Art In Response To Disaster: Japan At The Venice Biennale

The 55th Venice Biennale International Art Exhibition (June 1 – November 24, 2013) welcomed Japanese media and video installation artist Koki Tanaka. Curated by Mika Kuraya, Tanaka examined the tangible and emotional after effects of the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. We discuss how this was achieved through Tanaka’s experimental work.
Koki Tanaka, A Piano Played by Five Pianists at Once (First Attempt), University Art Galleries, University of California, 2012/ Photo by University Art Galleries, University of California
The 55th Biennale of Art marked Japan’s 30th entry into the internationally renowned contemporary art exhibition. Curator Mika Kuraya, who is the Chief Curator of the Department of Fine Arts at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, commissioned Japanese artist Koki Tanaka to present a Japan which is still recovering from the massive earthquake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear accidents of 2011. Japan’s National Pavilion, with the exhibition organised by The Japan Foundation, depicted the post-quake situation in Japan, and the ways in which the country is gradually recovering.
The official theme of Tanaka’s exhibition is ‘Abstract Speaking – Sharing Uncertainy and Collective Acts’. The work seeks to address the difficulty of perceiving and sharing the problems and pain of others. His installation plan turned the Japan Pavilion into a platform for sharing previous or fictional post-calamity experiences interactively through distinct assignments. Specifically, these assignments placed participants in unusual situations and prompted them to deal with atypical circumstances.
Watch excerpts of five video works by Koki Tanaka for the Venice Biennale:
Examples of devised disaster-style exercises included having a group of people descending the emergency staircase of a high-rise building together as quietly as possible; walking around nighttime streets with flashlights in hand; a ‘collective act’ that mimics evacuating a building in complete darkness; and reconstructing a single piece of pottery using the shards of several broken ones. This aimed to depict the collaboration required among conservators in their attempts to rebuild an object, and acts as a metaphor for the challenges in building a new post-quake society.