Towards a liveable world: Learning from Ainu culture

Eiko Soga, Artist and Researcher at The Ruskin School of Art, and Marenka Thompson-Odlum, Research Associate at Pitt Rivers Museum, share their research on Ainu culture with Jonathan Watkins, Ikon Director. Together they consider the re-labelling of Ainu artefacts, on loan from the Pitt Rivers Museum, as part of Ikon’s exhibition by Ainu artist and musician Mayunkiki, Siknure – Let me live (9 September – 13 November 2022).

The event includes a screening of Soga’s film, Autumn Salmon (2015-19), which was recently exhibited at the Pitt Rivers Museum alongside a pair of Ainu salmon-skin shoes, known as chepkeri and dated c.1900. 

This event is in partnership with the Japan Foundation. 

Biographies 

Eiko Soga lives and works in England and Japan and is currently reading for her DPhil at The Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford. Soga works with moving image, photography, poetry and installation to explore how our sensory knowledge-based engagement contributes to a diverse ecosystem of the more-than-human world. Her work uses storytelling as a way to observe and document how ephemeral and intangible aspects of everyday processes can lead to bigger phenomena such as collectiveness and the development of culture.  

Marenka Thompson-Odlum is a Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museum and a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow. Her doctoral research explores Glasgow’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade through the material culture house at Glasgow Museums. At the Pitt Rivers Museum, she is researcher on the Labelling Matters project, which investigates the problematic use of language within the museum spaces and ways of decolonisation through re-imagining the definition of a label.