Film stills from Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here by David Buckland, 2025. Left: Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (b. 1989, Marshall Islands) as the Mejenkwaad. Right: Meghann Riepenhoff (b. 1979, Atlanta, Georgia, USA) and Jo-Jikum youth in the process of making the cyanotype artwork series Adaptive Radiation during the 2023 Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here voyage.
West Coast premiere of the Marshall Islands art and climate project with installations, film screenings, and public programs across the UC Berkeley campus and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) in 2026–27, culminating in a full exhibition of original artworks at Berkeley’s David Brower Center in 2027–28
In August 2023, thirty international artists, writers, scientists, and filmmakers traveled 450 nautical miles across the Marshall Islands with youth and elders from the nation's Indigenous communities. This expedition, entitled Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here—organized by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Michael Light, and David Buckland, with support from Stellar Blue Fund and Cape Farewell—was not one to witness ruin, but a return: an act of honoring ancestral lands, the struggles of those who came before, and the enduring presence of Marshallese life today.
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States detonated sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, rendering atolls uninhabitable and leaving health impacts that carry across generations. Those same atolls now face erasure by rising seas. Yet Marshallese culture endures—in navigation, language, art, and an unbroken relationship with the ocean. Those aboard the 2023 voyage returned with works of art, poetry, music, film, and research confronting the entangled legacies of nuclear testing, colonialism, and climate change in the Pacific.
That project now comes to UC Berkeley as a series of installations, courses, and public programs running across campus throughout the 2026–27 academic year. Guided by the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (EAHI), the series centers survivance and the legacy of nuclear testing through satellite exhibitions and installations at Doe Library, Giannini Hall, Memorial Glade, the Worth Ryder Art Gallery, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA); a film screening at UC Berkeley Journalism; and allied events and courses across campus. Together, these programs invite the UC Berkeley community to engage with Marshallese histories and perspectives while exploring nuclear legacies, climate change, cultural resilience, and our shared futures.
The UC Berkeley presentations are co-curated by independent curators Amy Kisch and Svea Lin Soll and are a prelude to the project’s full culmination: an exhibition of original works from the 2023 voyage at the David Brower Center (DBC) in Berkeley (September 1, 2027, through February 10, 2028). Alongside an installation at Bakar Labs, the DBC presentation follows exhibitions of select works at the National Maritime Museum (London) and the Nevada Museum of Art, Institute for Art + Environment (Reno) and will incorporate critical and creative contributions from the UC Berkeley campus community.
Exhibition: Doe Library, Bernice Layne Brown Gallery
September 21, 2026 – March 2, 2027
Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here at Doe Library brings together reproductions of works and interpretive material from the 2023 voyage, exploring climate change, the legacy of US nuclear testing, and Marshallese knowledge and resilience. Curated by Amy Kisch and Svea Lin Soll, in partnership with UC Berkeley librarians Becky Miller and Susan Powell.
Opening reception
September 22, 2026, 4:30–6:30 p.m., Morrison Library (in Doe Library)
RSVP
Exhibition: Remembering the Future: Nuclear Testing, Rising Seas, and The Marshall Islands
Giannini Hall
Rausser College of Natural Resources
September 21, 2026 – March 2, 2027
At Giannini Hall, 36 photographs selected from the recently published Remembering the Future: Nuclear Testing, Rising Seas, and The Marshall Islands (Radius Books, © 2026) by Mark Klett and William L. Fox extend the two men's decades-long collaboration tracing the nuclear history of the American West and the broader Pacific sphere. Installed along the building's main hallway, the images move between the physical remains of nuclear testing—bunkers, craters, camera towers reclaimed by jungle—and the everyday textures of Marshallese life: canoe building, weaving, seawalls raised by hand. Paired with archival images from the testing era and drawn from Fox's field notes and essays, the photo essay holds both histories at once: the violence of nuclear history, and the resilience of a culture that continues to inhabit these islands.
