This exhibition expands on the film-essay and photo-essay focus of SixtyEight’s two previous With or Without the Sun exhibitions in order to look at the essayistic approach to photography and film-making more widely. Essayistic strategies include using various types of source material, more than one narrative perspective, or problematising the idea of 'truth' in ways that allow alternative narratives and perspectives to emerge.

The works and the exhibition advocate for art forms that highlight precisely the complexity of the notion of 'truth'. They allow for a nuanced understanding of fact and fiction, memory and perception, and encompass an approach to equivocation that may be of assistance to us in navigating a world marked by so-called 'alternative facts'.

They also offer a way to acknowledge that more differentiated concepts of culture and identity have become essential in the reception of information and formulation of opinions, particularly in recent years, in which longestablished 'western' ideas of history and culture have been called into question by previously overlooked populations.

While the two earlier exhibitions held 2018 and 2019 raised issues about cultural differences and meetings, the outsider's gaze, and what a contemporary approach to film-essay and photo-essay narratives looks like. The artists in this exhibition ask questions which are increasingly pertinent in our globalised world, such as 'What is the nature of cultural identity?', 'Where are ideas such as home and belonging to be located, in the self or in the place?’, and 'How do local frames of reference interplay with supposedly global common references?'

The interplay of the artistic contributions from Denmark, Germany, Japan and China therefore served to nuance the understanding of cultural identity through transcultural exchange, in which different cultures are given the space to influence and positively affect one another. Through the experience of the exhibition, both Japanese visitors and visitors from abroad had the opportunity to see themselves through reflection in the other, and to explore common values across cultural borders. For this reason, the Danish contributions are not restricted to a traditional idea of Denmark, but include works and artists from Greenland and immigrants who have settled in and form part of the multiplicity of Danish society.

In the tradition of transculturalism, the exhibition concept and the many years of research within the framework of With or Without the Sun are self-reflexive and selfcritical, with each exhibition further exploring ideas brought up by the previous one.

Download the exhibition brochure in Japanese

Download the floor plan in Japanese

Chen Chuanduan presented a selection of images from his photo series the Belly of the Giant Serpent. Through an interplay of photography, archival material, nuanced use of AI generated elements, and poetic texts, the project tells the story the town of Norgris, where a meteorite with scales like a snake is said to have fallen to Earth. Children who touched it were believed to be protected from illness, and religious beliefs and ceremonies developed around it. Yet the author doesn’t seem sure whether he can return to the town, or if it even exists. The work meditates on the nature of human beliefs and how belief systems arise. In the context the use of AI generated elements also takes on the character of a reflection on what we believe and how.

Katharine Duve’s video work Suzzanna van Osch is based on the premise that biographies are constantly in flux and inherently contain contradictions. Through the figure of Suzzanna van Osch – celebrated as an icon of Indonesian horror cinema – the film traces the elusive identities of ghosts, which can transcend physical laws and social conventions. Superimposed film images merge with sound recordings and video effects to form a digital collage. Sound and image are not synchronised, thereby interrogating the contradictory qualities of identity, local rituals, and cinema itself, while a female voice-over articulates a fragmentary narrative of paradoxical self-reflections and discrepant biographical references.

Tina Enghoff’s video work You Run but the Circle Surrounds You tells the story of David Samuel Naeman Josef Kristoffersen, who in the early 1950s was sent away from his family in Greenland to the Refsnæs Hospital in Kalundborg, Denmark, to be treated for a childhood hip disorder. He received no treatment and lost the ability to speak his mother tongue. Switching between statements of fact and poetic, metaphorical imagery, the work offers the viewer an emotional and empathetic entry point to the story.

Taken as a pair, the two video works articulate ideas of personal and cultural belonging and loss, and of the simultaneous spectrality and reality of memory, but from different perspective and in very different contexts.

Fabian Hammerl’s 貴方は本当にとても遠くに住んでいる人です / You are a person who really lives very far away is a visual journal composed of photographs from Japan and China. It takes us on a journey on foot, by train, with overnight lodgings in shabby hotel rooms and temporary homes, day-to-day observations and short-term encounters, the change of seasons and a constant notion of parting. The title of the series might be taken from a letter or a note, and while it states a simple fact, it also implies a deep sense of incomprehension. Hammerl has always doubted the reliability of photographic report, and works with the incongruity between a descriptive surface and the connotations beneath.

The series of images in Julia Mejnertsen’s photo book HUN form a multi-perspectival narrative about a typically western view of nature, told through a focus on the author’s mother's passion for hunting. Animals are seen in the zoo, as objects of the hunt, typical family pets and as taxidermy specimens, the different human gazes playing off one another and against images of family life. Through these visual reflections the series develops a nuanced image of our understanding of nature and the animal, as well as the contested status of hunting, which questions inherited assumptions about how we see other animals and each other. At the same time, the work considers the artist's relationship with her mother, and how witnessing her passion for hunting had significance for the artists finding her passion in photography. A series which does not shy away from the difficult questions raised by the issues studied, or from the strong reactions people might have.

