Shimada Yoshiko’s repertoire of remembrance: art activism as a response to Japanese colonialism and military sexual violence

In 2003, amidst escalating tensions encapsulated by the US-led invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, the artist Shimada Yoshiko staged a series of anti-war performances under the umbrella of the global Women in Black movement, invoking the spectre of Japan’s WWII aggression in Asia to catalyse a collective response towards violence and its erasure. This article revisits a selection of artworks that she produced between 1993 and 2003, showing how these works illustrate the formation of a feminist aesthetic for ‘doing’ activism against violence. It locates the political role of collaborative modes of remembrance within her practice, centring the citational, performative and embodied dimensions of her strategies for addressing the gender-specific violence of Japanese colonialism epitomized by the ‘comfort woman’ system of military sexual slavery established by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces from 1932 to 1945. Drawing on Diana Taylor’s (2003) theorization of the embodied ‘repertoire’ as an epistemic site that resists the violence of the colonial archive, and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s (2020) account of ‘devisualizing’ as an ethos of undoing scopic regimes formed around colonial structures of domination, I contend that Shimada’s activist repertoire embeds a practice of critiquing the relationship between visuality, coloniality and violence.