Tsutaja’s research for the exhibition started in 2019 with visits to the White Sands Missile Range in southern New Mexico and surrounding areas. Nearby, the sounds of Enola Gay, which resembles a reconstruction of the first aircraft to drop an atomic bomb in warfare, coaxes the viewer to step inside the reconstructed machine. As the viewer moves through the exhibition, they encounter expressive black and white drawings in which the characters-half-human, half-animal-invite viewers into their surrealistic other worlds. Tsutaja’s work, through sumi ink and graphite drawings, provides insight into living and working within worlds that continue manufacturing and supporting atomic bombs.
These masks refer to the extinct drama-dance process involved in gigaku, which was performed in Japan in the seventh and eighth centuries via the Silk Road from Central Asia.
These experiences are translated into a science fiction-style narrative driven by fourteen non-human characters with masks that resemble ancient artifacts. The show, on view through December 10, 2021, traces the history of nuclear weapons from World War II to the present and consists of collected interviews from Japanese and American victims, historians, activists, disarmament experts, physicists, journalists, and educators whom the artist met.
In a site-specific installation commissioned by the Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso, Japanese artist Gaku Tsutaja unpacks the sordid history of the atomic bomb in the exhibition Enola’s Head. The history of the atomic bomb is complex, messy, and tragic, especially for the people and places-including the Southwest region as well as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan-impacted by the Manhattan Project. Rubin Center for the Visual Arts, University of Texas at El Paso Courtesy Rubin Center for the Visual Arts. Gaku Tsutaja reconstructed Enola Gay, the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan during World War II. Gaku Tsutaja: Enola’s Head at UTEP’s Rubin Center recreates the aircraft that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima-and tells a different history of the victims and survivors of nuclear warfare.