Opening at the Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies - 11th July to 24th September 2005

Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth - 29th October to 3rd December 2005

Millais Gallery, Southampton Solent University - 13th January to 25th February 2006

This mixed media exhibition curated by Siumee Keelan presents the work of three artists from Japan: Kanemaru Kazuya, Mutsumi Tsuda and Keiji Usami, and from England: Alexis Hunter, Jacqueline Morreau, Mircea Roman and Tolleck Winner. Alongside their work will be the installation Peace Tent created by young people (from Positive Activities for Young People, Ealing Youth and Connexions Service) working with the artist Eric Fong and over 100 ‘mail art works’ from artists around the world who were invited to explore current visions of nuclear weapons in the 20th and 21st centuries, and in particular nuclear fictions since 1991. The curator was inspired after reading the classic manga (Japanese comic) Barefoot Gen, the vivid autobiographical story of artist Keiji Nakazawa who was only seven years old when the Atomic Bomb destroyed his home city of Hiroshima. Barefoot Gen unveils his family's struggle for survival in the aftermath of the atomic devastations.

The exhibition is timed to commemorate the 60th anniversary of this tragic time of man’s inhumanity to man and when the USA used Japan to test the power of a newly created weapon of mass destruction. The date was 6 August 1945. Nuclear consciousness has proliferated in the arts since the atomic attack on Japan, becoming a visual culture of global dimensions, incorporated science-fiction dystopian narratives of destruction and fall-out in comics, cartoons, multi-media, performance, painting, sculpture, graphic design photography and film. The symbolic order of the nuclear age has undergone recent transformation with the arrival of new narratives and metaphors of nuclear threat since the Cold War and with the new fictions involving 'War on Terror', rogue atomic states, depleted uranium, and dirty bombs. A global threat, with local affects, has motivated new aesthetic responses to a new culture of annihilation, and plotting the boundary between nuclear fiction and reality in narratives of heroism and nihilism, resignation and resistance, paranoia and paralysis. The works in After Hiroshima: Nuclear Imaginaries exemplify this current surge of interest.