When You Call My Name
When You Call My Name is a collaborative project honouring civilians who were brought from South East Asia, Pacific Islands and across Australia as ‘Japanese aliens’ to be interned in Australia during WWII, and who died during internment. They include 26 people from Taiwan and one from Korea. They were included with the Japanese because Taiwan and the Korean Peninsula were under the rule of Japan during the Pacific War. 192 of the 194 people are now buried in the Japanese Cemetery in Cowra, NSW, Australia. Two who died on the voyage to Australia were buried at sea.
The project gives every participant a particular deceased internee to ‘adopt’ : A name and an information kit on a particular Nikkei internee. The participant will be asked to respond to their learnings with a 2D artwork, or a photograph of a work, which includes the name of the internee.
The resulting artworks will be exhibited online, as a print catalogue and as a part of a large-scale collage for exhibition.
Calling for collaborators
Be part of a community project through art:
- Find participants through their networks
- Consider and identify interests, matching participants with internees via similarities in name, gender, occupation or in locations such as place of birth, internee address or place of capture.
- Lead their participants to create and deliver individual artworks by March 2025
- Create their own artwork or a series of artworks by March 2025
Artworks
- Must have the internee’s full name somewhere within the artwork
- 2D artworks such as illustrations, paintings, photographs, collage, formatted text etc or photographs of 3D works such as sculpture, dance, performance, music score etc
- Delivered digitally as high-res photo, scan (min 5MB) or original at A4 size
- All originals will be returned
- Participants must be the copyright holder of the image
- Copyright of the artworks remains with the participant, but licensed to this project
Exhibition
- As part of a physical exhibition in Australia
- As part of a catalogue of artworks
- Online exhibition
More info about this project contact Mayu Kanamori: https://mayu.com.au/contacts/
More info about Denzo Higa: https://cowrajapanesecemetery.org/grave/210/
Sophie Constable on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sophieconstableart/
More info about Mayu Kanamori: https://mayu.com.au/mayu-profile/