Jakob Sinn’s photo and audio work We Build What You Dream takes its name from a slogan frequently seen in Thailand in the context of large-scale construction projects. The phrase can be read as a metaphor for a country navigating the ongoing tension between tradition and modernity. This ambivalence is mirrored in the present work, which consists of a leporello with twelve analogue photographs and a sound piece consisting of six tracks. Field recordings are supplemented by manipulated tape loops sampled from Thai cassette tapes of the 1980s.

Carsten Rabe’s film Sketches on the Question of the Actual in Relation to the Image and Form poses a series of questions that examine the relationship between visual imagery and narrative. In the interplay of questions and image descriptions, the viewer is invited to engage with themes such as photography and form, original and copy, and their relationship to statement, observation, and storytelling. Throughout, the work raises the question, What relationship do real, occurred events have to those that enter discourse as retellings? – and, Does the binding force of a community diminish if it can no longer agree on a shared truth?

Mini Library of Books - books which were of inspiration of the curators and/or represent key examples of essayistic narrative technique

Inuuteq Storch, Flesh (2019), articulates Storch’s experiences in New York, where he felt spiritually at home while at the same time bodily homesick, and missed the close relationship to nature in his homeland of Greenland. Flesh is a story about finding the recognisable in the unrecognisable, a wild and slightly savage conglomeration of people, places and parties, that may or may not reflect the wild and harsh landscapes of Greenland.

Chris Marker, Le Dépays (1982, 2024). English language edition of Marker’s photo-essay of 1982, which he made around the same time as his famous film Sans Soleil. It traces some of the same themes – cats, Tokyo, Japan and the Japanese – but unlike the film does not suddenly set off for other parts of the world. As with Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs, which he considered essential reading, Marker’s texts and black and white photos are as much about his own invented Japan as the actual country.

Through images and text, Kevin Malcolm’s Impartial Spectator (2024) weaves together site-specific memories of his youth skate-boarding at The Adam Smith Building in Glasgow with his adult self's reflections on the larger socio-political meanings and references of the same place, and of how Smith’s ideas have shaped the world.

Tina Enghoffs Displaced (2021) documents a research project about an aspect of the history and legacy of the colonial relations of Denmark and Greenland, a project which the video You Run but the Circle Surrounds You is also part of.

Jan Søndergaard’s Tokyo 123 (2015) contains three photo essays: the first about the black crows of Tokyo, which are slowly, park by park taking over territories from humans, and the attempts to control them; the second about the thin line between urban living and the close and neighbourly relationship with a nature worship deeply embedded in Japanese culture and religion; the third about very small variations in Japanese everyday aesthetics, which, caught in his outsider’s gaze, are crystallised into rare, slightly alien entities.

Sophie Calle, True Stories (2017, 2018). In this book Calle tells stories in the form of short texts, inspired by or referring to an image on the facing page. They are very different from one another, and one can never really be sure whether a true story is also a question of ‘telling stories’, i.e. lying, as the English idiom has it.

Carsten Rabe, Amerika (2017). While location and date are considered essential indicators in the medium of documentary photography, in Amerika the photographs are situated in space and time under the heading “America”, while their indexical character is uncertain. Rabe’s narrative approach offers viewers the opportunity to reconcile the photographed imagery with their own remembered images of an America that is both imaginary and realistic.

Simon Brugner’s The Arsenic Eaters (2018) investigates the widespread historical belief that the consumption of arsenic, one of the most potent mineral poisons, is beneficial to one’s health. Arsenic eaters were anxious to conceal their use, as it was taboo. The first part, a visual study, traces the myth of the poison eaters, the second part presents Brugner’s cultural-historical research findings connected to the topic: on historic mining, superstition, medicine and pre-20th century Alpine life in general.

Yamaguchi Takuya, My Soliloquies About Photography (2024). Politics, wars, religion, climate change, LGBTQ issues, poverty, refugees – none of these subjects appear in his photos. He wonders what kind of photos he wanted to capture in the first place. That question came to mind at some point, and he felt the need to stop taking photos and set the camera aside. To reconsider his photography from the ground up, he gradually wrote down everything related to photography in his own words.

In his book Mountain (2023), Higashiji Yuichiro takes a photograph of one of the most iconic images of Japan, Mount Fuji, and subjects it to serial reproduction in a photocopier. By photocopying the previous copy rather than the original, he allows the optical reproduction method to gradually break down the image through decreasing detail and increasing coarseness of printing, until it is as good as uncregnoisable. A meditation not only on original and copy, but more profoundly on what repeated viewing of and exposure to the same representations of a culture or society may do to our cultural imagination.

Yuki Jungesblut, Kirin Quest (2021). Taking Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem The Hunting of the Snark as her travel guide, Yuki Jungesblut set out to search for the Kirin around the East China Sea. Jungesblut’s quest follows (in part) the ancient trade routes of the diplomatic missions between the states and kingdoms that preceded the nations of today, acknowledging how they brought new ideas, goods and technologies, i.e. cultural exchange and growth. The Kirin – as elusive as the Snark – becomes the leitmotif in a musical and thematic sense.

