“Can You Get Anyone to Care?” Curating an Exhibition on the Great East Japan Earthquake, Tsunami, and Nuclear Disaster during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Although COVID-19 has commonly been narrated as an impediment to the arts, I argue that it also offered exciting new opportunities to engage audiences with exhibitions focus on public health crises. In this article, I reflect on my experience of curating Picturing the Invisible with students at Technical University Munich (TU Munich) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Organized in memory of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, the exhibition was shown at the Royal Geographical Society, London (October till December 2021) during the so-called “second wave” and at TU Munich (June 2022) amid the rise of the Omicron Variant. Departing from the common tendency to narrate events as having been successfully organized despite the pandemic, this paper presents the virus as co-creating—perhaps even co-curating—the exhibition. To do so, I provide a brief overview of Picturing the Invisible, before going on to analyze the role that the virus played in calling me to organize this project (as both a researcher and as a lecturer), how it has made it logistically possible, and how it presented new opportunities to engage foreign audiences with the experience of Japan’s triple disaster.

 

新冠肺炎常常被认为是艺术的障碍。但我认为, 新冠肺炎也提供了令人兴奋的新机遇, 让观众参与公共卫生危机展览。本文回顾了我在疫情期间与德国慕尼黑工业大学学生共同策划《拍摄隐形事物》展览(Picturing the Invisible)的经历。该展览旨在纪念2011年日本东部大地震、海啸和核灾难, 于“第二波”疫情期间(2021年10月至12月)在伦敦皇家地理学会展出, 并于奥密克戎变异上升期间(2022年6月)在慕尼黑工业大学展出。与“疫情肆虐、但是活动仍然成功组织”的常见叙述不同, 本文认为, 病毒共同创造了(甚至是共同策划)该展览。为此, 我简要介绍了《拍摄隐形事物》, 分析了病毒呼吁我组织展览(作为研究人员和讲师)的作用、病毒如何在逻辑上实现这一目标、以及病毒如何为吸引外国观众了解日本的三重灾难提供了新的机遇。

 

Aunque el COVID-19 comúnmente ha sido narrado como un impedimento para las artes, sostengo que aquel ofreció también nuevas y excitantes oportunidades para atraer la atención pública, con exposiciones centradas en las crisis de la salud pública. En este artículo, reflexiono sobre mi experiencia como curadora de Picturing the invisible con estudiantes de la Universidad Técnica de Múnich (TU Múnich), durante la pandemia del COVID-19. Organizada en memoria del Gran Terremoto del Japón Oriental, el tsunami y el desastre nuclear, la exposición se presentó en la Real Sociedad Geográfica de Londres (de octubre a diciembre de 2021), durante la llamada “segunda ola”, y en TU Múnich (en junio de 2022), en medio del brote de la Variante Ómicron. Apartándose de la tendencia común de narrar los eventos como si se hubieran organizado con éxito a pesar de la pandemia, este artículo presenta el virus como co-creador –quizás incluso como co-curador– de la exposición. Para ello, proveo una visión general abreviada de Picturing the invisible, antes de emprender el análisis sobre el papel que jugó el virus al convocarme a organizar este proyecto (tanto como investigadora y un conferenciante), cómo lo ha hecho logísticamente posible y cómo presentó nuevas oportunidades para involucrar las audiencias extranjeras en la experiencia del triple desastre que afrontó Japón.

Keywords:

• art
• Fukushima
• nuclear
• pandemic
• public engagement

 :

• 艺术
• 福岛
• 核
• 疫情
• 公众参与

 :

• arte
• compromiso público
• Fukushima
• nuclear
• pandemia

COVID-19 has proven as able to colonize our mental real estate as it is able to invade our bodies. For two years, the pandemic loomed large in our politics and culture, discussed with a well-deserved constancy, and framing even those discussions in which the “C-word” went unuttered. COVID’s touch was especially keenly felt in the world of art, not only because it periodically shuttered beloved museums, but because it transformed the imagined disposition of our audiences. Visitors were increasingly spoken of as beleaguered, tired, and depressed—craving distraction and consolation. Exhibitions bore titles like “art in a dark time” and normally irascible critics seemed suddenly sentimental.¹ In this context, the imagined role of art was not to kill sacred cows, as it was for the avant-garde movements of the 20th century (Bürger 1974; Greenberg 2017; Krauss 1986), nor even to warn of dangers others seem doomed to miss (Tyszczuk, Smith, and Butler 2019). The dominant assumption has been that few people want to see challenging or upsetting work in the middle of a pandemic. Instead, critics extolled the “reparative” virtues of art (Sedgewick 2003)—suggesting that we turn to it for comfort and respite (Fox 2020). Art was at hand to lionize our front-line heroes,² sooth us with visions of the world outside the home-office, and even inspire hope (Sedgewick 2003).

