Description
The silence explored in this paper emerges from a blank canvas that replaced a testimony panel at the Women’s Active Museum on War and Peace in Tokyo. The testimony panel had been prepared for an exhibition of former ‘comfort women’s’ testimonies to their subjection to the ‘comfort station’ system, but was withdrawn by the survivor before the exhibition’s inauguration. While this withdrawal might be understood as evidence of the system’s continuously contested character as a hesitance among survivors to come forward to testify, it might also be understood as a foundational unsettling of the core dichotomies that sustain ‘comfort women’ discourse. Exploring themes of silence and speech; visible and invisible; and affirmation and negation, the paper understands the blank canvas as a site that not only unsettles binaries, but also scrutinizes the limitations of instrumental approaches to politics. The creative tensions that emerge in the museum visitor’s encounter with the blank canvas highlight the implications that the unsettling of core dichotomies produces as possibilities to relate to ‘comfort station’ history in the absence of stories to retell and images to mirror oneself in. Such yet unimagined relationalities unsettle binaries such as soldier and civilian; perpetrator and victim; and male and female and leave the visitor with only one possible mode of relating to this history: that of the human.
