Vanishing from the mainstream headlines, the nuclear catastrophe of Fukushima seems more and more eclipsed from our eyes. Out of sight, out of mind, so would the governments like it to be. If you visit The Japan Times website, you will see at least some information on the ongoing crisis. 'Radioactive beef already sold, eaten'. A few days ago, the headline 'Cesium found in Fukushima cattle feed' outlined in its article that 'the contaminated beef did not reach retailers, the officials said'.
Where are all these headlines in our newspapers?
Yesterday, TEPCO announced that it hopes to reduce the highly radioactive leaks by end of July and to cool the reactors by January 2012. And across the ocean, in America, two nuclear incidents are escalating with minimal press reporting. The Fort Calhoun Nuclear Facility in Omaha, due to be re-licensed until 2030, is being submerged by dangerous flooding, with its surrounding area now designated a 'No Fly Zone' since early June. Meanwhile, in New Mexico, a 93 square mile wild fire approached the Los Alamos' nuclear lab dump site, where an estimated 20,000 55-gallon drums of nuclear waste are being inadequately stored above ground. After burning an acre of lab property, crews are now preparing for flash-flooding in the area triggered by the fire. This would not be the first time that governments, particularly the U.S. Government, withhold data and violate free exchange of information 'for national security purposes'. Sites such as Fort Calhoun and Los Alamos, essentially produce enriched material for nuclear weapons and bombs, holding close ties to the military. In 1959, Boeing Rocketdyne nuclear testing facility released the third greatest amount of radioactive iodine in nuclear history. The incident went unreported for 40 years.
'It is a great error to believe that by making the political choice of its energetic turnaround, Germany is breaking with the European concept of modernity and turning towards an archaic age...What is irrational is not the exit from the nuclear power, but continuing to defend it after Fukushima...refusing to take our lessons from history's experience', says the German sociologist and philosopher Ulrich Beck in Le Monde. And moreover, who wants to trust our future with an industry that keeps its lips so tight?
Presented at Berlin's KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Japanese artist Leiko Uemera proposes an exhibition to reflect on the nuclear cataclysms of the past and present. In turn, works by Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, Boris Mikahilov, Wim Wenders, Yutaka Takanashi and others, explore the conflicts of the nuclear age. Film director Win Wenders' photograph of the Holy Ganjin statue in a temple of the city of Nara, unexhibited to the public, is lit from beneath. As a portrait of a great spiritual leader, Wenders' rendition appears like that of a burnt victim. Today, Leiko Shiga, coming from a small village of 400 people where many lost their homes and took refuge in shelters, presents a photographic diary reportage after the earthquake in Japan. Works from past decades predate today's Fukushima nuclear disaster - or the paradox of a nation once ruined by atomic power adopting it again as source of energy. Product of so-called progress, civilization, points out Uemera. Tomatsu's photograph of a melting watch, damaged by the blast and forever stopped at 11.02am on August 9, 1945, reminds of Japan's wounded past with the war's culmination of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fifty years later, the artists' sense of disaster and warning seem deja vu: the same conflicts between nature, man, progress and economy. The perspectives change but these works can still be looked to for political discussion. With the media's reporting over Fukushima now largely silenced, the problems continue - and what can we turn to then? Photo Yutaka Takanashi and text Sophie Pinchetti
I've known Laetitia Benat since 1996, when she worked as an intern at Purple magazine, where I'm a regular. She was still a student at the Ecole des Beaux Art in Lyon, mostly working with photography and video. One day she showed a close-up photograph of a girl wearing a white plastic bag as a top, which had the words "Thank you" in red across the chest. That simple image became the cover of the summer issue, 11, 1996, and Laetitia became a regular at Purple and began showing in Purple's occasional exhibitions, among others, and expanding her output to drawings, collages and ceramics. The photographs, collages and ceramics in her exhibition and rose again, combine religious symbolism, scientific artifacts, and the worldly New Age as if seen through a spiritualist's prism. A photograph of an evangelical symbol is placed with the still shot of a ceramic cruet; the picture of a monk's vestment is positioned next to that of an Asiatic votive still life; a photograph of one of her handmade ceramic figurine lurches forward in aggressive pantomime alongside a photograph of quietly falling snow over a rooftop, The single image of a pale, nude girl reveals her bobbing on her enfolded arms in serene security at the verge of a stream. These are beautifully shot photographs - beautiful in the sense that they are balanced, nicely proportioned, and carefully ordered. The collages are taken from computer downloads and include color wheels, scientific curios, a nude figure, and hippie-era musicians. The ceramics are somewhat like her pen and pencil drawings, only in 3D. Some are abstract, some have fingerlike tendrils, some have masks, and some are of animals. In all, her images and objects, interiors and environments, and colors and textures, bring to mind terms like simple, significant, and respectful. Laetitia has easy empathy for people and things. She doesn't aim to be hip or controversial. If anything her words are the polar opposite of stridently political art or noisy, sexy, speedy, and cheap, commercial pop art - from the Sixties up to now - simply by not being either political or pop. Her images derive instead from the quiet, inside-outside world of her careful choosing, and are imbued with her almost-Japanese esthetic of reticent gift giving. The gift-giving aspect is especially evident, I think, in her subjects and materials, and in her close-in style of drawing, modeling and photographing - and because Laetitia treats her subjects, objects, and chosen media so intimately. Which, I think, is one of the things that makes her work contemporary or so pertinent now. Text Jeff Rian and Photo Sophie Pinchetti
Banned from public exhibition in France upon its initial release, Un Chant d'Amour was to be the only film created by legendary French writer and political activist Jean Genet. Allegedly made for the private porn collections of wealthy French gays, Genet later disowned the film.
Curated by Jean de Loisy and Ilan Wizgan, Israeli artist Sigalit Landau's political and environmental installation One Man's Floor is Another Man's Feelings
presents a series of video, sculpture and image imbued with symbolic
gesture. Landau's work is set around the lowest place on earth - the
Dead Sea - one that is scene to an ongoing ecological disaster. Pipes
run across the Pavilion's ground floor, in a series of installations
such as The Cave and Water Ladders where these
core irrigation systems stage water as message of life and knowledge, whether
it be frozen, salt, fresh, poison or absent. In her film Salted Lake,
worker's shoes covered in the heavy salt crystals in the water of the
Dead Sea melt into the frozen lake in the revolutionary European city of
Gdansk. In Azkelon, a "knife game" is staged, the title of the
film a hybrid of neighboring towns Aza (Gaza) and Ashkelon which share a
beach though separated by a border. Beyond her installations and most
radical is Landau's unique proposal to the Jordanian and Israeli
governments to construct a bridge that would connect the two
countries across the Dead Sea using salt pillars and crystals. Her
extensive research into water and crystallisation processes would this
time create a crystal bridge, not only serving the borders of
co-existence but also defining a focal space for the political,
ecological and economic crisis. Landau's work becomes the metaphor for
the volatile tensions of the Middle East, one that powerfully progresses
the unbreakable ties between the poles of nature, man and survival. Text Sophie Pinchetti and photo Olivier Zahm
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