“The Marshallese people have a story to tell that the world needs to listen to, because, in a way, they have already had their apocalypse.”

Solomon Enos, artist, Hawaii

In August 2023, the pioneering arts activist organisation Cape Farewell led an expedition of 30 international, Oceanian and Marshallese artists, writers, scientists, and filmmakers to the Marshall Islands, described as “the most existentially-threatened land mass on earth”.

The exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, opening this November, shows the works created by the artists during and in response to the expedition, including sculpture, painting, photography and video installations. The multi-award winning, 70-minute film, documenting the project, will also be screened during the run of the exhibition.

Stills from Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner performing The Mejenkwaad

Led by artist and Cape Farewell founder, David Buckland, Marshallese poet and climate activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and American photographer Michael Light, the international creative team voyaged to Bikini and the surrounding atolls. They interacted with Marshallese residents and the natural ocean habitat, exploring territory that has been scarred first by nuclear weapons testing and now threatened by rising sea levels.

https://vimeo.com/1076193155?fl=pl&fe=vl

The project was named Kõmij Mour Ijin, Marshallese for Our Life is Here to reinforce that, no matter how threatened these islands are, they are nevertheless home to almost 40,000 incredibly resilient people. Their story is as much our story: we all face climate crises, in the form of flooding, drought and extreme temperatures.

Despite their small size and isolated location in the Pacific, the Marshall Islands have played a significant role on the climate stage. The now late Marshallese politician and government minister, Tony deBrum, ‘grandfathered’ the 2015 climate agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It is his relative, eco-warrior and Marshallese Climate Ambassador, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, who has helped coordinate this expedition and whose powerful performance poetry is captured in the exhibition through a still from her video work, ‘Mejenkwaad’ (A Monster). Taking on the role of a mythological demon woman known to eat babies, she wanted to ‘haunt’ the island, speaking out about the ‘jellyfish’ stillborn births that the islanders suffered as a result of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing.

Debby Schutz, Jenij Le Ia (Where Will We Go) 2024

The Jo- Jikum team of younger, local artists, included Debby Schutz, whose striking oils show her homeland being engulfed by flood waters, forcing islanders to abandon their homes.

This team was headed up by Marshallese elder and master navigator, Alson Kelen, a former mayor of Bikini, whose family have built sailing canoes on the islands for generations. A sculpture that has to be ‘read’, his model of a traditional Marshallese sailing boat stands at the centre of the National Maritime Museum exhibition, revealing in its stick structure how local sailors navigated this Pacific region.

Inspired by Alson’s work training local youth in canoe craft, and by her ongoing fascination with water and mapping, artist Tania Kovats allowed the sea to make a drawing as her contribution to the exhibition: a pen, fixed to the boat, recorded the motion of the waves. Her ‘canvas’ was an admiralty map of the atolls whose colonial territory becomes obliterated by the pen markings: “It was alarming to experience the scale of water compared to the scale of land,” she said, understanding how very real the ocean threat is. A print of one of the drawings will be exhibited.

Artist Michael Pinsky took to the water himself, swimming the 5km from Bikini to the centre of the Bravo Crater, the site of the first nuclear bomb test in 1954. Here he symbolically released a Steppe mammoth tooth, sending part of an extinct mammal into the heart of an extinct island.

An exhibition showing more material from the Our Life is Here expedition will run in parallel at the Nevada Museum of Art, alongside a campus-wide residency partnership with University of California, Berkeley, encouraging a global conversation on nuclear legacy, the climate threat and 21st century humanity.

"Climate is culture," says David Buckland, highlighting art's role in narrating the cultural shift that must take place in order to arrest climate change. His thoughts are echoed by the Hawaiian artist Eno Solomon: “Art also has the ability to visualise the world we all need.”