Seeing, Listening, Connecting: Imaging and Memorialising the Asia-Pacific War (World War II)

This research examines how documentary practice can function as an alternative modality for memorialising stories and experiences associated with the Asia-Pacific War (WWII). I explore how lens-based images and practices can enable particular forms of knowing, which run counter to the unity and collective narratives promoted by official memorialisation and other forms of government acknowledgement of this history. These other types of knowing privilege connecting, imagining, listening and ethics over strategies of making history visible and knowable. My photographs and videos combine declassified military archival imagery with my own present-day imaging of four people’s testimonies concerning this conflict.