Robyn Mineko Williams leaps forward into the past

For the first time this spring, Robyn Mineko Williams will present her work in Sweden. Beams will fill Stora Galleriet at SKF/Konstnärshuset with textiles, objects, and multiple channels of audio and video, curated by Ashik Zaman. The installation is a new iteration of her multi-year series of film and performance projects titled Hisako’s House, which stems from extensive research into her ancestors’ experiences before, during, and after their incarceration as Japanese Americans. C-print caught up with Mineko Williams — also a dancer and an extensively produced contemporary choreographer — through a FaceTime call from Stockholm to Chicago.

Photo: Jacqueline Burnett and Knox Murdock in a screenshot from the film “Hisako’s House” by Mike Gibisser and Robyn Mineko Williams

C-P: Let’s begin with the process of translation from site-specific live performance to multimedia exhibition. In what ways is your fluency in dance helping you envision and refine the ideas in Beams, as they stem from the film and performance versions of Hisako’s House?

RMW: For Beams, I revisited footage of the performances, interviews, and some of the material that I ended up not using in the performance piece. After some time away from the last performance, which was in late May 2025, there was now a different lens that I had on all of this material, on this project I had been working in quite deeply since 2021. This iteration, Beams, was a nice, new way to look at what I’ve gathered and what I’ve learned, and find a new life for that material. In terms of how dance, movement, and choreography has helped with this installation — and this has been happening over years now: Since I’ve started to make pieces that are site-specific, there’s a bit of anticipation of how people move through spaces and interact with a performance, and that’s something I’ve become really excited about — how people use proximity, how comfortable they are getting close, how they create, like, their own ‘movie versions’ through interacting with the work. Installations are a new way of creating worlds for people to be in and to move through. It’s different in that this is my first time presenting something without live performance, with the exception of some short films. But it feels very organic, in a way. This is what I like to do: create worlds for other people to be in. An installation is just a different strategy.

C-P: Great. Part Two, then: What about this process has felt different from live performance, in terms of creative decision-making, challenges, and skill sets?

RMW: We’ve extracted the live, performative part that’s what I’ve always done and relied on and that transmits the feeling, the physical energy of the work. So I think the challenge has been trusting that I can figure out how to still transmit emotion and feeling without performers in the space. I’m figuring out, What are the tools for that? How can I create something that doesn’t feel cold or far away, but that still feels warm and close, that has human resonance? I’m trying to be okay with being up on that ledge. This feels like a big leap.

C-P: It also sounds a bit to me like how designers talk about interiors. You can’t make people do a specific thing in a room. You can only make the room a certain way, and then hope it fills up with the kinds of activity you’ve envisioned.

RMW: Yeah, I think it is a design challenge. But it’s not super specific, like, ‘I want you to go here, and then you go there.’ What I’m going for isn’t that linear. I’m trying to design something with hope that it somehow sparks some emotional resonance.

C-P: I appreciated reading what A. Martinez wrote, in prose and poetry, about Hisako’s House. First, can you tell me a bit about this person and who they are?

RMW: Yeah! She’s a beautiful artist and poet here in Chicago. She came to Hisako’s House and I think just really connected with the piece. That was the first time we met. We ended up talking that night at my grandma’s house and then we kept in touch. She’s also working, or has been working, on a sort of interactive series and installation based around her grandmother’s home. So there was just a lot of alignment in the work we’re both doing. We also both have sons who are eleven.

C-P: That’s a lot of alignment for sure. So, the quote from her about Hisako’s House I wanted to ask you about is, ‘It opened me up but it also held me.’ How did reading those words hit you? What do you think about this concept, perhaps contradictory in some ways, that an art experience can hold you at the same time it uncovers something tender — not tender as in gentle, but as in vulnerable or raw.

RMW: What’s contradictory about that?

C-P: Oh — good question! Well, I suppose that, when something feels like it ‘holds’ you, I at least think of that as it’s affirming or accepting, whereas, when something ‘opens you up,’ I think it’s more…invasive, I guess. That it surfaces something you’ve tried to suppress. That it excavates you and exposes something.

