Stolen Heirlooms is an exhibition by Japanese-Canadian artist Kellen Hatanaka that honours the legacy of his household’s experiences of incarceration throughout WWII. Recreating possessions misplaced to this injustice out of paper, wire, and washi tape, Hatanaka reconciles with the difficult and nuanced feelings communities displaced by way of loss expertise together with anger, unease and grief.
The time period heirloom is commonly used to confer with sentimental objects handed down by way of households, however Hatanaka expands the notion of heirlooms to incorporate the passing on of much less fascinating concepts, resembling generational trauma and ache. By recreating possessions documented in archives of the Japanese-Canadian internment, Hatanaka is ready to develop company in approaching the legacy of his household, and the way he chooses to pass-on the heirlooms given to him.
Stolen Heirlooms brings consciousness to the uncared for reminiscence of Alberta’s position in incarceration, because it served as the situation of many sugar beet farms households have been pressured to work on. By way of the physique of labor, Stolen Heirlooms requires unpacking the complexities of collective remembering, for these impacted and people who take part extra passively, and asks the viewers to rethink our concepts of legacy, transference, and inheritance.
“In 1942, 22 000 Japanese Canadians have been forcibly faraway from their houses alongside the coast of British Columbia. With very quick discover to go away, they have been solely allowed to take one or two suitcases of belongings with them, forsaking a lot of their lives. Throughout this time my grandparents and their households have been faraway from their houses and despatched to the camp in New Denver. This physique of labor is impressed by my nice grandmother’s story of getting to go away behind her shamisen, a standard Japanese string instrument, when she was pressured to go away her residence with my Grandmother and Nice Grandfather. It made me marvel what others had misplaced and if these objects nonetheless exist someplace, orphaned. The idea of collective loss is summary and complex. How do you try and quantify and assign a price to a loss that goes past merely financial? This work was an try and grapple with and look at the loss my grandparents and others skilled.
The sculptures on this exhibition, a set of stolen heirlooms, signify the losses skilled by Japanese Canadians together with possession, property and neighborhood. The varied assortment of sculptures depicts imagined misplaced objects that maintain cultural, financial or sentimental worth. The idea of an heirloom was utilized to attract a parallel between the passing of heirlooms by way of household generations and the passing of inherited trauma by way of generations of Japanese Canadians.” —Kellen Hatanaka
