Paribatana Mohanty
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Dear Document Fukushima
Multi-screen video installation
Duration Variable (Loop)
2014-2021
Liquid Elephant and the Mirror, 1 min, 2014-2021
Glass window reflects. Reflects the neighbor. The image of Daichi Nuclear Power Plant traveled nearly three kilometers far to be reflected upon its neighbor’s glass window. It trace passed the fence. It always does. And in future it will, eternally trace pass our imagination like Bodhisattva entered queen Maya’s dream without her permission.
Dear Document Fukushima No. 3, 1 min, 2014-2021
A nuclear radiation contaminated space is never exhausted, appear to be in an infinite loop. In this never ending loop what manifest is abstraction.
Dear Document Fukushima No. 4, (Hey what in the world is this hole?) 1 min, 2014-2021
We pretend to care, we pretend to cure. We are rhetorical players.
A Sacred Utterance, 3.45 min, 2014-2021
Umbrical Cord, 1.49 min, 2014-2021
Dear Document Fukushima No.17, 40 sec, 2014-2021
Many took the Chernobyl nuclear disaster as an opportunity to serve the country. The crisis shaped by a propagandistic nationalism. There are still posters, which reads, “Our goal is the happiness of all mankind.” “The world proletariat will triumph.” And “The ideas of Lenin are immortal.”
One said, “To pray there used to be communism instead of god, but now there was nothing, so they pray god.”
Sometimes, I lose my mind. This is this moment
Here is a Clock Working, 1.3 min, 2014-2021
Feels like the evacuation process is still continuing. A clock is still working. Among thousands of dead clocks, one is working. Showing the time equal to the time we brought there – exactly 9.40am in the morning. A register of our meeting. We noted the time. The clock made a notation about us on 19th of March 2014.
A Prayer and the Prey, 1.37 min, 2014-2021
Dear Document Fukushima No. 19, 1.24 min, 2014-2021
The Hubris, 40 sec, 2014-2021
All form of references are valid in a site of disaster. This is how they remembered the catastrophe. This is how they survived.
A Dream Sequence (Meeting), 1 min, 2014-2021
Camera Breaking Act, 4.23 min, 2014-2021
Dear Document Fukushima No. 21 (Anywhere Fukushima Everywhere Fukushima), 1 min, 2014-2021
I have juxtaposed this photograph of pilgrims from Odisha in the radioactive Pacific in Fukushima. Waiting to see if they can touch the water and practice their ritual. For the sins of humanity Fukushima might become the pilgrimage site of the future.
Dear Document Fukushima No. 23, 1 min, 2014-2021
A Proposal for a Football Field, 2.6 min, 2014-2021
Setsuko!, 57 sec, 2014-2021
Setsuko Yokokawa is a toddler and the younger sister of Seita Yokokawa in the Studio Ghibli movie Grave of the Fireflies. She was born in 1941, but she later dies in 1945 towards the end of the film.
Dear Document Fukushima No. 6, 1 min, 2014-2021
In 1986, the inhabitants of Belarus associated Chernobyl nuclear disaster and radiation, and the after effect of this catastrophe with communism, war and disease. Today, in this time of covid pandemic bio-hazard, we are surrounded with the image of glove, mask and PPE kits. It feels, we, the liberal secular artists, scientists, activists and the public in general are hung in a strange spacetime at this unusual strange juncture between present and future, just like these rubber gloves in Fukushima.
Like masks, gloves also protect us from what a bare hand should not touch. I wonder, how will this ‘un-touch-ability’ is different from caste ?
A Dream Sequence, 6.24 min, 2014-2021
Wild abandoned Fukushima is the habitat of other mortals. Internal chemistry of such places provoke imaginary spectacles in one’s mind and prophecies a sense of inexhaustible time, all too familiar and strange at the same time.
How to comprehend such zones or prophecies that grow into wild-life sanctuaries of new mutating animals, flora and fauna, or repositories of the un-dead like in a Natural History Museum?
Project ‘Dear Document Fukushima’ approaches the audio-visual documentation of Fukushima exclusion radioactive zone, as potential layouts for ‘Horror Vacui’ (the fear of empty space), a term used in early cartography to describe a tendency of filling those undiscovered empty spaces with fictional decorative animals, flora and fauna designs in the processes of making maps. Each mediated image of Fukushima is a document, not a record or witnessing evidence of the event of a nuclear accident that took place on 11 March 2011, but an entity which has life, tentacles and influence. All these images are as wild as the artistic interventions, acts or performances that are stuck in the itinerant loops of time and memory of those places. Opening up an enigmatic, dangerous and incomprehensible zone that Fredric Jameson describes as ‘radical other space’.
Documentation of Fukushima can be viewed in parallel with other abandoned places existing on the surface of earth like Chernobyl or Minamata Bay, and many new emerging wastelands that are slipping away from human habitation due to spillage, war, climate change, mining, radiation, pollution, border disputes, and no man's land etc. In our closed, squired urban pockets, we are living unknowingly in parallel with such hyper worlds which Michel Foucault's calls “Heterotopias”, that appear hostile to human kind but hide many unheard stories of the Future.
‘Dear Document Fukushima’ is a research based multi-screen video installation project (consisting of videos, images and text). The work speculates on environment- disaster-landscapes, interrogates and invokes non-human actors, characters and positions around urban wastelands and their intensities. The project and engagement was initiated during Paribartana Mohanty’s first visit to Fukushima in 2014 with Yoi Kuwakubo, Pedro Inoue, Irwan Ahmet and Tita Salina.
Project link: https://paribartanamohanty.wordpress.com/2017/03/22/dear-document-fukushima/
References:
Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Fredric Jameson.
Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, Michel Foucault.
‘How Cartographers Confronted Empty Spaces’, Exhibition, harvard map collection, pusey library, November 12, 2015
He-y, come on ou-t!, a short story by Shinichi Hoshi, translated by Stanleigh Jones. This story appeared in The Best Japanese Science Fiction Stories, edited by John L. Apostolou and Martin H. Greenberg (1989).
Location: Gallery MMB, Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai
About the artist
Paribartana has received several fellowships, awards and residencies including nomination for Asia’s leading award for Media Artists – 4th VH award and online residency at EyeBeam, Addressing the question of ‘critical tourism’ at Art Inside Out in Sweden, Onassis International Residency program in Athens, SOMA Summer Program in Mexico, studio residency program at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New York, Visiting Artist Fellowship at South Asia Institute, Harvard University, Boston, Tokyo Wonder Site International Creator Residency, FICA Emerging Artist Award, and City as Studio 1, Sarai-CSDS Media Lab Associate Fellowship for Contemporary Art and Media Practices etc. He worked as one of the curators for Kochi Students’ Biennale, as part of Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016. He is also part of artist collective WALA, and organizes meetings, gatherings, and public performances and guided tours. Paribartana had his 2nd solo exhibition ‘Trees are Stranger Than Aliens in the Movies’ at the Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2018. He has presented and performed at the March Meeting 2018, Sharjah, School of Arts and Aesthetics (JNU), InC gathering of artists, Dhalao and Sarai Reader CSDS, New Delhi, Kochi Muziris Biennale Symposia On the Future of Art Education in India, Taj Ske residency 2015 in Bangalore among many others. His videos, paintings and installations have been exhibited in many group exhibitions, film festivals, seminars and symposiums.