Fabian Hammerl, A house in Omihachiman: Sixteen perambulations (2020, 2024). An unexpected find of historic traces of German in an old house in a Japanese village initiated a reflection on how information is forwarded over time, the various transitions and alterations of intended meanings, and the role of the photographic image as a carrier, if not deviser of truth(s). The sixteen photographic perambulations, allegedly performed around the real house in Omihachiman invite the viewer to draw their own imaginary map of Omihachiman adapted from the depicted places, persons and events.

Film and Video Archive

Chris Marker, The Koumiko Mystery (1965). Marker meets the young woman Kumiko, and is attracted by the fact that she “isn’t an example of anything,” while “Japan is around her” — she is a mystery, even to herself. Born in Manchuria, China, educated in a French-Japanese school, she comments “I must be Japanese by now.” Their conversation in halting French, about politics, beauty, and the relationship of people to animals, is hindered by partial misunderstanding. After Marker’s return to Europe, Kumiko films and sends her answers to a list of his questions — the conversation continues across time and space, but distanced by the lens and tripping over language.

Chip Lord, The Aroma of Enchantment (1992), explores the fascination Japanese teenagers have for the American 1950s and 60s — they wear bobby socks, and Brylcreme in their hair. The film connects historical anecdotes about General Douglas McArthur with the director’s own feelings of alienation in the midst of Japanese culture. Lord focuses on stories told to the camera by Japanese collectors of American memorabilia and advocates of American-isation. It is by turns humorous and mournful in its attempt to come to terms with questions of cultural displacement and western cultural influence in the 90s.

Jorge Suárez-Quiñones Rivas, The Eternal Virgin (2017) consists of clips from Ozu Yasujiro’s films in which the actress Hara Setsuko appears alone, without any visual, verbal or gestural interaction with another character, even one off-screen. The result is 71 shots from 6 different Ozu films. Setsuko is seen going about daily routines: walking down corridors, opening and closing doors, preparing and eating dinner. It is a complex approach to Japanese culture, in that the Japanese filmmaker’s original representation of the female characters becomes a vision of the woman in the home, seen anew in the light of a (western) post-feminist gaze.

Magnus Bärtås, Kumiko, Johnnie Walker & The Cute (2006-07) is about Kumiko Muraoka, the main figure in Chris Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery, and Johnnie Walker, a Japanese homosexual Jew, who is seen by those around him as a foreigner even though his family have been Japanese citizens for generations. Otherwise he holds readings in his home from a Haruki Murakami novel in which one of the characters is based on him. The director locates Kumiko Muraoka in Paris, and finds that she regrets her answer to a question Marker asked 43 years previously, and writes and reads a new text instead. The real or fictive characters are reconstructed and placed in new relationships to their mixed, nomadic backgrounds.

Thorbjørn Bechmann, The Koumiko Project (2012). Taking Chris Marker’s The Koumiko Mystery as its point of departure, the film follows a young Japanese woman for some summer days and nights in Tokyo in 2012. She carries out actions and dialogue developed on the basis of Marker’s film. Camera and actor pass through several of the same areas that framed the original film. The Kuomiko Project is the result of a fetishisation of Chris Marker’s original film, both a re-enactment of Marker’s fascination, and a realisation by proxy of the filmmaker’s own.

Umi Ishihara, Pains of Forever (2015) represents a contemporary iteration of the ‘self-documentary’ tradition, in which she invites the viewer into the intimate realm of home video footage, only for the personal story told to end up questioning the meaning and relevance of these images. Probing the relationship between love and suicide, and hinging upon Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, the monologue speaks of the events that transpired between the narrator’s parents on their slow dance toward destruction. To cope is to quietly confront the ‘impossibility of communication’.

The exhibition project received generous support from the Danish Arts Foundation, the Scandinavia-Japan Sasakawa Foundation, Toyota-Fonden, the Senatskanzlei Hamburg, the Consulate General of the Federal Republic of Germany Osaka-Kobe, and was also supported by the Royal Danish Embassy.

Dalpine/Fiebre Photobook donated copies of Julia Mejnertsen’s HUN for use in the exhibition.

A big thank you to the artists Simon Brugner, Chen Chuanduan, Yuichiro Higashiji, Yuki Jungesblut and Carsten Rabe for donating books, and to Yamaguchi Takuya for lending in. All other books stem from the curators' personal collections.

The curators also wish to thank all the staff at the Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa for their help and support throughout, not least Enzio Wetzel, Miyuki Nishimura, Naoki Ishida, Satomi Fukui and Noriko Sawai.

Every attempt had been made to trace the copyright holders of The Koumiko Mystery (Le Mystere Koumiko), without success. Any breaches of copyright this may have led to are involuntary and unintended. Rightful claims will be met on the same terms as if prior permission had been obtained.