Artist and Curator-Led Tour with Mark Klett and William L. Fox
September 23, 2026, 4-5pm
Giannini Hall
Register · Event page
Mark Klett (b. 1952, Albany, NY, USA), 2023, Mounted archival digital print, 36 x 48 inches, Titles as published in Remembering the Future. Courtesy of the artist. Left: “The canoe built by Alson Kelen and builders at WAM, sailing in Bikini lagoon. The canoe was transported to Bikini and intentionally left on the island’s beach” Right: “Looking through a porthole into a room in ‘Bunker 1200,’ built to monitor the effects of a thermonuclear device, Nam island”
Site-Specific Public Art Installation: MEJENKWAAD
September 21-23, 2026
Memorial Glade
An outdoor installation organized by photographer Michael Light, presented at Memorial Glade at the heart of the UC Berkeley campus. Featuring film stills from the expedition, the installation centers around poet, activist, and artist, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s embodiment of the Mejenkwaad: a demon from traditional Marshallese legends, said to eat babies, swallow canoes, and terrorize villages in precolonial times. Today, the Mejenkwaad is a powerful figure that bears witness to the impacts of colonialism and nuclear testing and the damage they have caused to landscapes and communities of the Marshall Islands. Jetn̄il-Kijiner is the climate envoy for the Marshall Islands Ministry of Environment and co-founder of the Jo-Jikum youth climate nonprofit. Michael Light is a Bay Area artist and co-leader, with Jetn̄il-Kijiner and David Buckland of Cape Farewell, of the Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here endeavor. He first visited the Marshall Islands in 2003, after globally publishing 100 SUNS, his seminal visual meditation on nuclear detonations. UC Berkeley commissioned Light to do a week-long installation of SUNS at the Glade in 2005, in celebration of the San Francisco premiere of John Adams’ opera Dr. Atomic about J. Robert Oppenheimer. Twenty-one years later, Light is thrilled to now be able to bring Marshallese voices to the same UC Berkeley space in response to the violation of U.S. nuclear testing—and Berkeley’s direct role in it. Light would like to acknowledge all those artists who collaborated to make the conjuring and performance of the Mejenkwaad a reality on Bikini Island in addition to Jetn̄il-Kijiner, especially extreme vocalist Carmina Escobar, painter Solomon Enos, and filmmakers Brock Scott and Jordan Dozzi. A self-guided walking tour leads visitors through the site-specific installation.
Guided Walking Tour with Michael Light
September 22, 2026, 6:30-7:30pm
Video Installation
October 5 – November 24, 2026
VIDRINE, Worth Ryder Gallery
Anthropology and Art Practice Building
The VIDRINE presents four artists' video responses to nuclear history, colonialism, and climate change in the Pacific, made in the wake of the Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here voyage. In Anointed, poet and Marshall Islands Climate Envoy Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner stands on Runit Dome at Enewetak Atoll, the concrete cap the United States built over radioactive debris from its nuclear tests, and speaks to radioactive racism and the long quest for peace and justice. The video was directed by Dan Lin and produced by Pacific Resources for Education and Learning. Michael Light's BRAVO, ECHO 1954–2023 returns to the site of the Castle Bravo nuclear test, tracing its mark on the landscape across nearly seventy years. In Mammoth, Michael Pinsky carries a mammoth tooth from England's eroding Norfolk coast to the Castle Bravo crater at Bikini Atoll, linking the mammoth's climate-driven extinction to today's rising seas. David Buckland’s videos of his Bikini Texts projected into and on the waves inside the Bikini Atoll. The words projected, including ‘Our Life is Here,’ all reflect on the Marshallese culture, the traumatic nuclear explosions detonated on Bikini and the rising sea levels.
Exhibition: Artists on Colonization, Nuclear Legacies, and Climate Crisis
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) Teaching Gallery
Now on view through January 24, 2027
A parallel presentation drawing on BAMPFA's permanent collection in dialogue with Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here's themes organized by Elaine Yau, Associate Curator and Academic Liaison, BAMPFA. The exhibition opens with images printed from aging slides documenting US Army and Navy development on Kwajalein Island in the mid-1960s, showing how land and water have been shaped by military interests. Photographs by Richard Misrach and Mark Ruwedel evoke the danger that lingers, invisible, in places exposed to radioactivity, while works by Enrique Chagoya, Alma Lavenson, and Patrick Nagatani point to the Indigenous communities displaced and marginalized by colonization.
A further group of works considers humanity's interconnection with nature and its resources—fragile, ambivalent, and full of wonder—culminating in Isabella Kirkland's lush portrait of the rainforest, a reminder that society will be defined as much by what it protects as by what it creates. The exhibition complements fall-semester courses in the Departments of History, Rhetoric, and Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies in conjunction with Professor Shannon Jackson and affiliated members of UC Berkeley's Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative.
