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A curtain on a bay window

Group Exhibition - Gap Dynamics - / 2013 / Itabashi Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan 

photo by ichiro ohtani

I made this installation based on my memories of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake that I experienced when I was 15 years old. I exhibited it in 2013, two years after the Great East Japan Earthquake. When I was offered the exhibit I realized that more than twice as many years had passed since that time when I was 15 years old. And I thought that now I could capture my memories of those days objectively and create a work of art. Fifteen years ago, I had seen the earthquake from the inside. Fifteen years later, I lived in Tokyo and saw the earthquake from the outside. This work began with the different feeling I had between the inside and the outside.

 

The story “A curtain on a bay window” and a installation related to it. The story is about one scene of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake of 1995 written with a personal point of view, just like someone's everyday life. From a burnt bay window, a lace curtain which must have burnt spreads and flows up into the sky.A lot of rubble are scattered and four books are buried in them.If you open the book, you can see a picture of a house collapsed and burnt and usual life of a family just after the earthquake. Words of a woman which is the beginning part of the story are written on the outer wall of the museum. The work humorously depicts the strength of people who have lived through the “extraordinary” as part of their daily lives.

copyright © Sumi Kanazawa All Rights Reserved.

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