Artist Eiko Soga has just launched three exhibitions around Oxford city centre for TORCH's Japan Season!

Soga's work combines video, poetry and ethnography based on the value system of the Ainu, who are the indigenous people of the Japanese and Russian owned lands surrounding the Sea of Okhotsk. Soga has spent time with Ainu communities in Samani, Hokkaido, Japan to connect and develop this work.

'My Neighbour's Meal' is open in 95 Gloucester Green 12 - 4pm 8th - 19th November

In this exhibition, Soga raises a question: Do you ever envision the kind of culture your neighbours grew up with and lived in? By focusing on the food and cooking practices of the Ainu people, she starts a conversation about this.

Between 2020 and 2021, Soga learnt traditional Ainu cooking from an Ainu elder, Ms Kane Kumagai in Samani in Hokkaido, Japan. Traditional Ainu cooking is considered to be ecological and community oriented. Soga looks at cooking as a space to exchange empathy, mutual effort and lived knowledges, in order to unpack the interrelationships among historical, cultural and natural landscapes. Attempting to unfold this complex social landscape has allowed her to learn stories of disvalued knowledge through a compassionate approach. As a result, she has gained a better sense of how our sensory knowledge-based engagement with both people and nature contributes to a diverse ecosystem.

In 2016, Soga also worked with an Ainu hunter called Mon-chan in Nibutani in Hokkaido. He took her to the mountain where he hunts and she tried to understand what hunting means to Mon-chan experientially. The result is a video work showing the process through which she unlearnt her social norms and tried to embody Mon-chan's values.

Through this installation, Soga hopes to encourage audiences to be interested in the culture of people who are close to us physically but who might be far away emotionally and culturally.

The other two exhibitions can be found in the #WindowGalleries along Friars Entry, Oxford and in the Pitt Rivers Museum. More info here: https://torch.ox.ac.uk/event/empty-shop-...