Our new exhibition celebrates the research project Whales of Power: Aquatic Mammals, Devotional Practices, and Environmental Change in Maritime East Asia. The project studies changing relations between humans and aquatic mammals in maritime regions of North- and Southeast Asia, focusing on popular ritual practices and beliefs.
About the exhibition
This research-based exhibition isn't quite like anything you've seen before. By combining different elements like photographs, objects and embroidery art pieces, we hope to give you a different way of looking at and engaging in research.
Embroidery
Sakura Koretsune is in Oslo as a guest researcher in the Whales of Power project. She is a visual artist who collects stories of human-whale relations, and uses these as inspiration for embroidered images on textiles, as well as texts in journals and poems. For the past six years, Koretsune has visited various places that have relationships with whales and dolphins. For this exhibition she has created embroidered pieces inspired by stories she's collected and old photographs. The result is both beautiful and meaningful: "Stories are woven out of words, and pieces of textile are woven out of yarns. “Text” and “textile” share the same origin in the Latin word “texere,” which means, “to weave.” If we were to connect scattered words, stories, and lands where whale stories were handed down, lost images of whales may be rewoven, as if retying loosened yarns."
About the research project
The Whales of Power project is funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 803211 (ERC Starting Grant 2018).
Whales of Power is divided into sevearal work packages, each of which takes up one or several case studies. Some of them will be presented in today's program.
Program:
Short presentations, followed by Q&A, light refreshments and a tour of the exhibition.
- Whales of Power: an introduction
Aike P. Rots, Associate Professor, Japan Studies, IKOS and Principal Investigator for Whales of Power. - Searching for Zan: Human-Dugong Relations and Environmental Activism in Okinawa
Marius Palz, Doctoral Research Fellow, IKOS - Writing Waves: Ecocriticism, the Ocean, and Literature from Japan
Ingvild Boberg, Doctoral Research Fellow, IKOS - Presentation of the embroidery in the exhibition
Sakura Koretsune, guest researcher IKOS, and visual artist
Open to all! Welcome!