RMW: Ah. Well, I loved it because, for me, getting opened up and then being held is like when you’re with a friend and your heart cracks open, but you have a good hug afterwards. I feel like those things go hand in hand. It’s like when you’re in a conversation and you don’t really expect to have an emotional reaction, but then you do, and that feels okay, because you’re in good company. I didn’t really think about how people would receive Hisako’s House, to be honest. When I opened it up to the public, my grandma had just died and it was very raw. I wasn’t really thinking about the audience. I was just doing it. So when people came and — this happened a few times — when people would just start to cry, it surprised me and I think it surprised them, too. I’m always on the line of, like, [Makes a happy face] and [Makes a sad face].

C-P: Ah. Like the drama masks. Comedy and tragedy.

RMW: Yeah — the happy and the sad. When I look at things that I’ve made, it’s always both of those things at once, if not with even more layers on top.

C-P: You’ve said that, for Beams, ‘I’ve created a series of rooms to be in and move through — a spatial representation of home, time, and memories that intertwine and inform one another, a bit like waves.’ Now, this might seem tangential in which case, I totally understand, but have you seen Interstellar?

RMW: No.

C-P: Okay. Well, the house from the beginning of the film reappears at the end of the film, as a location where past and present meet, and two people communicate with each other across great distances and many years, but in shared time. So, not to get all sci-fi with this conversation but, when you said ‘waves,’ I was wondering if you were thinking about more than just water, but maybe also light waves. Sound waves. Gravitational waves. Physics.

RMW: Could be! Yeah, I think that, when I was writing that statement, I was trying to find a word for the bleeding that happens between materials, like water and sand. How something will come in and change, and inform, and then it goes away, and the sand is never the same again. I thought, What is a word for that thing? And I thought it really does feel like waves, like these rooms — they’re waves in a timeline and so, I think what you’re describing makes sense, because it’s non-linear time. Water into sand. Past into present.

C-P: Ah. I think too about the Doppler effect — why the pitch of a siren changes after the ambulance passes you. When the source is moving toward you, that compresses the waves and, after it passes, it stretches them out.

RMW: That also makes sense with the sound design we’re using [for Beams] and what we’re hoping it can create. As an observer, or someone in the room, for it be an impetus to get closer or for it to sound like it’s coming from far away, from a different room. The sound will move depending on how you move.

C-P: Such that we think of sounds coming from a close place as in the present, and sounds in the distance as coming from the past? Like, using sound design to reflect the passage of time?

RMW: Yes.

C-P: Tell us a bit about the title: Beams. One of my questions is, similar to our conversation about waves, is it a reference to beams of light, or beams in an architectural, structural sense? Maybe even beams as in ‘beam me up,’ a way of transporting instantaneously from one place to another? Is it all of those things?

RMW: I think it can be all of those things, though I hadn’t thought about the ‘beam me up’ one yet. [Laughs] Originally, I was thinking about a story my aunt told me. When you went into camp, into the barracks, they would count the number of people in your family. If you were only two people, you would have [the same amount of floor space as] two beams above your head. A family of four would get four beams [of floor space]. That was a story that always stayed with me and then, at my grandma’s house, which is mid-century architecture, there were beams all over the ceiling in that place. There was something about those two definitions of home that they experienced in their life that felt like something for the installation, too. I also was thinking about trying to separate these ‘rooms’ [within the gallery]. They’re different sizes and so the title relates to that. But also, yeah, the title works in the way of lineage, radiating forwards and backwards. That makes sense to me.

C-P: I wondered out of curiosity how to translate the title into Swedish and I think you surrender that double meaning. The word for beams of light is strålar but the word for structural beams, like in a ceiling, is balkar. In Swedish, you would have to choose between the two meanings — or come up with a different title, I guess.

RMW: Oh! That’s interesting.

C-P: Tell us about the process of collaborating with Macie Stewart on the soundscape. You touched on that a bit already but, what are the goals of the audio components of the exhibition? How much storytelling will the score be doing?

RMW: The process was awesome, as it always is with Macie. We spent some time in a studio, setting speakers up around us, to try to understand how to create a world of sound and, also, how to create moments like in dreams, through field recordings and voices that come in and out of the space. Moments that feel like… You know, when you’re in a house, and someone’s talking to you from another room? That, versus talking with them across a dining room table, which is very clear. We’re trying to capture these things that reflect the fuzziness of time through proximity. With everything we work on together, we’re always trying to find a mood, an arc, that has a bit of breath to it.

