in.visible (2023)

in.visible (2023), The Art House, Solo Exhibition October 2023 – January 2024
with photography, light, sound, dark room tools and chemicals

photo by Emily Rhyalls

‘In this thought-provoking new body of work, the artist confronts, for the first time, her lived experience as an untold Zainichi – a Korean immigrant residing in Japan. 

The exhibition examines themes of loss, identity, injustice, contradiction, and pride, as well as investigating how her own personal cultural ‘root’ has shaped her as an artist. By revisiting poignant parts of her family history, and discovering and reclaiming previously untold narratives of her heritage, Akama has created a new body of photographic work and sculpture that is made to activate the gallery space through movement, light and sound.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors walk through an installation of Japanese Kami tape, influenced by the experiences of nearly 100,000 people who travelled from Japan to North Korea under the government’s repatriation scheme. With the promise of a better life, the repatriation ship sailed repeatedly over 30 years from December 1959. Set to move intermittently, the installation references the tape being thrown in celebration between travellers and those left behind, thus creating a connection that they would hold on to until the ship departed, without the knowledge that those boarded would not be able to return.

Akama is interested in deformalising the concept of an exhibition and reimagining the gallery as a performing darkroom – a space for analogue photographic processes to unfold as performance. During her residency at The Art House this summer, the artist researched traditional darkroom practices, and began exploring the space in-between success and failure. 

As a durational performance throughout the exhibition, the artist will return to the space to produce new photographs, leaving them exposed to direct sunlight to evolve in colour and tonality. These spontaneous interventions focus on the artist repeatedly revisiting one image of her father in his final days – a reoccuring image seen projected in a sculptural work that visitors can peer inside, accompanied by an faint audio of him singing a famous Korean song. By redefining the photograph as an un-fixed image with no end, Akama’s new works take the form of an unstable memory, remaining fluid and ever-changing.’ by Damon Jackson-Waldock