Images without End: A Workshop on Emergent Time-Space

Workshop with Mayumo Inoue, Hitotsubashi University and Kaori Nakasone, photographer based in Tokyo and Okinawa.

This workshop brings a photographer and a scholar from Japan/Okinawa, whose photographic and critical practices intervene into the ways in which time has been managed as a linear trajectory for the imperially produced – or more simply racialized – subjects and their gendered norms.

Kaori Nakasone, a photographer from Okinawa and the founder of art press Kobunesha, will explore how photography might “pencil in” an alternative sense of time that estranges the received images of Okinawa and elsewhere within the imperial frame of orientalism and nativism. Nakasone will especially introduce her use of half-frame film camera, through which pairs of two images proliferate and suggest affinity without end, that is, without temporal or purposive finality.

Mayumo Inoue, a literary critic, will discuss a few cases of literary and video works in which inscriptions do not sit still as the words in a language and, instead, appear at best as half-words, i.e., linguistic matters that demand new ways of seeing, touching, and vocalization in a realm where the notions of native language and its speaker are in question. Inoue will then discuss how such experiments in and through image and language might facilitate a critique not simply of a nation but of a larger logistical and infrastructural spaces of sea and air through which plural nation-states collectively engage in war and commerce.

Chair: Stefanie Heine and Brian Alkire.