefecture, where Yoshida was born. A fictional narration about the Jomon period jar coffins and spent nuclear fuel excavated in Rokkasho Village tells a multi-layered story of the past of the landscapes captured in the images and photographs.

Tatsunori Yamaguchi has been presenting a series of works depicting conversational relationships with artificial intelligence and robots. In this exhibition, he will be showcasing a group of works that he created driven by his pride and sense of responsibility as an artist who is the third generation of atomic bomb survivors. By confronting the things his grandfather left behind, he will depict his grandfather's "life."

The four artists share an approach that tries to consider a larger story by drawing on personal histories. The expression "peaceful use" has been used as a discourse to belittle the risks that may bring about non-peaceful outcomes in the context of how humanity can handle nuclear energy, which can be used as both a weapon of mass destruction and an energy-efficient source of power. While social life in modern Japan is supported in no small part by such benefits at the expense of the risks of others, in reality, options at the individual level are limited. Therefore, we consider the possibilities of art through curation that attempts a positive "peaceful use" of art, which has also diversified the means of expression and appreciation through the development of science and technology.

Curator Statement

Time continues to tick.

Before the invention of mechanical clocks, humans measured solar time by the movement of shadows. Archaeologists determine relative ages by the decay of radioactive isotopes.

8:15, 11:02, 5:46, 2:46... The clock that has stopped ticking becomes a symbol of the event that stopped time.

It is the law of nature that a shadow leaves no trace, but the intense heat rays of the atomic bomb burned the "shadow of the dead" onto the stone steps. If the painting was born from tracing the outline of the shadow of a lover going off to war, then the roots of art are cruel. In a world situation where absurdity was rampant and the world was in chaos, "Hiroshima" lost the vocabulary and tolerance to accept contradictions. "Peace education" did not teach us about its past as a military city since the Sino-Japanese War, or the time when it tried to build a "city of peace" by promoting the "peaceful use" of atomic energy. Although people appeal for the anti-nuclear movement by saying "the spirit of Hiroshima to the world," I have always seen them tone it down and become hesitant when it comes to discussing Japan's national security position or energy policy.

From cave paintings to media art, art has attempted to preserve fluid traces and convey non-existent existence. Even when the clock stops ticking, society continues to move busily, and images overflow and are eliminated. This leads to the rampant spread of propaganda that innocently spreads images of justice. To counter this, we must confuse the official memory that has been organized in a linear manner. By re-setting the axes of time and space, we must search for a path to the past before it was organized in a single layer.

"Peaceful Use of Time and Machines" aims to dig up crumbling memories of the past and outdated technology, and reactivate them in a perceptible form. To achieve this, the project not only tells the story of Hiroshima in Hiroshima, but also fills the space of Tokyo with a mixture of fact and fictional images and sounds of Hiroshima and Aomori. By playing with order in this way, the project aims to restore our sense of belonging as members of this contradictory society. It tempts us to take such a "gamble."