Shigeyuki Kihara: dark angel of history.

Abstract

This is how the angel of history must look. [Her] face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, [she] sees only single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage, and hurls it at [her] feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise … This storm drives [her] irresistibly into the future, to which [her] back is turned, while the pile of debris before [her] grows towards the sky. What we call progress is this storm. - Walter Benjamin, from “On the Concept of History,” with gender pronouns amended. There is a striking resemblance between the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s allegorical “angel of history” and the lone human subject of Shigeyuki Kihara’s latest work, the photographic series Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? For Benjamin, his angel of history was the conceptual tool necessary for thinking about history without becoming complicit in the hegemonic power dynamics of his era. In Where do we come from? the Samoan woman in Victorian mourning garb appears, like a dark angel of history, as a haunting visitor at a number of locations around Samoa, observing the aftermaths of 2012’s Cyclone Evan, the 50th anniversary of Samoa’s independence in 2012, and the 2009 tsunami. Does Kihara’s angel serve a function similar to that of Benjamin’s?