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) 

September 21, 2026 – March 2, 2027
Opening reception: Tuesday, September 22, 2026, 4:30–6:30 p.m.

The Our Life is Here project comes to UC Berkeley as a yearlong series of installations, courses, film screenings, and public programs unfolding across campus throughout the 2026–27 academic year. Guided by the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative (EAHI), the series centers survivance and the enduring 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), alongside a film screening at UC Berkeley Journalism and related events and courses across campus. Together, these programs invite the UC Berkeley community to engage with Marshallese histories and perspectives while considering nuclear legacies, climate change, cultural resilience, and our shared futures.

Co-curated by independent curators Amy Kisch and Svea Lin Soll, the UC Berkeley presentations serve as 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, running from September 1, 2027, through February 10, 2028. Presented alongside an installation at Bakar Labs, the DBC exhibition follows presentations of select works at the National Maritime Museum (London) and the Nevada Museum of Art, Institute for Art + Environment (Reno)  It will also bring together critical and creative contributions from across 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: 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)

Site-Specific Public Art Installation at Memorial Glade: MEJENKWAAD
September 21-23, 2026

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: VIDRINE, Worth Ryder Gallery
Anthropology and Art Practice Building
October 5 – November 24, 2026, Video compilation produced by Jordan Dozzi

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 Herevoyage. In Mejenkwaad, poet and Marshall Islands Climate Envoy Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner takes the form of a demon out of Marshallese legend—traditionally a destroyer of villages, here a witness to colonialism's damage to land and community. The program also includes her work Anointed about radioactive racism and the long quest for peace and justice. 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 Witness follows wayfinder and former Bikini Atoll mayor Alson Kelen to the bunker whose cameras filmed the 1954 Castle Bravo blast—holding both the weight of that history and Kelen's hope for what comes next.

Exhibition: Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) Teaching GalleryArtists on Colonization, Nuclear Legacies, and Climate Crisis
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'slush 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. 

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)

• 6:30-7:3pm: Guided Walking Tour of Memorial Glade with Michael Light 

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) 

• 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)