C-P: Does the soundscape have a set duration? Or is it phased? Do the different audio channels overlap, in terms of when they begin and end?

RMW: Right now, have a soundscape that loops and corresponds with the videos. So those are on the same track. We’re talking about the second channel, the voices and field recordings, being on a separate loop and duration, so those don’t always coincide with the rest of the audio in the same way.

C-P: Ah — so there are different periods, maybe, but they’re still in alignment. Every so often, it all comes back around to the same place.

RMW: Yeah. We discovered we wanted to do that because it felt like too much information at once, when everything was lined up. I think we wanted it to feel like there’s a bit more space, a bit more variance in people’s experiences. Less like something that lasts 16 minutes and then you walk out but, potentially, you could be in the exhibition for, I don’t know, 40 minutes, and still be having new experiences, because the material is being combined in different ways. That, plus how it sounds different when you’re in different parts of the gallery.

Photo: Jesse Obremski, Jie-Hung Connie Shiau, and Knox Murdock in a screenshot from the film “Hisako’s House” by Mike Gibisser and Robyn Mineko Williams

C-P: Now, my last question. I’m sure you’ve been thinking about how many of the arguments and rationales for internment and segregation leading up to Executive Order 9066 in 1942, through and beyond Korematsu and the 1980 Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, et cetera, seem to be echoed today in the discourse about immigration. I guess my question is, How much have you been aiming Beams at what’s happening right now? Are you looking to make direct connections, or is it more about the history, your family history, and whatever people who experience it decide to apply to current affairs is up to them?

RMW: It’s felt important for me to tell this story, to shine more light on the events of the incarceration of Japanese Americans here in the U.S., because there’s still a smothering-over of that history. And, as I’ve been working on it, our administration has continued to repeat that history. I think that has just made me feel more urgency in continuing this piece and figuring out how to share it beyond. People need to know. Part of why these things happen is, there’s a lack of true knowledge, a lack of retelling history. Sometimes, the history is passed down in a form that feels… It’s like there’s a filter between the history and the humans, and their humanity.

C-P: I’m curious about how visitors will respond to Beams here in Stockholm. I don’t know how safe it is to assume that Swedes are aware of the parts of history you’ve been looking at. I do think that they are fairly well aware of what’s happening in the U.S. right now, because it’s such big news and because it affects so many people. But do they know about Japanese American internment? Will this exhibition teach Swedish people new things about American history?

RMW: I mean, I feel that way about Americans, too. If you stop someone on the street here, I’m not certain they would know about Japanese American incarceration. I know because it impacted my family. They cover it a bit more now at my son’s school than when I was a junior in high school and it got, like I’ve said before, one paragraph in my history book. But it’s interesting you bring this up because it’s been on my mind, how to give the context as people walk into Beams. I want people to have their own experiences with it, and it’s not just about that. It’s also about family, and love, and the ripples of what gets passed down. It’s not explicitly ‘about’ Japanese American incarceration.

Photo: Robyn Mineko Williams in a photo by Chris Strong of “To Leave You”

C-P: It brings to mind how artists take that responsibility upon themselves, a lot. When I think about all the things I’ve learned about the histories of different peoples and nations, of different ethnic and religious groups, and so on, a lot of what I’ve learned came to me through art experiences. The American artist Zoe Leonard was recently here in Stockholm, and was interviewed onstage by Lisa Tan, who lives here now but was born in upstate New York and grew up in Texas. They talked about Leonard’s recent project, called Al río / To the River, which includes a lot of photographs she took along the Rio Grande, where that river is also the border between the United States and Mexico. Even as an American myself, I learned a lot from that conversation between two artists. They aren’t immigration lawyers and they’re not really historians, not primarily. One of the photos Zoe Leonard showed was of a field filled with birds, but through explaining why she took that photo, and why all those birds were in that field, on that particular day, all of this information about agricultural labor, border security, and displacement came spilling out. But I digress. Robyn, thanks so much for spending part of your morning with us. We’re all looking forward to experiencing Beams for ourselves, very soon.

RMW: Thank you so much! I’m looking forward to it, too.

Zachary Whittenburg

Robyn Mineko Williams’ Beams will be showing at SKF/Konstnärshuset in Stockholm May 16–June 13.