A collaboration between the Royal Geographical Society and the Munich Centre for Technology in Society, Picturing the Invisible brings together six celebrated photographers to examine the legacy of the 2011 North East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. This exhibit provides an intimate portrait of the people rebuilding their lives in the affected territories, celebrating their efforts to reclaim their heritage in the wake of a historic disaster.

The photographs are complimented by a series of short essays, provided by policymakers, experts, and citizen scientists united by their deep engagement with the triple disaster. This exhibition program will be hosted on a dedicated website which will launch 25 September 2021.

Artists:
Masamichi Kagaya, Yoi Kawakubo, Giles Price, Lieko Shiga, Thom Davies, Rebecca Bathory
Essayists:
Sir David Warren (former-British Ambassador to Japan), Prof. Sheila Jasanoff (Harvard), Prof. Richard Samuels (MIT), Prof. Kyoko Sato (Stanford), Prof. Kohei Watanabe (Teikyo), Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby (Oxford), Prof. Maxime Polleri (Laval), Prof. Jacques Lochard (ICRP)

Biographies of selected artists are provided below:

Lieko Shiga is a photographer based in Kitakama, a village hit hard by the tsunami. In her capacity as the unofficial ‘village photographer’, she responded to the disaster in two ways: sorting, cleaning, and returning family photos recovered from the wreckage; and producing a series of haunting works titled The Spiral Shore, infusing her own experiences into her surreal portraits and mystical landscapes. Shiga’s work has won a series of coveted awards, including the Tokyo Contemporary Award, the Kimura Ihei Award, the Higashikawa Prize, and the International Centre of Photography’s Infinity award. Her work has been widely exhibited at venues including MoMA, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Centre Pompidou-Metz, Metz. https://www.liekoshiga.com

Yoi Kawakubo buries silver halide film in the contaminated soils of Fukushima’s exclusion zone to produce a powerful series of abstracts, titled If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst in the skies at once. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and the National Art Centre, Tokyo. Among other accolades, Yoi won the 2015 Ohara Museum of Art Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Shiseido Art Egg Prize and the 2012 Sovereign Asian Art Prize (Hong Kong). https://www.yoikawakubo.com

Masamichi Kagaya turns radiation into art, photographing the contamination of plants and everyday objects in their Autoradiograph series. This work has been exhibited at more than 25 locations on three continents, been featured in 15 publications, and has garnered considerable critical attention, receiving the 2017 Fujifilm Award and an Honorary Mention in Prix Ars Electronica 2017. https://www.autoradiograph.org/en/