ARTISTS

The focus of Linda Iha’s photographic practice is her birthplace, Okinawa, the subtropical island chain with the highest concentration of US military installations in Japan. In Modern Contradiction, Iha employs video to examine the environmental pressures that bear upon life under colonial structures of occupation and extraction. While the title of the work hints at the geopolitics of Okinawa, the video also explores the tensions between still and moving images: Plants hover in front of a photograph of a soldier pasted up on a wall, and a torn fragment of a photograph is filmed from above as sand, water, and wind swirl around it. In the background, the faintly perceptible sound of artillery evokes the ever-present violence of military encroachment on the landscape.