小原一真

Kazuma Obara

The wars and disasters unfolding across the world today can be understood as the manifestation of problems accumulated through the process of modernisation since the Industrial Revolution, as well as the contradictions and fractures produced by the histories of colonialism and imperialism. This exhibition brings together works by photographer Kazuma Obara, spanning his documentation of the Great East Japan Earthquake and nuclear disaster, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine, alongside records of victims of the Second World War, the Roma people who have endured long histories of discrimination and persecution, and survivors of Hansen’s disease.

Rather than presenting these events as isolated occurrences, the exhibition approaches them as phenomena that have circulated globally and remained interconnected across long spans of time. It seeks to reveal how catastrophe produces invisibility and division, how historical and structural continuities persist beneath the surface, and how individual lives become obscured in their shadow.

The exhibition’s title, Unreel, refers both to the act of threads becoming entangled and gradually coming undone, and to the unfurling of a reel of photographic film. When a thread is loosened—triggered by a particular event—histories that had not surfaced, or had only intermittently appeared, are suddenly laid bare. For those who live these lives, and for the people around them, such moments can be emotionally destabilising and, at times, profoundly painful. They may mark the beginning of new forms of violence, yet they may also give rise to new connections, offering the possibility of repair or solace.

Many of the individuals depicted in this exhibition have seen the very foundations of their lives shaped by disaster or by arbitrary and unjust violence. The works on view trace a trajectory that begins in Norway in 1874 and extends through the COVID-19 pandemic to our present world in the aftermath of the war in Ukraine. By carefully unraveling individual stories, the underlying interconnectedness of the world—its chains of relation and entanglement—gradually comes into view. In that moment, the memories of others captured in these photographs begin to connect quietly with our own, across past, present, and future.