Very pleased to have a new work in the Listening for Traces exhibition at Rizq Art Initiative (RAi) in Abu Dhabi. The show was curated by Cathy Lane and I’m in the company of some extraordinary artists showing works resonating with sound, conflict, memory: Abdullah Al Othman (KSA), Asma Ghanem (Palestine), Alexia Webster (South Africa), Christopher Marianetti (USA), Jananne Al Ani (UK / Iraq), Louise K Wilson (UK), Martin John Callanan (UK), Nour Sokhon (Lebanon), Open Group (Ukraine), Shirin Neshat (Iran), Thomas Gardner (UK), Uzma Falak (Kashmir, India) and Yara Mekawei (Egypt).
My contribution – “Waves Finding The Shore” – is an 8 channel work based around an unedited recording from Tokashiki, the largest of the Kerama Islands, located in Okinawa Prefecture, the southernmost extent of the Japanese archipelago. In Tripadvisor reviews, Tokashiki is “a beautiful place,” a “heaven on earth” for hiking, whale-watching and snorkelling in waters so limpid they have their own colour, “Kerama Blue” which you can see in my photograph.
[Trigger: rest of text references war, atrocities, death, severe injury mass suicides, numbers of dead]
This same coastline in is rendered in black and white 1945 newsreel footage showing ships, assault craft, patrols on jungle paths, explosions, rolling smoke and wrecked fortifications and homes. This is where the US first landed on Japanese soil in the last battle of WWII, fighting that would engulf all Okinawa and leave a civilian death toll some estimate at 150,000 (Kyle Ikeda, for example). Two days after the initial invasion, US infantry encountered a small, wooded valley with many corpses and severely injured bodies, the majority children, victims at what Google Maps translates as “Group Self-Determination Site,” road signs call “Site of Mass Suicide,” lives lost to what the Okinawan newspaper Ryukyu Shimpo terms “compulsory mass-suicide,” capturing the role of the Japanese Imperial Army in ordering and facilitating these atrocities.
On January 13, 2023, both the beach where the US troops first came ashore and the nearby wooded valley were both deserted.
No military overflights as reminders of continued US presence, no laughter from tourists, no prayers voiced, no howling winds, just waves finding the shore, soaking the sand, sifting the bleached coral branches.
To accompany the exhibition, on March 14, the online symposium “Resonant Dialogues: Navigating Sound, Art, and Conflict” took place.