Given this zeitgeist, 2020 was a curious time to begin curating an exhibition on the lingering legacies of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. There is little obvious comfort to be found in an earthquake powerful enough to move the earth’s axis more than 10 cm, a tsunami that reached heights of 40 m, or the worst nuclear incident the world had seen since Chernobyl. Nonetheless, this was the task that I set myself and my students at TU Munich. This article provides a critical reflection on our experience of curating Picturing the Invisible: a travelling exhibition, organized to mark 2021 as the 10-year anniversary of Japan’s “triple disaster.” Shown first at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), London (October to December 2021) then at Technical University Munich (TU Munich) (June 2022). Since the time of writing, the exhibition was hung at the Heong Gallery (Figure 1), Downing College, Cambridge (February to April 2023).

FIGURE 1 Entrance to the Picturing the Invisible exhibition at the Heong Gallery [photograph], taken by Jo Underhill.

This paper has grown out of a moment of social discomfort. A colleague said that my students and I had done well to organize the exhibition despite the pandemic, causing me to squirm. Beyond a (British) allergy to praise, I found myself objecting to the word “despite.” By way of explanation, I hope to offer a radically different account of the relationship between the exhibition and the virus—one that avoids the (conventional) hero narrative of man triumphing over nature. I do not wish to frame the virus as an adversary, somehow (momentarily) overcome in the organization of the exhibition. Doing so would not only be immodest; it would also be inaccurate. As I hope to demonstrate, the virus inspired, impeded, and enabled this project in equal measure. COVID-19 made it difficult to organize any in-person events. Yet without COVID-19, this event would and could not have taken place. In recognizing this, I would like to present the virus as co-creating—perhaps even co-curating—the exhibition. To do so, I will first provide a brief overview of Picturing the Invisible, before going on to analyse the role that the virus has played in calling me to organize this project (as both a researcher and as a lecturer), how it has made it logistically possible, and how it presented new opportunities to engage foreign audiences with the experience of Japan’s triple disaster. All exhibitions are a product of their times, but not all times are as marked as the COVID years—and this exhibition’s debt to its moment was especially great. It is the extent to which the virus played an active part in the conception, organization, financing, installation (Figures 2 and 3), and reception of this exhibition that I wish to explore.

FIGURE 2 Picturing the Invisible at the Heong Gallery [photograph], taken by Jo Underhill.

FIGURE 3 Picturing the Invisible at the Heong Gallery [photograph], taken by Jo Underhill.

PICTURING THE INVISIBLE IN BRIEF

Picturing the Invisible belongs to a tradition of collaboration between academics and artists (see for example: Bevan 2019; Mori and Kagaya 2015; Tyszczuk, Smith, and Butler 2019). This mode of work has proven popular in Geography, Anthropology and STS (Benschop 2009; Downey and Zuiderent-Jerak 2021; Rogers et al. 2021)—owing, in part, to the disciplines’ shared interest in using art exhibitions as vehicles of public engagement (e.g., Newell, Robin, and Wehner 2016), capable of fostering dialogue around controversial topics (Fraaije et al. 2022), such as nuclear technology (Rogers et al. 2021) and climate change (Tyszczuk, Smith, and Butler 2019). This surge of activity has been supported by institutional efforts to foster collaboration between academics and artists. A particularly prominent role has been played by learned societies (e.g., 4S’ STS Making & Doing) and galleries, both within universities (e.g., Sainsbury Centre, Heong Gallery, VU Art Science Gallery) and outside of them: many major cultural institutions appointing dedicated curators of environmental art for the first time (e.g., Tate, Serpentine, Royal Ontario Museum). A particular emphasis has emerged on exhibitions that make visible otherwise intangible issues, such as climate change, which have invisible causes and diffuse effects (e.g., Perera et al. 2021). This focus reflects a common conviction that exhibitions can serve a civic function, promoting dialogue on environmental issues by translating complex topics into a digestible and engaging form. Working within this tradition, the Picturing the Invisible exhibition brings together eight talented³ artists working with film—or other photographic mediums (e.g., daguerreotypes)—in the territory affected by the “triple disaster.” Each of their works is paired with a short essay provided by a policymaker, citizen scientist, author, activist, or academic from the field of Geography, Science and Technology Studies (STS), Anthropology, or Japan Studies (see Table 1). Additional works have been added to this core corpus as the exhibition has travelled. Though the contributors are diverse in their experiences and perspectives, they share an interest in nuclear landscapes and a commitment to “making the invisible visible” (Mori and Kagaya 2015). To promote access to the exhibition at a time of ongoing travel restrictions, all 14 artworks and essays have been made available on a dedicated website (picturing-the-invisible.art) and video tours, filmed at both the RGS (Takahashi 2021a, 2022a) and TU Munich (Takahashi 2022b), have been uploaded to YouTube (see also, Takahashi 2023b).

TABLE 1 Artworks and Essayists

Artist	Artwork title	Essayist
Lieko Shiga	Blindfolded Pilot (2010), from the Spiral Shore (Rasen Kaigan) series	Sir David Warren, British Ambassador to Japan (2010–2012) and Chairperson of The Japan Society (2013–2019)
Yoi Kawakubo	If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns were to Burst into the Skies at Once IV (2019)	Dr. Robert Macfarlane, Reader in Literature and the Environmental Humanities, University of Cambridge and best-selling author of ‘Underland’
Yoi Kawakubo	If the Radiance of a Thousand Suns Were to Burst into the Skies at Once V (2019)	Prof. Sheila Jasanoff, Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University and 2022 Holberg Laureatte
Takashi Arai	A Mirror on the Other Side, Maquette (2021)	Dr. Hisako Sakiyama, Co-author of the National Accident Independent Investigation Committee (NAIIC) report and member of the Takagi School of Citizen Science
Masamichi Kagaya (with collaboration of Satoshi Mori)	Evacuation: Insoles (2018), from the Autoradiograph series	Dr. Brigitte Steger, Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge and co-editor of ‘Japan Copes with Calamity’
Giles Price	Untitled (2017), from the Restricted Residence series	Dr. Kyoko Sato, Associate Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Society, Stanford University
Rebecca Bathory	Untitled (2016), from the Return to Fukushima series	Prof. Kohei Watanabe, Associate Professor, Teikyo University
Rebecca Bathory	Untitled (2016), from the Return to Fukushima series	Dr. Peter Wynn Kirby, Senior member of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford and author of ‘Troubled Natures: Waste, Environment, and Japan’
Takashi Arai	2017-07-13, A Landscape of Geiger Counters, Yamakiya, Fukushima (2017), from the Daily D-type Project series	Prof. Mikihito Tanaka Professor of Science and Media Studies, Waseda University and research manager of the Science Media Centre Japan (SMCJ)
Satoshi Mori (with co-operation of Masamichi Kagaya)	Cypress Leaves (2014), from the Autoradiograph series	Prof. Maxime Polleri, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Laval
Lieko Shiga	Portrait of Cultivation (2009), from the Spiral Shore (Rasen Kaigan) series	Prof. Brian Wynne, Professor Emeritus of Science Studies and former Research Director of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University
Giles Smith	Untitled (2017), from the Restricted Residence series	Aileen Mioko Smith, Director of Green Action and co-author of 'Minamata: A warning to the world’
Thom Davies	Untitled (2014), from the Nuclear Samurai series	Prof. Jacques Lochard, Vice-Chair of the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and Professor at the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute, Nagasaki University
Thom Davies	Untitled (2014), from the Nuclear Samurai series	Prof. Richard Samuels, Ford Professor of International Studies, MIT and author of '3.11: Disaster and Change in Japan’

Note: The two pieces by Takashi Arai could not be shown at the RGS or TUM due to budgetary restrictions.

Despite concerns that social distancing measures⁴ might deter engagement with the exhibition, Picturing the Invisible generated considerable interest at both the RGS and TU Munich. The exhibition was featured in The British Journal of Photography (Warner 2021), The New Statesman (Brakus 2021), BBC Science Focus (Cutmore 2021) and drew a steady flow of visitors. (Visitor numbers were not counted at the first two venues but the exhibition drew 2146 visitors at the Heong Gallery.) Over the exhibition’s two months at the RGS, I led 14 tours which were attended by schools (e.g., my alma mater, Queen Elizabeth’s School, Barnet), university societies (e.g., UCL Museum Club), interest groups (e.g., Anglo-Japanese Friendship Society (Nichi-Ei Otomodachi Kai)), and members of the public (Figure 4). Each tour lasted one hour and was attended by up to 30 people. Most drew between 10 and 20, which allowed for a conversational mode of engagement, and I frequently stayed behind for 30 to 45 minutes to speak with interested visitors. I was struck by the frequency with which they drew connections between the content of the exhibition and their own lived experiences of the pandemic. It was these encounters that prompted me to reflect seriously on COVID-19’s agency in shaping the conception, delivery, and reception of the exhibition.

FIGURE 4 A masked tour of picturing the invisible at the royal geographical society. Still from “Meet the artists ‘Picturing the Invisible’ in NE Japan” [video], filmed by Ross Harrison at the Director’s Gallery, Royal Geographical Society (in Takahashi 2021c).

COVID-19 AS A CALL TO ACTION

In the Role of a (Nuclear) Researcher

Though Picturing the Invisible explores life in the wake of 3.11, it was COVID-19 that inspired the exhibition. By Spring 2020, I had worked on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster for close to a decade⁵ and like many ethnographers, I felt that I had struck a pact with my research subjects: they had welcomed me into their lives; I had promised to tell their stories through my scholarship. But COVID-19 compelled me to find more popular ways to transmit their experiences. As early as 2016, I had heard citizen scientists (e.g., Takagi School of Citizen Science), activists (e.g., Metropolitan Coalition Against Nukes), and international organisations (e.g., ICRP) speak excitedly of both the disaster’s 10-year anniversary and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics as opportunities to communicate the lessons of the “3.11” the world. They were keenly aware that the Tokyo Olympics were born of a desire to showcase the Tohoku region’s recovery to the international community; the Japanese state dubbing the Olympics the “Recovery Games.” In keeping with this mission, the 2020 Olympic torch had been built from recycled aluminium, “originally used in the construction of prefabricated housing units in the aftermath of the Great East Japan Earthquake” and, on its arrival in Japan, began an (unusually long) 121-day tour of the nation’s 47 Prefectures in the Tohoku region (Figure 8). The idea was that the Olympic flame would shine a light on the recovery of the region. Yet as Qatar has since discovered, the global attention of a major sporting event can be a double-edged sword. Many of my research informants expected the 2020 Olympic torch to cast light on the myriad issues that continue to afflict the Tohoku region: the tens of thousands who remain unable to return home; the legions who choose not to; the advanced age of most who do; the social and economic difficulties they find upon their return (see Figure 5); and the discrimination faced by those who have settled into new lives, elsewhere. The decision to host the Olympic baseball and softball events in Fukushima, in particular, was expected to raise questions about the safety of the athletes in the international media—not unlike the discussions of smog that surrounded the 2008 Beijing Olympics. For many of my research informants, this media attention was an opportunity to pose broader questions about how “acceptable” limits of radiation exposure were being set for both the citizens of Fukushima and the workers hired to decontaminate it (Hecht 2012, 2013; Koide 2020).

FIGURE 5 Rebecca Bathory, Untitled, 2016, photograph, from the Return to Fukushima series. It is a common decontamination practice to scrape the contaminated topsoil into black plastic “flexible containment bags” (furekon-bukuro), which are stacked at temporary storage site like those pictured above. By 2015, more than 9 million bags had accumulated across 100,000 sites in Fukushima (Mainichi Shimbun 2015). The need to find permanent disposal sites is among the many issues my research respondents hoped the Olympic Games would underscore. (For discussion, see Kirby 2021; Takahashi 2023a.)

None of this was to be. In the face of the global pandemic, the “Recovery Games” became the COVID-19 Olympics and stories about the status of Tohoku’s reconstruction were displaced by acrimonious debates about whether to hold the Games at all. In this context, it was hard to pitch news items on the status of Fukushima. The crisis at home made it difficult to generate any interest in a decade-old environmental disaster abroad. COVID was new—and “newsworthy”—in a way that the nuclear disaster was not. The idea behind Picturing the Invisible was that art might offer an alternative forum for reflection—that while newspaper editors may (rightly or wrongly) feel that the public do not want to read about another public health crisis, the custodians of exhibition spaces might be tempted to host some of the groundbreaking work emerging from the Tohoku region. And visitors who profess to find the news “too depressing to read” might nonetheless engage with the realities of life in Fukushima today when drawn to an image they find beguiling or compelling. In short, I hoped to use the capacity of art to inspire, intrigue, and seduce to spark conversations about the context of the works’ production: context that is usefully provided by the essays that accompany the artworks (for example, see Figure 6).

FIGURE 6 Masamichi Kagaya (in collaboration with Satoshi Mori), Evacuation: Insoles, 2018, autoradiograph, from the Autoradiograph series. Autoradiographs are images produced through exposure to ionizing radiation, rather than visible light. They allow artists to capture the contamination of everyday objects. Here, Kagaya and Mori have arranged insoles from shoes left in two evacuated towns. (For discussion, see Steger 2021; Takahashi 2022b, 2023a.)

IN THE ROLE OF A LECTURER

My second motivation for organizing Picturing the Invisible was pedagogical. In forcing us from our seminar rooms and into the confines of the “home office,” COVID-19 foreclosed any possibility of a “normal” university experience. There would be no chatter in the corridors, lunchtime study-groups, or dormitory parties, and students’ academic achievement suffered (Mahdy 2020). Yet I was adamant that no student of mine should think to themselves, “if only I had started in another year….” To this end, I wanted to offer my students something extra—above and beyond what students in other cohorts had the opportunity to do. The opportunity presented itself in the form of teaching an Immersion Project on the Responsibility in Science, Engineering, and Technology (RESET) Elite Master’s course at TU Munich. This signature course invites graduate students to learn social constructivist approaches by working intensively on a case study for five months. In this case, students were invited to critically examine models of science communication and public engagement with empirical reference to the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster. Rather than simply write about how others had communicated the disaster, I offered my students the opportunity to try it for themselves, putting their critical insights into practice by helping to curate the Picturing the Invisible exhibition. My students have been involved at every stage of the curatorial process: helping to shape the exhibition’s narrative; selecting artists and essayists; scouting suitable venues; designing interactive installations; and planning how to install the exhibit. Seven students also contributed essays to the exhibition program which can be read on the Picturing the Invisible website (Figure 7).

