'Remembering Absence' by Kirk Palmer

You are cordially invited to an artist talk by Kirk Palmer and Dr Mark Rawlinson, University of Nottingham, on Tuesday 17 February at the Daiwa Foundation.

Kirk Palmer’s work explores the existential nature of human relationships with the world through an exploration of the temporal landscape and sense of place using still and moving images, such as Hiroshima (2007) and War’s End: An Island of Remembrance (2012.. His show, Remembering Absence, is exhibiting at the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation until 26th February.

Palmer and Dr Rawlinson discussed themes arising from the exhibition such as empathy, trauma, the absence of ruins and memory and landscape.

Palmer is also featuring in an exhibition at the Tate Modern, entitled Conflict, Time, Photography. In the catalogue for that exhibition, curator Simon Baker writes that “Kirk Palmer’s film Hiroshima works with and through time, and consists of a series of strangely attenuated sequences of everyday life in Hiroshima, in and around the hypocentre, complete with the muted city sounds of traffic and children playing. It is chilling because despite the anachronism of the city’s appearance (in 2007 rather than 1945, unrecognisable as the original ground zero), the effect is of being forced to see the residents of Hiroshima going obliviously and imperviously about their everyday lives. The film transforms them from being the inhabitants of Hiroshima sixty-two years after the bomb to representing the inhabitants of the same city just moments before the event. Looking at the present through the lens of the past, Palmer’s Hiroshima seems perpetually frozen on the brink of obliteration. But although historically the bombing will always have happened, his film seems somehow to disavow this fact, and to suggest, in spite of everything, that for the on-screen Hiroshima at least, the plane will never come and the bomb will never drop.” (The Tate show is until 15th March).

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