The Curious Case of the Camel in Modern Japan: (De)Colonialism, Orientalism, and Imagining Asia?

The event will be held in English.

In her lecture, Ayelet Zohar critically analyzes camel images as a metonymy for Asia as well as Japanese attitudes towards the continent.

The lecture reads into encounters with the exotic animals, from Nanban art, realist Dutch-influenced illustrations, through Misemono roadshows of the first camel-pair imported in 1821. Modernity and Japan’s wars of Pan-Asiatic fantasies associated camels with Asia’s poverty, bringing camels into zoos, tourist venues, and military zones, as lowly beasts of burden, while post-war images project the image of exotica and foreignness on camels as Buddhist ‘peace’ messengers. Zohar convincingly argues that in the Japanese imagination, camels serve as signifiers of Asia as Otherness, the opposite of Japan’s desire for self-association with Western cultures.

Dr. Ayelet Zohar is a Senior Lecturer at the History of Art Department, Tel Aviv University. She received her PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (UCL), University of London (2007), followed by a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University (2007–2009), and a second Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (2011). Her main fields of research are the history and theory of Japanese photography; Contemporary fine art photography; Historical, Meiji era photography; Art and visual culture in Japan; Postcolonial theory; Deleuzian studies; Psychoanalysis and Trauma Studies. She has published extensively on issues of Japanese photography and contemporary art, war memory in Japanese photography, gender and sexuality in contemporary Japanese art/photography.

Duration: 90 min.
To participate in the event, all guests need a valid museum ticket (or an annual ticket, a KHMembership or a membership of the Weltmuseum Wien Friends).
Registration online (limited number of participants)
Meeting point: WMW Forum

The exhibition is part of the Klima Biennale Wien.
With the vision and innovative power of art, the Klima Biennale Wien spurs the paradigm shift toward a livable and sustainable future on our planet. The key tools to achieve this objective are, without doubt, participation, collaboration, and awareness. The Biennale will stake out viable responses to the climate crisis together with the people of Vienna.