FIGURE 7 Takashi Arai, 2017-07-13, A Landscape of Geiger Counters, Yamakiya, Fukushima, 2017, daguerreotype, from the Daily D-type Project series. (For discussion, see Tanaka 2021. For a student’s response to Arai’s work, see Klausing 2021.)

FIGURE 8 Lieko Shiga, Portrait of Cultivation, 2009, photograph, from the Spiral Shore (Rasen Kaigan) series. Taken shortly before the triple disaster, in the coastal village of Kitakama, this photograph was published in the tragedy’s wake. (For discussion, see Takahashi 2022a, 2023a; Wynne 2021.)

COVID-19 AS AN ENABLER

In addition to creating the impetus for the exhibition, the “new normal” also freed up the resources necessary for this project. Readers will no doubt recognize how varied experiences of lockdown have been. A period which, for some, has been characterized by precarity, hazardous working conditions, and bereavement has been experienced as an opportunity to save the time, money, and energy associated with commuting by others. In my own case, the transition to working from home was broadly time neutral. The time I gained by not having to commute or travel to conferences, was quickly cancelled out by weeks spent in bed with COVID-19, new calls for pastoral care, and the demands of the online classroom. Nonetheless, I credit the virus with creating the conditions of possibility for Picturing the Invisible. For although I already knew 11 of the 14 essayists involved, I began this project as nothing more than an admirer of the eight artists exhibited. COVID-19 made it possible to connect with them and those who knew them. The closure of galleries across the world meant that these usually globe-trotting individuals were suddenly confined to their computer screens: a captive audience for my (entirely unsolicited) emails. (To my surprise, I heard back from a majority of the artists that I contacted.) And the normalization of Zoom meetings made it possible to build genuine relationships—even friendships—with artists dispersed over 6000 miles. It occurred to me more than once that the process had begun to mirror 2020s Staged: a BBC drama which imagines an inexperienced theatre director capitalizing on lockdown by convincing suddenly idle actors (the inimitable Michael Sheen and ebullient David Tennant) to rehearse for a play, which will open on an unspecified date. “When things open up again.”

COVID-19 also freed the financial resources necessary to get this project off the ground. As in many departments, the Munich Centre for Technology in Society (now the Department for STS, TU Munich) earmarks some funds to host guest speakers ever year. With COVID-19 forcing these lectures online in 2020 and 2021, €8000 that would have ordinarily been used for flights and accommodation was suddenly unaccounted for. As bureaucratic logics dictate that these funds could not be seconded for other purposes or deferred for future use, (and I was lucky enough to work in a department with supportive leadership,) there was an unexpected opening for more unconventional events to be organized. This initial sum was supplemented with an additional €2000 of research funds attached to my Lectureship, producing a total budget of €10,000: a sum roughly equivalent to the amount TUM allocates for a small workshop. Most the artists and essayists were exceptionally generous in offering their contribution without compensation, with only one pair of collaborating artists asking for a participation fee. This allowed our modest budget to be invested almost entirely in the creation of the exhibition prints and our website. (I covered my own travel, as well as miscellaneous costs, during the exhibition’s tenure at the RGS.) The exhibition was thus created, almost entirely, with funds made available by COVID-19. This core funding was later supplemented with an additional €2000 from the RESET events budget, which funded the exhibition’s travel to Munich, and an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (£10,000) and a small grant from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (£2667), which covered the costs of exhibiting at the Heong Gallery, Cambridge, as well as expanding the range of exhibits. The application for these additional funds was considerably aided by “proof of concept” that the initial exhibition at the RGS provided. The virus thus created the conditions of possibility for the project. It provided 80% of the funds behind the RGS show and two thirds of the fund behind the show at TUM. And while it is true that by the time the exhibition closed at the Heong Gallery, the funds made available by the pandemic accounted for just a third of our total budget, the virus had provided the most vital first third, which allowed the exhibition to take a credible form, capable of attracting additional investment. To name COVID-19 alongside TUM, Sasakawa, and the AHRC as a funder of Picturing the Invisible—indeed, our “seed investor”—would be an anthropomorphism that misstates the virus’ (benign) intent. Yet it would accurately evoke the agency of this non-human thing, which has “spoken” to free the funds necessary for the exhibition’s creation.

NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR COMMUNICATING JAPAN’S “TRIPLE DISASTER”

More interesting perhaps than the role that COVID-19 played in motivating and enabling the exhibition are the new opportunities it created for engagement with its subject matter. At a crude level, visitors’ experiences of COVID-19 helped to evoke the magnitude of 3.11. Scholars from Mary Douglas (1992) onwards have observed that modern societies have a poor sense of scale (Douglas 1992, 38–54). For all our (purported) numeracy, we so often think in terms of “one,” “two,” “few,” and “many”—collapsing all disasters into a generic category of “big” events. If we do enjoy a more proximate heuristic of scale, it is likely that it is that of the territorial unit. In this optic, 3.11 was a “national” event; the pandemic is a “global” one. We may assume that global events dwarf national ones. In that the pandemic has killed 4.8 million people worldwide, we would not be wrong. But before we conclude that the comparison might somehow diminish 3.11 in the eyes of the exhibition’s audience, let us take a moment to consider the national experiences of this global event. It Is both instructive and humbling to realize that at the time that the exhibition opened, in October 2021, the virus has claimed fewer lives in Japan lives than 3.11. (The former was responsible for an estimated 17,900 deaths as of October 2021; the latter accounts for 19,700 deaths with an additional 2500 declared missing.) And while the virus had claimed lives slowly, the death toll creeping upwards over the course of a year and a half, 3.11 claimed most of its victims in minutes and hours. Such comparisons are, of course, impressionistic and need to be made with some care. The calculation of mortality rates is contested and flattening a complex event to any single metric will inevitably fail to capture its full scope. Nonetheless, mortality is a metric that visitors to the exhibition frequently requested and one that seemed to impress upon them the place of 3.11 in Japan’s collective consciousness. Guests accustomed to being told that COVID-19 was the most severe challenge their nation had faced since the Second World War seemed struck by the realization that this rhetoric had already been deployed in Japan, a decade ago.

Beyond providing a sense of magnitude, COVID-19 might also allow us to better empathize with the everyday experience of a nuclear disaster. It is sometimes said that the limit of human empathy is that we draw heavily on our own experiences as the prism through which to understand others’. Faced with events that fall too far outside of our frame of reference, we tend to express a lack of comprehension. People admit that they “can’t even imagine” what the other has gone through or profess that they “can’t connect” to the experience. Indeed, expressing our inability to comprehend a given event is a common means of acknowledging its magnitude; hence, commentators’ tendency to speak of the “unimaginable” suffering caused by disasters such as 3.11. This invocation of the “unrepresentability” of disaster is both “real”—insofar as all experience eludes representation—and imagined—the idea of “unimaginability” itself being a prominent discursive tradition through which we construct our experience of disaster (Stock and Stott 2007). This convention of unintelligibility as a heuristic for (horrifying) magnitude is also a trope of nuclear discourse, encapsulated by the novelist Martin Amis’ (1987) extended discussion of the (un)thinkability of nuclear technologies, but more commonly evoked through theological allusion. It is no coincidence that the code name for the first atomic detonation was “Trinity,” or that Oppenheimer reached for Hindu scripture to express his awe. Famously, he claims to have recalled the line, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” (in Freed and Giovannitti 1965a). (See also Freed and Giovannitti 1965b, 197).⁶ Yet in an earlier account, he is reported to have reached for another line of the Bhagavad Gita (XI, 12), to which two of the works featured in Picturing the Invisible (Figure 9) owe their title:

FIGURE 9 Yoi Kawakubo, If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the skies at once V, 2019, unexposed photographic film. (For discussion, see Jasanoff 2021; Macfarlane 2021.)

If the radiance of a thousand suns

were to burst into the sky,

that would be like

the splendor of the Mighty One—(in Jungk 1958, 201).

The artist Yoi Kawakubo is a scion of this tradition of “unthinkability.” His two aforementioned works take their name from the Bhagavad Gita (XI, 12). The grandeur suggested by the theological title is matched by the artist’s insistence on scale; each work standing at 2 m by 1.5 m and towering over visitors. The images themselves are unabashedly abstract. Confronted with the washes of luminous color, one cannot help but recall Rothko’s color fields and wonder if we are staring at a painting, rather than a photographic image. Yet the network of concentric circles and spider-web-like cracks that run across the surface disabuse us of this notion. And in the edges of the frame we find proof of the medium. Where we might expect to see the artist’s signature, we instead find the words “Fuji film” and a serial number. To produce these images, Kawakubo wandered into the nuclear exclusion zone, armed with a Geiger counter and some large format film. In this place, deemed too dangerous for humans to inhabit, Kawakubo would bury his film, returning to collect it months later (see Figure 10). The resulting images are products of ionizing radiation’s touch—they literally “picture the invisible,” sublime and enticingly sibylline. Yet the process of their production (documented in a video played for visitors to TU Munich and the Heong Gallery) feels curiously familiar, even quotidian, in a post-pandemic era. Few visitors will ever walk the fields of Fukushima, yet all have worn facemasks, and the personal protective equipment (PPE) that Kawakubo dons is no longer alien. As Kawakubo digs furtively, eager to reduce his exposure, we can almost feel the damp heat on our faces—all too used to breathing through polypropylene.

