GAKU
TSUTAJA
Gaku Tsutaja was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1974 and moved to New
York in 2006, where she received her MFA in 2018. Through drawings, paintings,
sculptures, video installations, and internet projects, Tsutaja exploits the
multiplicity of perspectives inherent within multimedia to frame out the
invisible, the sur/re-pressed histories and memories of the nuclear age. She
appropriates her childhood influences -- manga, martial arts, and zoology-- as
a hyper-signified language that captures the disappearing voices of experienced
nuclear horror. By fusing multi-signifiers, she defamiliarizes their contexts,
removing filters of history and patriotism and forcing a critical and immediate
engagement with a nuclear academic-military–industrial complex that encourages
passivity.
Tsutaja has exhibited
internationally, including recent exhibitions at Ulterior Gallery in New York
(2023, 2020, and 2017, solo); Maruki Gallery For The Hiroshima Panels in
Saitama (2022, solo); the Hawaii Triennial 2022 in Honolulu (2022); Rubin
Center for Visual Arts in El Paso (2021, solo); and Shirley Fiterman Art Center
at BMCC in New York (2019, solo). Tsutaja's exhibitions and artworks have been
widely reviewed in numerous outlets, including The New York Times, Artforum,
and NHK Broadcast.
Organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes
in collaboration with ICAN
ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB is an exhibition of posters that call for universal nuclear disarmament. Each made by a different artist, the group comprises historical and newly
commissioned works that detail a cultural history of disarmament movements and evidence the diversity of ways in which artists have expressed the need to ban the bomb. ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB is designed for maximum agility and economic effectiveness, relying on a black and white palette both for its impact and ease o reproduction. We asked artists to ensure their works can exist on a variety of supports, ephemera such as posters, postcards, billboards, banners, flags, t-shirts and social media posts, as we aspire to achieve the widest possible circulation of this message.
ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB presents the works of foundational conceptual artists Art & Language; pop hero, Keith Haring; legendary feminists, Guerrilla Girls; performance artists Regina José Galindo and Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova, as well
as eminent sculptors Magdalena Abakanowicz and Isamu Noguchi. It also features indelible photographs by Robert Del Tredici and Ken Domon alongside protest graphics from social movements such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), founded in 1958 and still active; the epic Peace Squadron and Visual Artists Against Nuclear Arms (VAANA); and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). Additionally, it examines how stories are told, from the theater of Bread and Puppet to films like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and Marguerite Duras / Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, to an unexpected survey of literature, from an early
anticipation of an atomic bomb, first envisioned by H.G. Wells in 1918, to the viscera spoken word poetry of Jayne Cortez.
ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB, organized by Estudio Pedro Reyes in collaboration with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), is presented on the occasion of the Second Meeting of State Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) held at the United Nations in 2023.
To organize en exhibition of ARTISTS AGAINST THE BOMB please contact curatorial assistant Verana Codina.
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