Suturing the Worlds: Tomie Ohtake Between Japan and Brazil
Schedule
Tue Feb 24 2026 at 05:00 pm to 07:00 pm
UTC+00:00Location
Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge | Cambridge, EN
About this Event
The newly launched Women’s History seminar is proudly housed in Murray Edwards College, one of the two women's colleges of the University of Cambridge. True to the college’s mission, the ultimate purpose of the seminar is to promote the status of women.
This talk is dedicated to the life and work of the Japanese-Brazilian artist Tomie Ohtake (1913-2015). Ohtake (née Nakakubo) emigrated to Brazil from Kyoto in 1936 where she became a prominent artist. She assimilated Japanese and Western visual idioms into the Brazilian modernist paradigm. Her art, however, was informed by the collective history of Japanese migration. To commemorate the complicated experience of the Japanese diaspora in Brazil, Ohtake developed a visual language, based on Brazilian reception of Eisensteinian montage, which gave expression to the "inbetween" diasporic community who understood themselves neither as Japanese nor as Brazilian but as dekasegi (guest workers) bound by a shared language. Like them flouting national alliances, Ohtake developed a sense of local belonging through the process of cultural hybridization, putting an ironic spin on both the Japanese imperial project in the Americas and Brazilian nationalism.
Speaker:
Dr Olga V. Solovieva is a scholar of comparative literature at the Center of Excellence IMSERt—Interacting Minds, Societies, Environments at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń. She is the author of Christ’s Subversive Body: Practices of Religious Rhetoric in Culture and Politics (2018), (2023), co-editor of (2021), and, most recently, editor of (2026). She has also recently contributed a chapter on Kurosawa to the path-breaking volume (2024).
The third seminar:
Tuesday 24th February 5–6:30pm, Vivien Stewart Room
Speaker:
Dr Olga V. Solovieva (Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń)
Title:
Suturing the Worlds: Tomie Ohtake Between Japan and Brazil
Where is it happening?
Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge, Huntingdon Road, Cambridge, United KingdomEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
GBP 0.00
