Kansai Franco-Japanese Institute, Kyoto

Victoire Thierrée belongs to a generation of artists for whom photography is a means of excavating the hidden structures of history. Moving between sculpture, film and image-making, the French artist investigates how landscapes bear the traces of military occupation, scientific intervention and technological control. Her striking solo exhibition ‘Okinawa!!’ is presented at the Kansai Franco-Japanese Institute as part of Kyotographie’s KG+ programme. Produced between 2019 and 2023 through repeated journeys between Japan and the United States, the exhibition centres on Okinawa as a territory where sublime nature and persistent militarisation coexist uneasily. Thierrée’s black-and-white photographs focus on the peripheries of American bases, where dense vegetation, coastlines and open skies seem almost to push back against the machinery of occupation. Yet the project extends beyond visible geography. Drawing on research conducted at the Smithsonian Institution, the artist also photographs botanical specimens collected in the Ryukyu Islands in 1951, exposing the lesser-known role of botany within postwar American military strategy. The exhibition’s title consciously echoes ‘Okinawa’ by Shomei Tomatsu, the seminal photographer who first brought international attention to the American presence on the islands. Printed in Kyoto by the historic atelier Benrido, Thierrée’s gelatin silver works transform this layered inquiry into a meditation on memory, violence and the enduring...