Meiro Koizumi: Battlelands

Working primarily in video and performance, Meiro Koizumi’s works investigate the boundaries between the private and the public, and between authentic and staged emotions, to present everyday situations transformed into sites of tension, involving conflicts between duty and desire. 

In “Battlelands,” Koizumi works with non-Japanese subjects for the first time, engaging U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Seven veterans recount traumatic experiences during these military conflicts, while wearing body-cams that record images of their current domestic spaces and everyday landscapes in the United States. The video articulates how traumatic memories of war impact the daily lives of these individuals, creating emotional, psychological battlelands.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website