On Forgetting, Remembering, Ignoring and Negotiation: Statue of a Girl of Peace as a Monumental Statue
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.33831/jws.v23i2.364Keywords:
war, comfort women, memory, urban space, spaces of representation, statueAbstract
During the Asia-Pacific War (1932-1945), East Asian women, whose numbers are hundreds of thousands, mostly Korean women, where it is easy to provide women due to being a colonial country, were forced to become sex slaves in Japan's military bases, and were subjected to systematic rape and violence. Years of silence was broken with the speech of Korean Kim Hak Sun on a TV program for the first time in 1990, and many women who were exposed to this violence came forward to speak. While women who were forced to become “comfort women”, who set out with an apology and compensation movement, received great support; these supports turned into a transnational movement with statues representing themselves and their experiences. This article aims to discuss the effect of a spaces of representation, on individual and collective memory through the concepts of memory, space and representation space through the first of these sculptures, Statue of a Girl of Peace. In this context, the main argument of the article is that a representation space can be created through the art of sculpture and this representation is possible to construct to shape collective memory.
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