Gaku Tsutaja: ENOLA'S HEAD

Gaku Tsutaja, ENOLA'S HEAD, artist proposal for structure, 2020.

The Rubin Center is proud to announce the commissioning of a site-specific piece in fall of 2021 by Japanese artist Gaku Tsutaja. Gaku uses drawing, sculpture, performance, animation and a deeply personal research process to explore the material culture and living history of the atomic bomb. Her drawings and animations create complex constellations of people, objects and events, shifting our understanding of complicity and victimhood and challenging traditional historic accounts based on nationalist frameworks. ENOLA'S HEAD is a motion picture theatre shaped like the nose part of the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 Superfortress that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945 resulting in more than 140,000 deaths that year, and many more over time.  The theatre hangs from the ceiling and floats in the air, leaving the viewers legs visible to others in the gallery, a reference to Gigaku, one of the oldest but now extinct forms of Japanese  masked performance,  with the viewers here wearing a giant mask of the Enola Gay. The viewers watch a film of an allegorical narrative of the history of the atomic bomb with imaginary humanoid animal characters. The story is based on fact and refers to four locations and people involved in the Manhattan Project following the cold war. 1. Los Alamos and Alamogordo (New Mexico); 2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Japan); 3. Hanford Site and Spokane (Washington); 4. Wendover (Utah). The narrative features the viewpoints of the victims for the nuclear weapon in the U.S. as well as Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Native Americans, Downwinders, American workers, U.S. soldiers. The characters of the physicist, doctor, bombardier, president, atomic energy agency, and activist also have the important roles in the story.