August 9th, 2014
One Thousand Questions/千の問—From Hiroshima to Hanford‘s opening reception. The lanterns here are once float off the water on August 6th at the Green Lake, Washington: based on a custom started in Hiroshima to float off the spirit of hibakusya. This year —69 years after the A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki— the lanterns were brought back from the lake and placed under the bomb sculpture in the exhibition space; brings about our revelation of our own arrogance—the desire to appease the dead by flowing off the spirit of the dead, and that it only rests on our self-affirming forgetfulness.
Perhaps the next question is “how instead, can we enter into a (new) relation with history?”
photo credit: Lincoln Potter