Sunday 15 March, 11am, free event BOOK PLACE
Join Dr. Makoto Takahashi, sociologist of science, curator and (sometime) Wardour resident for a discussion and launch of his new book ‘Picturing the Invisible’. Makoto will be joined by artists Yoi Kawakubo and Giles Price.
March 2026 will be the 15th anniversary of the Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent nuclear disaster. ‘Picturing the Invisible’, which began as an art exhibition, was published in memory of this seismic event which shook Japan to its core. The book brings together seven talented photographers, all working in the territories affected by the Fukushima nuclear accident. Takashi Arai, Rebecca Bathory, Thom Davies, Masamichi Kagaya and Satoshi Mori, Yoi Kawakubo, Giles Price, and Lieko Shiga. The photographs in the book are accompanied by essays by academics, authors, activists, and policymakers including by friend of the gallery Robert Macfarlane.
“Imaginative – with a clear point of view” – Ai Weiwei
INTRODUCTION BY MAKOTO TAKAHASHI
“The piece ‘Evacuation’ hit me hard. The artists collected and captured […] shoes contaminated with radiation. It captures a sort of shared experience of disaster: some footprints are adults, some are heels, some are children’s shoes. But all walk in the same direction. Away.” – Dr. Makoto Takahashi
Makoto Takahashi is Executive Director at the McQuillan Institute and a Harvard Fellow. His work examines how claims to expert authority are made in conditions of low public trust. He received his PhD from Cambridge University, writing a thesis on the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, which received the American Association of Geographers’ (AAG) Jacques May Thesis Prize. He previously worked at Harvard (as a Fulbright-Lloyd’s Fellow), TU Munich, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (as an Assistant Professor). Makoto is the lead curator of Picturing the Invisible, a traveling exhibition shown at the Royal Geographical Society (2021), TU Munich (2022), Heong Gallery (2023), and Cite Miroir (2025). The exhibition was awarded the 2022 Ziman Award by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST).
Yoi Kawakubo buries silver halide film in the contaminated soils of Fukushima’s exclusion zone to produce a powerful series of abstracts, titled If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst in the skies at once. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; and the National Art Centre, Tokyo. 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). https://www.yoikawakubo.com
Giles Price uses thermal technology to render eerie everyday scenes in Namie and Iitate, two towns heavily exposed to the effects of the nuclear disaster. In so doing, his Restricted Residence series evokes the ghostly presence of radiation, which has deterred so many residents from returning to their homes, even now many evacuation orders have been lifted. Price’s work has been exhibited at The Photographers Gallery, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Imperial War Museum, London; as well as numerous international venues. He is a contributor to various publications including The New York Times Magazine, FT Weekend Magazine, Guardian Weekend Magazine, Telegraph Magazine, and Bloomberg Markets. http://www.gilesprice.com
