prijava
SARAJEVO, July 16 (FENA) – As part of the "Culture on the Streets" festival, an exhibition by the Japanese artist Noriko Hayashi titled "Japanese Women" opened on Friday in Sarajevo downtown at 15 locations.
At the opening of the exhibition, Hayashi explained how the "Japanese Women" project and exhibition came about.
Namely, when Korea was divided into northern and southern parts after the war, many families remained divided. About 1,800 Japanese women remained to live with their North Korean husbands but lived with the hope that they would one day be able to return to Japan. Due to politics and war, this has not happened until today.
Of those 1,800 Japanese women, ten of them are still alive and Noriko Hayashi visited them all during her trips to North Korea, talking to them about their hopes, dreams and memories.
"During those visits, they told me about their life in Japan, about their houses, family, and nature. Although they are elderly women, the memories of their home are still alive," said Hayashi.
Therefore, she designed the project and, traveling between Japan and North Korea, reconstructed their fragmented and complex memories.
She photographed scenes from the birthplaces of Japanese women and took those life-size photos back to North Korea where she photographed the reactions of those Japanese women when faced with images of their memories.
The project lasted more than 10 years, and the exhibition toured the world.
Citizens of Sarajevo and many tourists can walk through the city during the summer to see the photographs exhibited at 15 locations in the city center, and, as the director of WARM Festival Sarajevo Damir Šagolj said, thanks to the cooperation with the company "Zanat" from Konjic, which made the frames, the photographs are masterpieces.
Noriko Hayashi is a multiple award-winning Japanese artist. Her exhibition "Japanese Women" was created over a period of ten years, and the result is a fascinating series of photographs and texts that try to snatch from oblivion the people whose lives were forever changed by the wars.
(FENA) S. R.
