Commemorating Malcolm X on the centenary of his birth and 60th anniversary of his assassination, ‘1965: Malcolm in Winter: A Translation Exercise’ marks Theaster Gates’s first contact with the archive of late Japanese journalist Ei Nagata and his partner Haruhi Ishitani. Through a series of architectural interventions, large-scale installations, archival works and new film works, Gates engages with the methods of care and preservation nurtured in Japanese philosophy and craftsmanship, drawing upon them as a framework to consider the role of art and aesthetics in shaping political, ideological and cultural legacies.
Having cultivated a relationship with Japan for over two decades – first during his training residency as a ceramicist in Tokoname in 2004 – Gates’s latest creative endeavour stems from his encounter with Ishitani following his 2024 solo exhibition ‘Afro-Mingei’ at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Ishitani and Nagata had both been present at Malcolm X’s assassination on 21 February 1965, shortly after he addressed the crowd at an Organization of Afro-American Unity (OOAU) event. Moved to action by this catalytic moment, they endeavoured to carry his message beyond the US to Japan, where the Black American fight for civil rights found renewed resonance in the Japanese left’s struggles against militarism and the legacy of occupation. Together, Nagata and Ishitani devoted themselves to documenting and translating the pivotal final months of Malcolm X’s life, the aftermath of his death and the currents of the broader Black Liberation Movement, bringing this history into the awareness of the Japanese public.
Positioning translation as the exhibition’s central axis, Gates re-engages with the archive’s transferred, disseminated and conserved materials to initiate his own artistic dialogue with its collected narratives. ‘This project […] helps me ask questions about who I am in relationship to these ideologies, how we tell stories about things we believe in, and where art lives in relationship to movements and movement building.’ Showcased in the North Galleries, the archive chronicles the proliferation of events leading up to Malcolm X’s assassination and its aftermath, while simultaneously underscoring Nagata and Ishitani’s engagement with other US-based and transnational socialist and Black power movements of the era – some rooted in Malcolm’s ideology, others developing in parallel. Editorial records from allied radical presses and underground counterculture newspapers document not only the activities, imprisonments and assassinations of prominent American socialist leaders – including Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey P. Newton and Martin Luther King, Jr. – but also spotlight radical movements and global efforts against racial and social inequality.