#Mio Okido "They are lying"

In a photographic installation, Mio Okido addresses the discourses of the culture of memory, which covers the period of modernity up to the end of the Second World War in East Asia. Since 2017, she has been travelling the former territories of the Japanese Empire and photographing the places of remembrance about the war. For this exhibition, she has 'reproduced' each of the 104 photographs taken: the now complete 208 pictures present on the one hand the perspective of a fictional Japanese narrator and on the other hand the perspective of the people of the regions and countries that at the time were either occupied or in conflict with the Japanese Empire.

Today in Japan they talk about the misery of war, but not much is being told about the perpetration of the empire. And the conflicts of the past mean that East Asia is still ideologically divided and that cooperation in the culture of commemoration remains difficult. Thus, completely different memories emerge, which are directed against each other, assert their own truth and deny the reality of the former opponents. Mio Okido tries to find a new approach to the culture of memory of this history through the artistic examination of "collective understandings of history".

Mio Okido was born in 1986 in Niigata, Japan. During her bachelor studies at Tokyo University of Arts she became interested in GDR history and studied for one year at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. After her bachelor's degree in Tokyo and a diploma at the Weißensee University of Arts in Berlin, she continued her studies in the master's program "Art in Context" at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her study topic is "Memory Culture and Media/Photography" and "Semiotics of Photography". In 2016 she was a participating artist in the project "ParisXBerlin - Bekannt-Unbekannt / connu - inconnu", the international artist-in-residence of studierendenWERK Berlin and Crous de Paris.

www.miookido.net

The project "They are Lying" by Mio Okido with Vivian See Yuen Chan, Wen-Ling Chung, Zora Steiner and Jiaying Wu was developed at the Institute for Art in Context of the Berlin University of the Arts within the colloquium “Intervene and Experiment in Public and Social Space” and was supervised by Kristina Leko.