When I was When I was., The Evening Post, 1915.
As a part of the exhibition, Making Peace, 27 April - 2 May 2015, Thistle Hall, Wellington.
A site-specific and time-specific installation to coincide with the the Centenary of ANZAC Campaign in Gallipoli Peninsula in WWI.
Five issues of The Evening Post of Wellington from exactly 100 years ago were reproduced and presented daily in the front window space. Only one issue from the exact same date was made available to read each day. (No paper was published on Sundays 100 years ago (2 May 1915) so all 5 copies were presented on the last day of the exhibition.)
27 April - 2 May 2015
Thistle Hall
Wellington
New Zealand
http://thistlehall.org.nz/projects/ww100.html
"The standout was Asumi Mizuo’s ‘When I Was When I Was’, a simple re-presentation of a copy of the Evening Post newspaper from Thursday the 29th of April 1915, with easy chair and table. In one window a notice from the paper was posted offering the “Imperial governments’” congratulations on New Zealand’s “splendid gallantry and magnificent achievement” in The Dardanelles. It is so out of sync with our current understanding, it reads at first as a joke.
" In the other window was a copy of the Evening Post’s front page. Full of the hustle and bustle of ads for plumbers, child-minders and coal for winter heating, the war is barely mentioned. You become aware of how similar the everyday needs of life were to ours now. Sitting down with the newspaper inside the gallery it isn’t until you get to page seven that news from the front appears, shorn of all the dramatic illustrations and human-interest stories you’d expect today.
"100 years ago in a time of terrible tragedy the newspaper kept the peace by careful control of information. Yet it also reflected that life went on, without uniformity, with a great many different individual experiences and stories. "
-excerpt from the review by Mark Amery, http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/ , 6 May 2015.
http://www.thebigidea.co.nz/news/columns/mark-amery-visual-arts/2015/may/163523-roads-of-national-significance#
