I Say Yesterday, You Hear Tomorrow. Visions from Japan

YO SUKE YAMAHATA When the atomic bombs were released on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, few people understood the importance of the event, and the repercussions of a nuclear attack. The 10th of August, the day following the explosion of the bomb, a small team, formed by the twenty-eight years old photographer Yusuke Yamahata, the writer Jun Higashi and the painter Eiji Yamasa, was sent by the Japanese army to report the devastation of Nagasaki. The pictures were to be used for the military propaganda. In only one day, from sunrise until dawn, getting closer to the epicenter of the explosion, Yamahata took over 100 pictures, creating the most significant documentation that has ever been proposed for such a happening. The selection of pictures here displayed shows the desolated landscape seen by the eyes of the young photographer while he was going towards the detonation point. Once completed the task he was assigned, probably shocked by what he saw, Yamahata decided not to send the film to the News and Information Bureau which had commissioned the work. The pictures were published in 1952 in the monography Atomized Nagasaki.

MASAHIRO USAMI Hayashi Yuriko Hiroshima, 2014 —C-type print Courtesy of the artist and Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo Originally just a hobby, Usami’s photographic series became more socially engaged after the 2011 disaster. Each image, inspired by Buddhist mandala paintings, features a central figure surrounded by the people and things relating to their world. Taken in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, this image portrays Hayashi Yuriko – Chairperson of the Kyochiku-kai Association of Survivors – occupying the intermediary space between past and present. The right side of the image depicts Hiroshima at the time of the bomb, while on the left, babies, natural elements, and members of Hayashi’s family represent the future and the city’s revival.

SHU TAKAHASHI La goccia nel blu, 1970 —Nitro enamel paint on canvas Courtesy Agiverona Collection Takahashi’s works combines traditional Japanese painting with contemporary pictorial practice. He seeks to synthesize the flat and homogeneously painted qualities of Japanese drawings with the notion of the canvas as more than just a supporting structure. Takahashi is not an emotive or symbolic painter. His abstraction is perceptive and spiritual, with bright chromes that harken back to Japanese philosophic traditions.

Susanna Petot, curator of I SAY YESTERDAY, YOU HEAR TOMORROW. VISIONS FROM JAPAN, with Lavinia Colonna Preti, member of Treviso City Council. From installation, painting, video, photography and sculpture, the diverse range of creative techniques draws awareness to collective traumas, evokes nature, raises questions about current national and environmental affairs, experiments with new media, and celebrates the present. In the end, we are asked: what do you truly hear when someone mentions yesterday, or tomorrow? The exhibition invites us to consider our own relationship to time, nature and humanity, and to imagine alternative solutions to the problems of today for a better tomorrow.

NOBUMICHI ASAI INORI – we pray all nukes will eternally disappear from the world (2017/08/06), 2017 —Video installation, 3:06 min Courtesy of the artist and Hatis Noit [music/cast]. Asai’s innovative practice combines advertising, design, art, and programming. This video was “dropped” on the Internet on 6 August 2017 at 8:15 am, the same date and time as the Hiroshima atomic bombing in 1945. The work’s central element is a device developed by the artist that visualizes radioactivity. The subject’s face is completely covered with projected dots of light, illustrating the overwhelming destruction of nuclear power in both the initial explosion and the ensuing radiation.