Photobook Workshop | Living Otherwise: Perspectives on Time, Space, and Sense-Making from Okinawa

 

“Living Otherwise: Perspectives on Time, Space, and Sense-Making from Okinawa” was an event series that encompasses an art exhibition and book display, photobook workshop, along with an artist talk. It highlighted the photographic works of Kaori Nakasone and Satoko Nema, two artists from Okinawa, and Mayumo Inoue, a scholar specializing in comparative literature from Tokyo, Japan. Through photographic art and artist and scholarly exchange, this event series sought to engage the University of Toronto community with the question of “living otherwise”: What does it mean to live in our times marked by senses of precarity, grief, and violent losses? What conditions could enable the possibilities for “living otherwise”—that is, to live in just and relational terms in face of difference and absence?

 

In the workshop, the artists discussed with the participants how their experiences of producing, publishing, and distributing photobooks and independent magazines in Okinawa constitute an alternative image politics that refuses prevalent imaginings of Okinawa as either a tourist paradise or militarized site.

 

 

Kaori Nakasone is a photographer based in Tokyo and Okinawa, Japan. She held solo exhibitions "Temporality" (Kobunesha Studio, Naha, 2023) and “Unframed” (Kiyoko Sakata Gallery, Naha, 2016) and participated in group shows including “Transit Republic: The Pan-Pacific Collective Edition'' (arena 1 gallery, Los Angeles, 2017) and “the 27th Hitotsubo Photography Exhibition” (Guardian Garden, Tokyo, 2006). Having served as an editor of photography magazine LP from 2008 to 2010, Nakasone began publishing las barcas in 2011 as its chief editor. She co-wrote the essay "Between Studium and Punctum: Tomatsu Shomei and Nakahira Takuma between ‘Japan’ and ‘Okinawa'" with Mayumo Inoue. It appeared in Voice of Photography (issue 28) in Taiwan and in the edited volume Epistemic Decolonization and the End of Pax Americana (Routledge, 2023). She published a photobook Temporality in 2023.

 

Satoko Nema is an artist born and based in Okinawa, Japan. She teaches as an adjunct instructor at the Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts. She held solo exhibitions “Marginalia” (Naha Cultural Arts Theater NAHArt, Naha, 2023), “Simulacre” (Renemia, Naha, 2019), and “Paradigm” (Omotesanto Gallery, Tokyo; space aotsubame, Kobenesha, gallery atos, Okinawa, 2016). She also participated in group shows including “LAS ISLAS SOLITARIAS” (Sugarcane Room gallery, Miyagi Island, 2023; sponsored by the Okinawa Arts Council), “Artist Today” (Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum, Naha, 2019-2020), “Sharing as Caring #6 Trans-Affekte: Geschichten, Leben und Landschaften (Heidelberger Kunstverin, Germany, 2018-1019), “Transit Republic: The Pan-Pacific Collective Edition” (arena 1 gallery, Los Angeles,2017), “Untimely Encounter 2016: Moment” (Alternative Space LOOP, Korea, 2016-2017), among others. She published two photobooks, Paradigm in 2015 and Simulacre in 2019. In 2023, she co-founded the artist group Aotsubame, whose members established the art gallery Sugarcane Room in Miyagi Island, Okinawa.

 

 

Ji Eun (Camille) Sung is an Arts & Science Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto. Her primary research interest lies in artistic practices that actively employed non-conventional media, with a focus on their conversation with and operation within the socio-political conditions in Korea, and more broadly, in East Asia. Her research interests also include queer and feminist art practice, activism, and theory and the relationship between critical theory and praxis. She has worked as a curator and art critic, producing exhibitions, installations, and independent publications, particularly as a member of the Korean feminist visual art collective No New Work. Her work has been published in the Journal of History of Contemporary Art and will be included in the Routledge Companion to Art History and Feminisms.