Giles Price, Restricted Residence, 2020. © Giles Price, 2023

What does it mean to remember Fukushima in the UK today? COVID, Climate Change, and Ukraine.

Thu 2 March 2023

Howard Theatre

Y?oi Kawakubo (photographer) buries silver halide film in the contaminated soils of Fukushima’s exclusion zone to produce a powerful series of abstracts. Among other accolades, Yoi won the 2015 Ohara Museum of Art Prize and was shortlisted for the 2016 Shiseido Art Egg Prize and the 2012 Sovereign Asian Art Prize (Hong Kong).

G?iles Price (photographer) uses thermal technology to render eerie everyday scenes in two towns heavily exposed to the effects of the nuclear disaster. He is a contributor to various publications including The New York Times Magazine, FT Weekend Magazine, Guardian Weekend Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, and Bloomberg Markets.

D?r Brigitte Steger (Senior Lecturer in Modern Japanese Studies, University of Cambridge and co-editor 'Japan Copes with Calamity) is one of the essayists involved in Picturing the Invisible. The tsunami disasters of March 2011 prompted her to travel to northeastern Japan, where she was the only researcher to live alongside survivors in a shelter. She observed that problems with cleanliness became a symbol of shared suffering in the shelters, and that survivors tried to regain a sense of normality by organising household routines according to deeply rooted social structures.

D?r Makoto Takahashi (Fulbright-Lloyd's Fellow, Program on STS, Harvard University and curator of Picturing the Invisible)has worked on the Fukushima Daiichi disaster for 10 years. His PhD thesis examined how claims to expert authority have been made in conditions of low public trust and received the American Association of Geographers’ Jacques May Thesis Prize. Picturing the Invisible has been exhibited at the Royal Geographical Society, London and TU Munich.

L?eigh Turner (British Ambassador to Ukraine 2008-12) is a former British diplomat and civil servant with over forty years of experience. He was joint head of the Foreign Office Crisis Unit set up in 2014 to respond to the Russian occupation of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine. Turner's book A Hitchhiker's Guide to Diplomacy is due to be published in Spring 2013 and explores 'the background to the conflict: what the world did wrong, what it did right, and what Vladimir Putin does not understand'.

Cost: Free