The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

importance of this medium, as Ali assertively demonstrates in communities across the country. Her process is one of reintegration after a youth spent as a refugee abroad, but is also an attempt to come to terms with a shared traumatic history of genocide and war, and to imagine the possibility, like the Bug, of transformational renewal. Encountered as freestanding objects within a darkened, semi-enclosed space, Shiga Lieko’s photographs evoke embodied presences. Visitors entering the installation are required to weave their way around Shiga’s images, which are mounted simply but effectively on stand-up frames, thereby initiating a sense of physical mindfulness, reminiscent of moving through a space filled with strangers. Shiga photographed RASENKAIGAN (Spiral Coast) 2008-12 in and around Kitakama, a town completely destroyed by the tsunami that devastated the Tohoku region of Japan in 2011. At the time, Shiga had been living in Kitakama for over 12 months as its official photographer, documenting the lives of its mostly elderly inhabitants. The images forming the installation were taken following the tsunami. They are intensely personal images in that they rise out of an overwhelming physical and emotional experience. They are also like pieces of a jigsaw, forming what Shiga terms the ‘saga’ of Kitakama. Central to this saga is the artist’s discovery of a particular shared sensibility she calls the ineffable. In her words: . . . it’s something that everyone there apprehends as an intuitive feeling, within their being, but cannot explain in words and thus don’t try . . . In my interactions with many different people over my days in Kitakama, I came to see that this ineffable quality exists in the connections between people and is an actual living sensibility. 6 RASENKAIGAN (Spiral Coast) incorporates a number of important strands of Shiga’s works. Her signature