Barricades, scrawny trees, empty roads, high-voltage power lines—Hana Usui’s images reveal few specifics. The Japanese artist has placed semi-transparent paper over the photographs she took around the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, site of a catastrophic nuclear accident in 2011. The trained calligrapher has also drawn thin, fragile lines across the paper—marks that both overlap and connect with the motifs behind them. The nuclear catastrophe, now ten years in the past, seems strangely remote here: diffuse and elusive, having slid into the incomprehensible. Usui’s work questions and troubles the documentary character of photography in an enigmatic, conscientious way. And her cycle represents a cautious, tentative approach to a disaster that far exceeds human imagination.
CLUB DER POLNISCHEN VERSAGER
›Fukushima‹ by Hana Usui
18 SEP—3 OCT 2021
Opening 18 SEP, 4pm—midnight