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 prewar 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 reproduction of a post-atomic archive–the United States Strategic Bombing Survey–created by the U.S. military in Occupied Japan; 2) a fictive, transhistorical correspondence with the late Japanese poet and hibakusha, Hara Tamiki; and 3) a photographic search for (or "survey" of) 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 recovering life disappeared by the state and its archives, and to do so, it looks to the pregnant breaks between language, light and atomic time.
Related Works: Letters to/from H
Exhibitions:
Brookline Arts Center, MA, USA, 2024
TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, PA, USA, 2023
ARCUS Project Open Studios, Ibaraki, Japan, 2022