More than a decade after the second-worst nuclear disaster in history, engineers want to construct a huge water-filled tank around one of the damaged reactors and carry out underwater dismantling work.
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
Fukushima nuclear disaster: An artist s view 10 years later
Japanese artist and filmmaker Hikaru Fujii told DW about the importance of embedding the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in public memory.
Ten years ago, the Japanese prefecture witnessed an earthquake and tsunami that triggered an accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant, causing a nuclear disaster whose effects were only preceded by those in Chernobyl in 1986.
In its aftermath, artist and filmmaker Hikaru Fujii documented the political and ecological crisis that resulted from the collapse of the nuclear plant. Fuji, who believes that artistic production implies a close relationship between history and society, created the project Les nucléaires et les choses in 2019, in which he reconstructed the history of the affected places, focusing on the consequences of the disaster and discussing the memory of the catastrophe.
Artists reflect on the Fukushima disaster, 10 years later
A museum south of the exclusion zone features works by Japanese artists who deal with the disaster in their works, while trying to establish a culture of remembrance for coming generations. Artists and the Disaster: Imagining in the 10th Year
By organizing the exhibition Artists and the Disaster: Imagining in the 10th Year, the art center in the city of Mito (photo), which suffered damage from the earthquake of 2011, looks back on the catastrophe one decade later through the eyes of Japanese artists.
Enchanting landscapes in the exclusion zone
In his works, artist Akira Kamo paints the ambivalence of post-disaster scenery in nuclear exclusion zones: beautiful landscapes where no one can enter because of the risks of contamination from radioactive substances. This painting from 2019 is titled: Standing Near Kitaide, Namiemachi, Futaba District, Fukushima Prefecture.
Environmental groups say the crippled nuclear plant's decommissioning effort is hopeless. Some local people fear it is not safe to return to communities that were beneath the radioactive plume.