Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan

The start of a new year is always a good time to think about the last twelve months and ensure good plans are in place for the coming year. Our exhibitions are scheduled and developed a number of years ahead of opening, so it’s always exciting to see them finally come to fruition – and appear in print in each new edition of Bulletin.

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Disruptive Landscapes: Contemporary Art from Japan includes moving-image works that examine our relationships to the land, whether historical, mythological or contemporary. They reveal how landscapes at once reflect our imagination and endorse national identity and societal structures. Landscapes are the aestheticised and mediated form of our natural surroundings, encoded with politics, cultural memories and belief systems; through distinct framing and composition they assert certain politics and mindsets, such as the notion of an untouched, unoccupied land, or the ideal ecosystem for a site.

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In 1951, the Treaty of San Francisco formally ended the war between the Allied Powers and Japan. The United States and Japan also signed the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security (known in Japan as Anpo), in which Japan agreed to host United States military bases. Nine years later a revised version of this treaty further formalising the arrangement between the two nations was negotiated by Japanese prime minister Kishi Nobusuke (the grandfather of future prime minister Abe Shinzo) and President Eisenhower. 

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はじめに、さらに20年さかのぼる。1951年、サンフランシスコ平和条約と同時に締結された「日本国とアメリカ合衆国との間の安全保障条約」（旧安保条約）は、米軍の日本駐留を可能にした。 同条約は1960年、当時の岸信介（安倍晋三元首相の祖父）首相とアイゼンハワー米大統領によって日米共同防衛が明文化されたかたちで改定され、月に調印された。

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