OPENING PROGRAMS
Throughout 2026-27, the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (EAHI) will present events, film screenings, symposia, and more as part of Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here. Full program details, including additional events and courses across campus, are available here. For questions or accessibility related inquiries please contact Iliana Morton at ilianamorton@berkeley.edu.
Tuesday, September 22, 2026
- 4:30-6:30pm: Opening Reception Doe Library, Bernice Layne Brown Gallery Exhibition - Morrison Room, Doe Library (RSVP)
A reception marking the opening of Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here and the public launch of the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative's eighteen-month collaboration with the project. The program includes contributions from Shannon Jackson (EAHI Director), Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (Poet and Climate Activist); Kieren Rudge (Critical Pacific Islands Studies Collective); Jordan Dozzi Perry (Documentary Filmmaker); Amy Kisch and Svea Lin Soll (KMI/OLIH Co-curators); Elaine Yau (BAMPFA Curator); Michael Light (Photographer), and David Buckland (Cape Farewell Founder).
- 6:30-7:3pm: Guided Walking Tour of Memorial Glade with Michael Light
Guests adjourn from the reception to traverse the Memorial Glade installation with the artist.
Wednesday, September 23, 2026
- 4-5pm: Artist and Curator-Led Tour of Remembering the Future, Giannini Hall, Rausser College of Natural Resources (Register / Event page)
Mark Klett and William L. Fox lead a walkthrough of the 36-photograph installation drawn from Radius Books' Remembering the Future, with a welcome from David Ackerly, climate change biologist, professor in the Departments of Integrative Biology and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and Dean of the Rausser College of Natural Resources.
- 5:15-8pm: Film Screening: Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here (David Buckland, dir., 2025, 70 min., English and Marshallese), Northgate Hall - UC Berkeley Journalism (Register / Event page)
The film documents the 2023 journey that brought Marshallese elders and youth together with an international team of artists, writers, scientists, and filmmakers to consider the intertwined legacies of nuclear testing and a changing climate across the Marshall Islands. Filmed in 4K with drone and underwater footage, and scored by Philip Glass. Moving beyond a story of loss, the film centers Marshallese voices, cultural resilience, and enduring relationships with land and ocean, while asking what those experiences can teach us about a shared and uncertain climate future. Introduction by Jennifer Redfearn, Director of the Documentary Program at Berkeley Journalism. Talk-back with David Buckland, Michael Light, Mark Klett, William L. Fox, and additional artists, curators, and faculty.
Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here
Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here began with a 2023 voyage of thirty international artists, writers, scientists, and filmmakers who traveled 450 nautical miles across the Marshall Islands with Indigenous youth and elders. The expedition was organized by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Michael Light, and David Buckland, and supported by Stellar Blue Fund and Cape Farewell. The project has since traveled to the National Maritime Museum in London and the Nevada Museum of Art's Center for Art + Environment, and is the subject of an award-winning documentary film. Learn more at ourlifeishere.org.
On the voyage: Takashi Arai, David Buckland, Greg Dvorak, Solomon Enos, Carmina Escobar, William L. Fox, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Susan Jieta, Kalena Kattil-de Brum, Alson Kelen, Mark Klett, Tania Kovats, Michael Light, Andrew McInnis, James Pinker, Michael Pinsky, Lisa Reihana, Meghann Riepenhoff, Himali Singh-Soin, Brock Scott, Jordan Dozzi, Victoria Warren, and members of Jo-Jikum: Peiji Glad, Konea Ishimura, Vicky Jamore, Jewan Jamore, Geovannie Johnson, Nenol Kaminaga, Jobod Silk, and Clancy Takia.
The Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (EAHI)
The Environmental Arts & Humanities Initiative brings together faculty, curators, staff, and students in the arts, humanities, and allied fields to advance the multidisciplinary study of the environment. EAHI brings particular attention to critical histories and ethical futures, as well to narrative, visual, media, and performance practices that promote environmental justice and the public good. Learn more here.
This multi-unit platform has been developed and produced with a range of campus and community organizations including: Doe Library, Rausser College of Natural Resources, Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, Planting Oceania, Critical Pacific Island Studies Collective, Worth Ryder Art Gallery, and the David Brower Center.
MEDIA CONTACT: Iliana Morton, Academic Program Manager, Center for Interdisciplinary Critical Inquiry, University of California, Berkeley, ilianamorton@berkeley.edu