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VisArt_05


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The visionary art of Yamashiro Chikako: perspectives on performing bodies, history, memory, and militarized environments 
Convenor:
Livia Monnet (University of Montreal)
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Format:
Panel
Section:
Visual Arts
:
Auditorium 4 Jaap Kruithof
Sessions:
Saturday 19 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Brussels

Short Abstract:

This panel argues that Yamashiro Chikako’s recent moving-image works present a decolonial rewriting of Okinawa’s history, culture and ongoing colonial domination through an experimental aesthetic that is at once speculative, restorative, and oriented toward socio-environmental justice.

Long Abstract:

The work of Okinawan artist Yamashiro Chikako (b.1976) has in recent years received increasing international recognition. Focusing on Yamashiro’s recent films and installations, this panel argues that her practice is visionary, profoundly political, and transformative. Recreating traumatic historical events such as the 1945 Battle of Okinawa and highlighting the impact of the islands’ double colonization by the US military and by Japan’s statist governance through a surreal or fantastic approach, the artist’s recent moving image works also entail a “speculative edge.” In other words, Yamashiro’s recent experimental practice may be described as a political occurrent art that “speculates on what it can do…(to) … implete a body … with the nature-culture continuum…(or to) … float identity and belonging in variable relations” (Massumi 2019).The panel’s presentations also highlight the decolonial techniques and modes of expression through which Yamashiro’s work reveals at once Okinawa’s lived experience of imperial debris and ecological ruination (Stoler 2013, Santa Ana et.al. 2022) and alternate “ways of transitioning through history” (Massumi 2019).

Focusing on The Body of Condonement (2012) and The Beginning of Creation: Abduction/A Child (2015), Rebecca Jennison argues that these videos’ depiction of the entanglement of performing bodies and the materiality of Okinawan limestone caves points to a relational spacetime underwriting the island culture’s body politic. Ran Ma’s presentation reads Yamashiro’s video installation Reframing (2021) as an eco-fantasy that articulates a speculative (counter)history and futurity of Okinawa through a reworking of the affective force and performativity of the body. Livia Monnet contends that Yamashiro’s recent film Chinbin Western (2019) projects a speculative vision of indigenous resurgence and socioecological restoration through a parodic champurû opera and an ecofeminist reclaiming of female spiritual agency. In a comparative study of Yamashiro’s video Your Voice Came Out Through My Throat (2009) and a selection of anti-war paintings and book illustrations by Shikoku Gorô (1924-2014), Hiroki Yamamoto argues that the work of the two artists provides a powerful response to the vexing question of how the visual arts should preserve and pass down to future generations the unspeakable memory and lived experience of WWII.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Saturday 19 August, 2023, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates