Chris Jordan + Jurgen Lehl “Midway: Message from the Gyre”

Kondaya Genbei

Designer Jurgen Lehl (1944–2014) spent over 40 years in Japan. This exhibition will include an installation of lamps he created with messages̶ from plastic he found on the beach.

Located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, the Midway Atoll is 3,200 km from the nearest continent. Yet each year it is engulfed by 20 tons of trash, much of it plastic. PET-bottle caps sprout from the corpses of albatross chicks which were mistakenly fed to them by their parents. Chris Jordan takes photographs to draw attention to this pitiful scene. It is not just the fact that plastic waste is killing these seabirds, but symbolic of the state of modern civilization itself. The exhibition, Midway, will include recent works by Jordan, as well as screenings of the pilot version of his documentary film by the same name, which was made at the same time as his photographs.

This exhibition is a Kyotographie and KG+ Kyotographie satellite event.