When You Call My Name Canberra Launch
Photo by Yumiko Starke
On a cool clear Canberra evening in spring about hundred people gathered in a room in the H C Coombs building at the Australian National University for the opening of the exhibition, When You call My Name. The project, which is collaborative, gathered together 166 artists who made 225 works, each commemorating one of the 208 Japanese civilians who died in Australian internment camps during or just after World War Two. The internees came from all over: Thailand, Taiwan, New Caledonia, Borneo, the Dutch East Indies, New Guinea, the Torres Strait Islands, Tonga and, of course, mainland Australia. It didn’t matter who they were or what they had done with their lives: if they were Japanese, they were rounded up, transported, imprisoned and, in the case of these 208, died in custody.
The artists, too, were an international cohort, from Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, Indonesia, Japan, North America and places in between. Not all were professional artists; some were poets, some were children, some were academics or civil servants, some just ordinary citizens. Others were direct descendants of those who had been interned. Each person had made an artwork (or several artworks) which featured, somewhere in the composition, the name of the internee they had adopted. The title of the exhibition, and its major theme, referenced the notion that, so long as a person’s name is spoken, they live on in the collective memory. These lost and perhaps hitherto forgotten internees would each have their name said again.
Photo by Christine Piper
The exhibition design was simple yet profound. We had gathered in the room, with the artworks laid out on tables at the front, and behind them a rectangular bulletin board. Each person, in turn, took an art work from the table and pinned it to the board. The only rule of placement was that it should touch another artwork. While we did so, a recording played, reciting the names of the internees, one by one, first in a woman’s voice, then in a man’s, then again in a woman’s voice. Along with the artwork they chose, each person also picked up two postcards reproducing the image (and with a QR code accessing their biography). One they kept, as a personal memorial, upon the other they wrote a message to the deceased. These postcards will in time be delivered to Cowra Regional Art Gallery. Most of the internees are interred nearby, in the Cowra Japanese Cemetery.
Photo by Christine Piper
The ceremony was loosely based upon a Buddhist practice called Oshoko, used to remember and honour the dead; but this basis was implicit, not explicit. It was extraordinary how moving it was. The repetition of the names of the dead, accompanying a simple action performed by ordinary people, some of them children, some of them the artists themselves, some of them family and friends, some of them outright strangers, did seem to raise and then gather together the souls of the dead in the room with us. It was as if the mere act of remembrance, in both sound and vision, was enough to give them, howsoever briefly, breath and life again.
Only about half of the art works were pinned up on the night. Two workshop sessions on the following day saw the remainder join their fellows in the display. As a finished work it looked uncannily complete; both the sum of its parts and more than the sum of its parts. It was I suppose coincidental that all three episodes took place before an exhibit of photographs of traditional weavers, and examples of the cloths they make, from Lake Toba in Sumatra; and that the last workshop, in Friday afternoon, coincided with a regular meeting of Pacific Islanders to drink kava and talk over the events of the week. It became clear that an art work made and exhibited in this way is much more than an aesthetic object; rather, it is itself a representation of community, and of the truth that, together, we too are more than the sum of our parts.
Photo by Christine Piper
Photo by Christine Piper
Photo by Christine Piper
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