TUM-STS art exhibition on Fukushima wins prestigious Ziman Award for public interaction with science and technology

On Friday, the TUM photo exhibition “Picturing the Invisible: 10 years after the Fukushima disaster” was awarded the prestigious Ziman Award for “significant innovative collaborative activity to promote public interaction with science and technology”, awarded by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). The exhibition, which was curated by former TUM lecturer Dr Makoto Takahashi (now a Fulbright-Lloyd Fellow at Harvard) together with students from the TUM Master’s program RESET and recently displayed at the TUM, has been a flagship public engagement and educational initiative of the newly founded STS department at TU Munich. The award committee decided to honor “Picturing the Invisible for its depth of engagement with different audiences, the differentiated nature of the proposed formats (in-person and virtual tours, associated events), the notable, broad societal impact and visibility, the collaboration between essayists from multiple disciplines (even beyond STS) and international artists, the involvement of students, and the great contribution of this collaboration to the STS approaches of global disasters.”The exhibition brings together seven celebrated artists‘ work with film in the territory affected by the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. These artists have won numerous prizes (e.g. Kimura Ihei Prize, Shiseido Art Egg Prize, and the Fujifilm Award)) and exhibited in major venues in the UK (National Portrait Gallery, Ashmolean, Imperial War Museum, etc.), US (MoMA, MFA, etc.), and Japan (e.g. Ueno Art Museum). The exhibition can credibly claim to showcase some of the most beautiful and moving creative responses to the 2011 “triple disaster”.To place the works in a broader political context, each work has been paired with an essay provided by a policymaker (e.g. British Ambassador to Japan Sir David Warren), academic (e.g. 2022 Holberg Laureate Sheila Jasanoff), author (e.g. best-seller Rob Macfarlane), activist (e.g. famed environmentalist Aileen Mioko-Smith), or citizen scientist (e.g. National Accident Independent Investigation Commission co-author Hisako Sakiyama). All images and essays are available on our website. There is a video short tour and a trailer.