The Statue of the Girl for Peace: A Tribute
Tuesday, 12 November 2024 | 14:00 to 17:00 EST | Sensorium Flex Space, Room 326, Joan & Martin Goldfarb Centre for Fine Arts (CFA), Keele Campus, York University
Created by artists Kim Seo-Kyung and Kim Eun-Sung, the Statue of the Girl for Peace commemorates the victims of Japanese military sexual slavery, often euphemistically called "comfort women," during the Asia-Pacific War from the early 1930s to 1945. An estimated 200,000 young girls and women from colonized and occupied regions were subjected to brutal exploitation.
The original statue was installed in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul in 2011, marking the 1,000th Wednesday Demonstration, a weekly protest by survivors and their supporters, seeking justice and redress for this historical atrocity. Since then, the Statue has become a powerful symbol of the redress movement, fostering alliances across generations and transcending national borders. Replicas have been installed in over 100 locations across Korea and globally, including Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, and the United States.
The empty chair beside her symbolizes both the absence of victims who have passed and the ongoing struggle for justice in unresolved war crimes. It extends an invitation for you to join in intergenerational and transnational solidarity against gender-based sexual violence.
This event is presented by mihyun maria kim, Nava Messas Waxman, Marc Nair, and Joshua D. Pilzer. It is organized by Hong Kal & Nava Messas Waxman.
mihyun maria kim is an interdisciplinary artist based in Toronto, researching (un)translatable affects shaped by languages entangled with unresolved historical grief and transmissions of longing. Exhaustion of the body, repetition of movement, fragments of hi/stories, and suspended feelings are explored between memory and imagination across space and time. Through relational methodology, her multivocal outcomes take in/visible form in poetry, painting, performance/activations, audio/video, site-specific installation, community-based round tables and public art.
Nava Messas-Waxman is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across performance, film and installation. Her practice engages themes of cultural identity, diaspora, liminality and memory. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at York University. Her current research explores the diasporic gesture as a dynamic living archive, embedded within complex artistic, cultural and personal registers. Messas-Waxman earned her MFA in Visual Arts from York University. She is a graduate research member at the n::D Studio Lab at York University and a graduate research associate at the Sensorium Research Center for Creative Inquiry and Experimentation at York University. Her recent projects include Assembly of Repair (2024), Shared-View (2022), and Variations on Broken Lines (2020). In 2019, she was honoured with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada's Joseph-Armand Bombardier Scholarship (SSHRC) and has received several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Marc Nair is a poet, artist and educator from Singapore who is based in Toronto. He has 11 collections of poetry, three solo photography exhibitions and three spoken word albums. He is currently a creative writing mentor, freelance writer, and a fellow with the Asia-Europe Foundation.
Joshua D. Pilzer is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the anthropology of sound and music in modern Korea and Japan, voice studies, gender, trauma and everyday life studies. His first book, Hearts of Pine, about singing in the lives of Korean survivors of the Japanese “comfort women” system, was published in 2012. His second book, Quietude, was published in 2022 and is an ethnography of the arts of survival among Korean survivors of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and their children, and won the coveted Alan Merriam Prize of the Society for Ethnomusicology. He is currently conducting fieldwork for an ethnography of the voice in everyday life in contemporary Japan, focused on the uses of speaking and singing voices in pedagogies of propriety and authority.
Hong KAL is Associate Professor in the Department of Visual Art and Art History at York University. She is an author of Aesthetic Constructions of Korean Nationalism: Spectacle, Politics and History (Routledge 2011), and currently working on visual representations of violence, trauma and grief in South Korea.
This event is supported by the School of Arts, Media, Performance, and Design (AMPD); Sensorium: Centre for Digital Arts and Technology; York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR); and Korean Office for Research and Education (KORE) at York University.
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