Summoning the Silenced: The Work of Tomiyama Taeko

Sat 18 Apr, 4:00PM

Book Tickets

Chained Hands in Prayer (しばられた手の祈り)
Slide set by Tomiyama Taeko, Maeda Katsuhiro, Tsuchimoto Noriaki, Koike Masato; poetry by Kim Ji-ha | 1976 | Japan | 36’ | English-language version

This screening focuses on the work of Tomiyama Taeko (1921-2021), an artist whose socially engaged practice occupies a distinctive place in postwar Japanese art. Raised in colonial Manchuria and marked by her return to Japan in the final years of the war, she emerged from the immediate postwar period convinced that painting had to be an act of engagement with social injustice. Her first public works appeared in the early 1950s, when she turned her attention to metal and coal mines across Japan, especially in Chikuhō, producing “reportage paintings” and drawings in relation to labour-union contexts, whilst also writing alongside her visual practice. A long journey through Latin America in the early 1960s broadened her awareness of anti-colonial struggle, exploitation, feminism and international solidarity, and shaped the direction of her art. From the 1970s onward, her work engaged in anti-colonial and anti-imperial histories, paying sustained attention to Korea and the violent legacies of Japanese imperialism and war in Asia, and insisting on art as a practice of remembrance.

This programme brings together two films and a 1976 slide set, all made in close collaboration between Tomiyama Taeko and the filmmakers Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Maeda Katsuhiro. Slide works were central to her practice – an intermedia form she used creatively and extensively to circulate images and words beyond conventional exhibition spaces. Maeda’s film centres on lithographs Tomiyama made in response to the violent suppression of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea. Tsuchimoto’s film, Pop Out Balsam Seeds! – My Chikuhō, My Korea – which takes its title from Tomiyama’s 1983 book of essays – returns to her Chikuhō mine paintings and records a dialogue with the filmmaker in which she articulates her political and artistic position. The film is dedicated to the Korean forced labourers who died in the mines, as well as to the poet and independence activist Yun Dong-ju, who died in Fukuoka Prison in 1945. Tsuchimoto – whose work was the subject of an Open City retrospective in 2022 – shared with Tomiyama a commitment to forms of expression grounded in political testimony and historical responsibility.

Tomiyama Taeko began developing slide works in the 1970s as a collaborative intermedia form combining painting, poetry, narration, and music, conceived as autonomous works rather than documentation of her paintings. The slide set presented here, Chained Hands in Prayer (1976), was the first project Tomiyama created with the filmmakers Tsuchimoto Noriaki and Maeda Katsuhiro. Produced in four language versions, it includes poetry by the Korean dissident poet Kim Ji-ha and music by the composer Takahashi Yūji, a leading figure of postwar Japanese new music, with whom Tomiyama collaborated over the years.

In 2022, Open City presented a retrospective of Tsuchimoto Noriaki’s films, celebrating a filmmaker whose work remains a vital reference for socially engaged documentary cinema. Throughout his extensive filmography, Tsuchimoto forged important collaborations with politically engaged artists addressing social injustice. Among the most significant was his work with the painters Maruki Iri and Akamatsu Toshiko, creators of the Hiroshima Panels, with whom he made the film The Minamata Mural (1981) as well as educational and artistic slide sets, including Hiroshima—Testimony Through Paintings (1985), both screened during the festival. His collaborations with the Maruki and with Tomiyama reflected his own enduring concern with how artistic practice might represent and respond to historical violence, political responsibility, and collective memory.

Maeda Katsuhiro was a filmmaker and producer whose work often aligned with Tsuchimoto’s concerns. Among his films is the remarkable Polluted Japan (1974), which examines the widespread industrial pollution incidents in Japan and the lives of those affected.

Screening organised and presented by Ricardo Matos Cabo, with thanks to Dimitri Ianni, Iwahashi Momoko, Komatsubara Tokio, Yamagami Sakiko and PARC.

Images courtesy of Montage Inc.