FIGURE 10 Kawakubo buries his film in Fukushima’s contaminated soil in this video, which documents the making of If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the skies at once. Still from “The Artist as Explorer” [video], by Yoi Kawakubo.

My student and collaborator, Aswathi Ashok was surely right to suggest that our own experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic ought to allow us to better appreciate the stresses of “seeing an invisible danger all around you” (Ashok 2021). Both radiation and the virus share a ghostly quality that can render familiar spaces eerie. Few artists invite us to draw this psychological parallel as explicitly as Giles Price (Figure 11). Picturing the Invisible contains two pieces from his Restricted Residence series, which depicts life in Namie and Iitate: two heavily contaminated villages in Fukushima Prefecture, which were evacuated for six years. These works do not photograph ionizing radiation in the way that other artists in the exhibition, such as Masamichi Kagaya, Satoshi Mori, and Yoi Kawakubo have. Instead, Price uses thermal imaging to conjure the psychological experience of living with an unseen threat; using the same technology to capture the fields of Fukushima and the ambience of London during the pandemic (Brakus 2021). In both settings—this visual epizeuxis seems to suggest—“we have good reason to fear what we cannot see, or taste, or hear, or touch” (Pearce in Price 2020). Unable to rely on our senses, our every action can become a negotiation with an unfamiliar risk. Prosaic choices become pained. By the time that Picturing the Invisible opened in London, our visitors—like the people of Fukushima—had wondered whether to go outside or not, whether “to make our child wear a mask or not,” and whether “to eat or avoid” certain foodstuffs (Muto 2011): friends and colleagues confessing that they had avoided unwrapped foods during the first wave and taken to furtively disinfecting each item before storing it in their kitchen. In this regard, they are better placed to understand the anxieties of life in Fukushima than they were prior to the pandemic. As one visitor wrote on their feedback form, they saw “one crisis bleeding into another.” For the people of Namie and Iitate, among others, the nuclear disaster has bled into the pandemic; one disaster compounding another. For our visitors, it’s their lived experiences of COVID-19 that bleed into their engagement with 3.11, sensitizing them to the ways in which a public health crisis can invade even the most mundane elements of life. A disaster, once distant, feels closer for its resonance with the visitors’ lives.

FIGURE 11 Giles Price (2017), Untitled, from the Restricted Residence series. (For discussion, see Sato 2021; Smith 2021.)

When transporting the exhibition from the RGS to TU Munich, one of my students—Nicholas McCay—suggested that we directly invite this comparison by drawing our visitors’ attention to that which was invisible in the exhibition space. This was a new twist on an old theme. Artists and curators have played with invisibility since at least the 1950s, when Yves Klein unveiled The Void⁷ (1958): an artwork made by emptying the Galerie Iris Clert and painting the interior white. As Rugoff (2005) notes, Klein’s intent remains a subject of debate; some seeing The Void as an assertion that absence is presence. (Klein himself “maintained that the space was actually saturated with a force field so tangible that some people were unable to enter” (Rugoff 2005, 5).) Others have interpreted—and iterated—Klein’s gesture as a form of institutional critique (Rugoff 2005, 12–15). By subtracting from the gallery space, artists such as the “Art & Language” duo (Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin) and Michael Asher have aimed to make more visible that which remains, drawing attention to everything from the role of explanatory text (e.g., Art & Language’s Air Conditioning Show, 1967) to the labor of backroom staff (e.g., Michael Asher’s Copley Gallery, 1974). Our intervention inverted the logic of this gesture: adding to the exhibition, rather than subtracting from it; and using a visible medium to evoke the literally invisible, rather than an invisible medium to make visible the overlooked. Specifically, McCay installed a thermal camera in the exhibition space, projecting the image on the gallery wall (Figure 12). Using the same color grading as Price’s Restricted Residence series, the installation (and accompanying text) reminded visitors that the pandemic remained with us in the gallery. It not only framed their interpretation of the works, but determined how they were able to engage with the physical exhibition space. Masks were mandated when the exhibition was hung at the RGS. At TUM, they were no longer required but signs across the exhibition hall reminded visitors that testing, contact tracing, and social distancing remained in place. The works were more sparsely hung, to allow our (bare faced) visitors to spread themselves out, and windows kept open to ventilate the exhibition hall. Current events often shape how visitors engage with an exhibition, intellectually, yet it is rare for those same events to directly influence how the exhibition is financed or hung. To speak of COVID as “co-curating” the exhibition then, is to underscore how the virus made its agency felt at every stage of the exhibition’s lifecycle: from its moment of conception, through the logistics of its gestation, to its delivery at the RGS and TUM—and it is the presence of this invisible actant that McCay’s installation sought to evoke.

