A Body in Fukushima

Overview

Acclaimed artist Eiko Otake has made five trips to Fukushima in the wake of the 2011 nuclear disaster. Collaborating with William Johnston, a photographer and scholar of Japanese history, Otake’s multidisciplinary project transforms the irradiated landscape into a site for performance. The artist’s movements—in empty train stations, overgrown roads, tsunami-damaged buildings, along broken seawalls, and amidst makeshift memorials—dwell in the residue of life before the meltdown while also charting the passage of time in these inhabitable lands. A Body in Fukushima is culled from tens of thousands of photographs, whose mournful but resolute march creates a “letter to the future.” “My body will carry a piece of Fukushima,” writes the artist, “I hope the [viewer’s] sense of their own distance to Fukushima might also change.”