He picks up the old, yellowed prints, one by one, straining to make out the faces printed upon them. He pauses and mumbles as he speaks… trying to place what he sees in front of him from over half a century ago. Locations and people exchange places with each other, as he attempts, and fails to recognise. More than once he becomes confused: ‘I thought you’d taken some of these, but you couldn’t have done, could you?
My photographic practice draws attention to both historical and contemporary issues within a social and political context. These issues are often entwined with the ideas of invisibility and displacement. Photographing the surrounding environment, I draw attention to the people who have become invisible, as their trace is imprinted upon the landscape. I do not set out to represent these situations explicitly; rather I prefer to let my images quietly rise to the surface, allowing the viewer to make their own associations and interpretations.
Between October and December 2008 I was working on a project in Kyoto, Japan, photographing in the Zainichi Korean community. Zainichi is a term used for permanent resident Koreans in Japan, although the zai implies ‘temporary residence’. The community was largely formed during Japan’s annexation of Korea, which began in 1910, and they have since faced continued discrimination and marginalisation. On my return from Kyoto, I found some of my Grandfather’s photographs taken during time spent in Japan, convalescing from injuries he sustained in the Korean War. I began to consider the links between these images, my photographs of the area in Kyoto where the Zainichi Korean community live and the complex historical story that entwined them.
To Forget uses his historical, yet personal, images reproduced to the same scale as a number of my own photographs. Within an accompanying text, of which I present only a fraction in the exhibition, I weave a narrative of displacement, referring to the history of the Koreans in Japan, the Forgotten War and the contemporary situation. The edited text shown is deliberately opaque – vast swathes of history and current social situations are merely suggested, with fragments of imagery that often appear unrelated. There is information offered to the viewer, but further information is withdrawn, held back, hidden. The work slips away. It refuses to be a representation of this complex story.
The work refers to the Zainichi Korean population, but they are not present in the images, except in a naïve village scene, painted on a protest placard surrounding a house. The human subject is withdrawn, as they withdraw, keeping their identity secret. In presenting the work in this manner I hope to encourage the viewer to reflect upon ideas of forgetting, of sidelining; the rupture in memory and communication, and the outsider viewpoint.
Resume
Charlotte Rea was born in 1982 in Shoreham, England. She lives and works in London. She graduated from her BA Hons Photography at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2004 and completed her MA Photography at the Royal College of Art in 2009. In recent years Charlotte’s work has been recognised by a number of awards including the Bloomberg New Contemporaries and the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Award, where she was one of the UK winners. She has been the recipient of an Arts Council grant and in 2008 she took part in a three month Artist Residency in Kyoto, Japan. Some highlighted exhibitions include:
2009 Small Show, Huge Talent, Sotheby’s Kiddell Gallery, London
2009 Foto8 Summer Show, Host Gallery, London
2009 RCA Show One, Royal College of Art, London
2008 International Artists in Residency, Kyoto Arts Centre, Kyoto, Japan
2008 Cowboys and Horses, Hockney Gallery, London
2006 Emergency Accommodation, Grimm Fine Art, Amsterdam
2005 Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2005, Barbican Gallery, London and UK tour
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