FIGURE 12 Thermal camera installation designed by Nicholas McCay in response to the work of Giles Price. [photograph] taken by Paul Klausing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the generosity of the exhibited artists and essayists or the energy and enthusiasm of my students. It was delivered in partnership with the Royal Geographical Society, TU Munich’s Department for STS, and the Heong Gallery, with financial support from the Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation and an AHRC Impact Acceleration Account, as well as a Fulbright-Lloyd’s Fellowship. We were proud to be official partners of the Japan-UK Season of Culture, organized by the Embassy of Japan in the UK. My heartfelt thanks go to Sebastian Pfotenhauer, Prerona Prasad, and Joe Smith for championing this project and to Laura Melville for her tireless work behind the scenes. FLIR is thanked for the loan of thermal camera. Elijah Teitelbaum is thanked for his careful copy editing of the essays. I am particularly indebted to Amandine Davre (2017, 2019) for introducing me to three of the exhibited artists and to Maxime Polleri, for introducing me to Amandine in turn. Thanks are owed also to Nigel Clifford, Sheila Jasanoff, and Dame Fiona Reynolds for their encouragement and support. Names are (cravenly) listed in alphabetical order. As ever, my final thanks go to Magdalen Connolly who was both indefatigable and indispensable during the delivery of this project.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Elitenetzwerk Bayern; Fulbright Association; Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation; and UKRI Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Notes on contributors

Makoto Takahashi

MAKOTO TAKAHASHI is Assistant Professor of Transdisiplinary STS at the Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit (VU), Amsterdam, 1081 HV, The Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include the nuclear, public health disasters, and crises of public trust in experts.

Notes

1 Compare the reviews of the Among the Trees exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London from March 2020, when it first opened (Frankel 2020; Kent 2020; Searle 2020), and September 2020, when it re-opened to the public (Becirovic 2020). One notices that the reviews from September are more positive that the three-star reviews the exhibition received in March, both in the sense that they are more complimentary but also in that they see more positivity in the exhibition. “In times as unstable as these, exhibitions like Among the Trees at the Southbank Centre offer us an escape into the constancy of nature,” Bacirovic writes. After months of lockdown, the works are “bewitching,” the trees possess “delicate overwhelming beauty” and have become “symbols of enlightenment and inspiration” (Becirovic 2020). Compare this with the “knotty” reading of the trees in Frankel and Searle’s March reviews, which emphasize the subject-matter’s duality. Here, forests are at once the “calm, safe, quiet haven[s]” of Becirovic’s review and spaces of “foreboding,” “unseen darkness,” and concealed malice (Frankel 2020). Peering at Peter Doig’s The Architects Home in the Ravine, “the house half hidden through frosted twigs,” Searle (2020) feels suddenly like “a stalker in the woods, making my silent approach as I prepare a home invasion.” “The show drags you in with the promise of tranquility then bashes you over the head with a branch in the woods” (Frankel 2020).

2 On 7 April 2020, Art Historian James Fox appeared on BBC Newsnight (2020). The thumbnail on Newsnight’s official YouTube channel reads, “COVID-19: How do we use art during times of turmoil?” Fox begins by Barbara Hepworth’s “ecclesiastical” drawings of surgeons at work; followed by an open window, through which a sea breeze billows (Andrew Wyeth’s “Wind from the Sea”); and ends with George Frederick Watts’ anthropomorphic depiction of “Hope,” who continues to play her harp against all odds.

3 Hakan Topal joined the exhibition as a ninth artist in 2023. His Uniform Cut was exhibited at the Heong Gallery.

4 The exhibition at the RGS fell during the second wave, while the exhibition at TU Munich coincided with the emergence of the Omicron variant.

5 The disaster was the subject of my BA, MPhil, and PhD theses (Takahashi 2020) and I made fieldtrips in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2016, 2017, and 2019. (For details, see Takahashi 2022b.)

6 For details of Oppenheimer’s citations of the Bhagavad Gita, see Hijiya (2000). I follow Hijiya in ruling that the definite article is audible in Freed and Giovannitti’s (1965a) film, The Decision to Drop the Bomb, through it is dropped in their book of the same name (Freed and Giovannitti 1965b). I defer to IMDb in crediting Freed and Giovannitti as co-directors of the film.

7 Officially titled The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw Material State of Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility, the work is more commonly known as The Void.