sound of a million insects,
light of a thousand stars
Tomonari Nishikawa, 2mins, 2014
''I buried a 100-foot (about 30 meters) 35mm negative film under fallen leaves alongside a country road, which was about 25 km away from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, for about 6 hours, from the sunset of June 24, 2014, to the sunrise of the following day. The night was beautiful with a starry sky, and numerous summer insects were singing loud. The area was once an evacuation zone, but now people live there after the removal of the contaminated soil. This film was exposed to the possible remaining of the radioactive materials.
This project is made possible with funds from the Media Arts Assistance Fund, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts, Electronic Media and Film, with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; administered by Wave Farm.''
Tomonari Nishikawa
Nishikawa’s films explore the idea of documenting situations/phenomena through a chosen medium and technique, often focusing on process itself. His films have been screened at numerous film festivals and art venues, including Berlinale, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, London Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, New York Film Festival, Singapore International Film Festival, and Toronto International Film Festival. In 2010, he presented a series of 8mm and 16mm films at MoMA P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, and his film installation, Building 945, received the 2008 Grant Award from the Museum of Contemporary Cinema in Spain. Nishikawa started using a 16mm film projector for his performance projects in 2013, scratching the film emulsion to produce the visual and sound. His on-going 16mm film projection performance project, “Six Seventy-Two Variations,” have been performed at Cosmic Rays Film Festival, Exploratorium in San Francisco, FRACTO in Berlin, New York Film Festival, Shapeshifters Cinema in Oakland, among others. He also uses slide projectors in his performance or collaborative work with sound artists, and one of such works, “Chiratsuki,” was performed with Sontag Shogun at Mono no Aware VIII in New York.
He served as a juror for several film festivals, including Ann Arbor Film Festival, Big Muddy Film Festival, dresdner schmalfilmtage, EUREKA Festival Universitario de Cine, and Hong Kong International Film Festival. He is one of the co-founders of KLEX: Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film, Video & Music Festival and Transient Visions: Festival of the Moving Image. He is based in Vestal, NY, and Tokyo, Japan. Nishikawa teaches in the Cinema Department at Binghamton University.
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Artist page: https://www.tomonarinishikawa.com/index.html
