With this year marking a decade since the Great East Japan Earthquake, Contemporary Art Gallery, Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki Prefecture presents Artists and the Disaster: Imagining in the 10th Year. The museum, which suffered earthquake damage and served temporarily as an evacuation center, displays the work of seven artists/art groups. Their work includes but goes beyond documentation, having expanded with time to encompass creative responses and imaginings of the future.
The first room presents a white curtain with a timeline of disaster-related events since the earthquake up through this year. Also exhibited are works by Haruka Komori + Natsumi Seo, a duo that has spent years in Iwate and Miyagi Prefectures documenting people’s lives and experiences. Seo’s texts recounting stories and her sketches portraying the changing landscapes are displayed in vitrines around the room, while videos by Komori showing reconstruction developments are mounted on the wall. The juxtaposition of