KANA KAWANISHI PHOTOGRAPHY is pleased to announce the opening of Tamami Iinuma’s solo exhibition, Japan in der DDR - Gestohlene Erinnerungen wurden erneut zerstört, from Saturday, November 9th. The opening of this exhibition will take place on the 30th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall that occurred on November 9th of 1989.

Based in Leptich, Paris, and Tokyo, Iinuma has been exhibiting her works around the media of architecture, photography, and publications, by logically constructing their relationships among each other and combining the artist’s own physicality.  This exhibition will commemorate the launch of her latest publication, Japan in der DDR and will specially feature the fourth chapter of the book, Gestohlene Erinnerungen wurden erneut zerstört (The memory that was deleted twice). 

In 2014, while Iinuma was in her doctoral course at Tokyo University of the Arts, Graduate School, she found out the Japanese construction company Kajima Corporation constructed three hotels built in the cities of Leptich, Dresden, and Berlin. During the process of interviewing the related people and researching various archives, Iinuma found out there was a theft that happened in the construction company’s office on January 12th, 1979. The stolen objects of this incident were Deutschmark cash, and a film inside a 35mm film camera. The camera itself was oddly left inside the broken safety box.

Inspired from this strange incident, Iinuma decided to retrieve the stolen memory and went to photo shoot the area of the Grand Hotel Berlin with her Contax T3, 35mm film camera. After she returned back to Tokyo, she brought the film to her photo laboratory and picked it up the next day, however, learned that her images were deleted white by the damage caused to the film that attributed to the improper maintenance of the developing machine. These two incidents may appear as coincidental occurrences at first sight, but looking carefully, the first occasion was probably by a Stasi spy when noticing the historical background at the time, and the second occasion was a man-made accident. The memory did not naturally disappear but was literally deleted twice.

The 1979 theft in Deutsche Demokratische Republik, and the 2016 accident in a laboratory in Tokyo. Investigating these two strange incidents in this exhibition Japan in der DDR - Gestohlene Erinnerungen wurden erneut zerstört (The memory that was deleted twice), we sincerely look forward to showcasing the attempt by Iinuma to retrieve back the deleted memory.