Dead Letter Room (2021–2022)
Dead Letter Room is a transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet Hara Tamiki (原民喜, 1905–1951), known for his slender output of poetry and prose during the pre-WWII and immediate postwar periods. An extraordinarily sensitive and elusive writer, Hara is most popularly admired for authoring Summer Flowers, a narrative first-person account of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Dead Letter Room is comprised of three interdependent parts: 1) a study of a postwar archive—the United States Strategic Bombing Survey—created by the U.S. military in post-atomic Japan; 2) a fictive, transhistorical correspondence with Hara Tamiki; and 3) a photographic search for the material, literary, and spectral traces of Hara's life, conducted by the artist in 2022.
Together, the elements of Dead Letter Room engage in a politics of mediation and exchange, flowing across disciplines, languages, nations, and temporalities. The project is preoccupied with tending to life disappeared by the state and its archives, and to do so, it looks to the pregnant breaks between language, light, and time.
Dead Letter Room was completed while in residency at, and with the valuable support of, ARCUS Project.
Related Works: Letters to/from H
01. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific Theater, 1945
In October 1945, a team of U.S. Air Force photographers arrived in Occupied Japan. Outfitted with military-grade still and cinema cameras, the photographers set out to conduct a comprehensive visual survey of the damages wrought on Japanese soil by wartime American bombing. Over several months, the surveyors produced over 10,000 still photographs and hours of 35mm and 16mm film, depicting the ruins of bombed-out cities, the relics of the Japanese war economy, and the thousands of civilians left dead or disappeared. The survey, titled the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), has a large section dedicated to visualizing the wreckage of atomic-bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, it remains one of the most extensive visual records of the ruins of nuclear war.
Photographs reproduced courtesy of U.S. National Archives.
02. Hara Tamiki (原民喜) b. Japan, 1905–1951
HARA Tamiki (原民喜, Japan, 1905–1951) is a Japanese writer known for his slender output of poetry and prose during the pre-WWII and immediate postwar periods. Hara's most celebrated work, the short story “Summer Flowers,” continues to be recognized as one of the most distinguished works of literature written by a survivor of the atomic bomb.
Central to Dead Letter Room is Letters to/from H, a collection of thirteen fabulative, transhistorical letters written between the artist ("AT") and the personified remains of Hara Tamiki's literary archive ("H").
The correspondence was written in English and has been translated into Japanese by Kyle Yamada and Kanoko Tamura.
See: Letters to/from H
03. Contemporary Sites:
Hiroshima & Tokyo, Japan, 2022
A photographic search for the material, literary, and spectral traces of Hara Tamiki’s life, and an inquiry into postwar erasures in the Japanese landscape. The series of photographs distantly echoes the language of the USSBS, as a visual index of absence-as-presence, disappearance, and the aftermath.
Exhibition History:
Brookline Arts Center, MA, USA, 2024
TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, PA, USA, 2023
ARCUS Project Open Studios, Ibaraki, Japan, 2022