Eric Baudelaire: The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images

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The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi and 27 Years Without Images is the first UK solo exhibition by French artist Eric Baudelaire. Baudelaire's most recent work looks at the complexities of recounting the history of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) — a radical group that emerged from the 1968 Tokyo student movement, settled in Beirut in the early 1970s, and engaged in sophisticated terrorist activities in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. The exhibition consists of an installation encompassing his 2011 experimental documentary film of the same name, which centres upon the oral testimonies of two JRA protagonists: May Shigenobu, the daughter of JRA founder and leader Fusako Shigenobu, and Masao Adachi, a legendary underground film director, JRA member and theoretician. This is shown alongside documents, photographs, prison drawings and works on paper that further contextualise the JRA's radical journey, focusing on issues of representation associated with documentary, testimony and the production or absence of images. The Anabasis... engages with questions concerning the relationship between politics and film, and militant filmmaking versus activism without cinema — a distinction that Masao Adachi refuses, but that Baudelaire's exhibition interrogates anew.