Open City Documentary Festival presents Summoning the Silenced: The Work of Tomiyama Taeko Sat 18 Apr

Free Gwangju – May 1980 – (自由光州 ―1980年5月―) 
Maeda Katsuhiro | 1981 | Japan | 25’ | digital | Japanese spoken, English subtitles  

Pop Out Balsam Seeds! –  My Chikuhō, My Korea – (はじけ鳳仙花 ―わが筑豊 わが朝鮮―) 
Tsuchimoto Noriaki | 1984 | Japan | 48’ | digital | Japanese spoken, English subtitles 
 
Chained Hands in Prayer (しばられた手の祈り) 
Slide set by Tomiyama Taeko, Maeda Katsuhiro, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Koike Masato; poetry by Kim Ji-ha | 1976 | Japan | 36’ | English-language version  

This screening focuses on the work of Tomiyama Taeko (1921-2021), an artist whose socially engaged practice occupies a distinctive place in postwar Japanese art. Raised in colonial Manchuria and marked by her return to Japan in the final years of the war, she emerged from the immediate postwar period convinced that painting had to be an act of engagement with social injustice. Her first public works appeared in the early 1950s, when she turned her attention to metal and coal mines across Japan, especially in Chikuhō, producing “reportage paintings” and drawings in relation to labour-union contexts, whilst also writing alongside her visual practice. A long journey through Latin America in the early 1960s broadened her awareness of anti-colonial struggle, exploitation, feminism and international solidarity, and shaped the direction of her art. From the 1970s onward, her work engaged in anti-colonial and anti-imperial histories, paying sustained attention to Korea and the violent legacies of Japanese imperialism and war in Asia, and insisting on art as a practice of remembrance.  

 
This programme brings together two films and a 1976 slide set, all made in close collaboration between Tomiyama Taeko and the filmmakers Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Maeda Katsuhiro. Slide works were central to her practice – an intermedia form she used creatively and extensively to circulate images and words beyond conventional exhibition spaces. Maeda’s film centres on lithographs Tomiyama made in response to the violent suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. Tsuchimoto’s film, Pop Out Balsam Seeds! – My Chikuhō, My Korea – which takes its title from Tomiyama’s 1983 book of essays – returns to her Chikuhō mine paintings and records a dialogue with the filmmaker in which she articulates her political and artistic position. The film is dedicated to the Korean forced labourers who died in the mines, as well as to the poet and independence activist Yun Dong-ju, who died in Fukuoka Prison in 1945. Tsuchimoto – whose work was the subject of an Open City retrospective in 2022 – shared with Tomiyama a commitment to forms of expression grounded in political testimony and historical responsibility. 
 

Screening organised and presented by Ricardo Matos Cabo, with thanks to Dimitri Ianni, IWAHASHI Momoko, KOMATSUBARA Tokio, YAMAGAMI Sakiko and PARC.

Img provided by @ 1984 MONTAGE INC.

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