Erika Kobayashi continues the Wandering Calendar with this limited edition bookmark/poster, now available for free at Art Metropole in Toronto.
Using fragmentation and dispersion, her work consists of 24 bookmarks that each disclose one of the different plant species previously found in the Forest of Wild Birds at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
The full set of bookmarks can be gathered and arranged to make the poster seen above, which includes a quote from Kobayashi’s novel “Trinity, Trinity, Trinity”. (This is the beginning of the revenge of the invisible.)
Erika’s longstanding exploration of radiation is suffused with metaphoric implications, but here takes the form of ominous reminder; what was “out of sight, out of mind” will come to haunt the oblivious and indifferent, often with perilous consequences.
Erika Kobayashi is a novelist and visual artist based in Tokyo. Kobayashi creates works that are inspired by matters invisible to the eye: time and history, family and memory, and the traces left
behind.
Her novel Breakfast with Madame Curie (Shūeisha,) was shortlisted for both the Mishima and the Akutagawa Prize and she was awarded the 7th Tekken Heterotopia Literary Prize in 2020 for her novel Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (Shūeisha).
Her first novel to be published in English, Trinity, Trinity, Trinity (translated by Brian Bergstrom and published by Astra House) won the 2022-2023 Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission Prize for English translation of Japanese literature. Sunrise: Radiant Stories (Astra House), is her second work of fiction published in English, and was released in 2023.
Many thanks to yoongyoooong for offset printing assistance in Seoul.
Thanks to Kunstverein Toronto and Art Metropole for making Erika’s work available in Toronto. Eternal thanks to Brennan J. Kelly for making things happen.
Wandering Calendar is a yearlong project organized by HaeAhn Paul Kwon Kajander.
View Wandering Calendar #5 documentation
