CHILDREN OF HIROSHIMA – Special video art event in Venice, August the 9th 2017, 7 pm
This special video art night suggests even a conceptual path into video art and cinema, proposing a poly-focal investigation that focuses on the contemporary inheritances of the dramatic events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki of 1945.
The realistic work Kuroi Ame (Black Rain) of 1989 differs, for instance, from the didactic approach of the classic documentary. The director Shohei Imamura suggests a perspective shift adopting the victims’ point of view through the main character’s look on the genbaku, a Japanese word referring to the atomic blast.
Children of Hiroshima (1952) – the first local movie after the US occupation – represents another meaningful example because it deals with the topic with a more expressive liberty, documenting the day of the explosion by way of a flashback in which the three archetypical images are present. Among them, the shadows on the walls allow us to outline a thread with the new wave of the Japanese horror film as a recent elaboration field and Kurosawa Kiyoshi is one of its main exponents. In particular, it is a formal choice, related to a new interest of the shadow iconography, that embodies the recycling of the Hiroshima trauma. In Kairo (2001) – an outstanding movie in our selection – Kurosawa stages an unforeseeable drama in the usual course of life during the Digital Age in which both spirits and human beings live as victims of solitude and loss of identity. Therefore, the reference to the Hiroshima imagery acts as a medium that universalizes the discourse about the human condition and about the individuals’ suffering and their remaining marks on the wall, their profile, their record.
For the occasion, the Children of Hiroshima serie by Elin O’Hara Slavick and the video-installative serie by Kailum Graves will be exposed.
The event is free, but open to a maximum of 40 people. In order to access and have more infirmation (precise location, maps ecc), is necessary to book the participation: info@iodeposito.org.
