Title: The Legacy of Destruction and the Art of Resilience: The Marshall Islands’ Nuclear Past and Precarious Future in the “Kōmij Mour Ijin/Our Life is Here” Exhibition
Keywords: Marshall Islands, nuclear testing, climate change, environmental justice, Indigenous resilience, art activism, Cape Farewell, exhibition, decolonial art
Abstract
This paper analyzes the interwoven legacies of nuclear colonialism and climate injustice in the Marshall Islands, as critically refracted through the 2026 exhibition Kōmij Mour Ijin/Our Life is Here at the National Maritime Museum in London. Curated around a 2023 artistic-scientific expedition led by Cape Farewell, the exhibition uses multisensory artworks to confront the enduring consequences of U.S. nuclear testing between 1946 and 1958—particularly at Bikini Atoll—and the existential threat posed by rising sea levels due to anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on visual analysis, interviews with curators and participants, and archival research, this article positions the exhibition as a form of counter-hegemonic narrative production, one that centers Marshallese epistemologies and embodied trauma within a broader discourse of environmental and colonial injustice. The paper argues that Our Life is Here functions not only as an artistic testimony but as an urgent act of epistemic resistance, reclaiming space—both physical and symbolic—for a nation on the brink of disappearance.
- Introduction: Atolls Between Annihilation and Memory
In January 2026, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, opened Kōmij Mour Ijin/Our Life is Here, a powerful interdisciplinary exhibition documenting the Marshall Islands’ historical trauma and ecological precarity. The title, rendered in the Marshallese language, translates as “Our Life is Here,” a defiant assertion of presence, identity, and rootedness in the face of dual cataclysms: the Cold War-era U.S. nuclear testing program and the accelerating crisis of climate-induced sea-level rise.
The exhibition emerges from a 2023 cultural-scientific expedition organized by Cape Farewell, a UK-based nonprofit founded by artist David Buckland that uses art as a catalyst for public engagement with climate change. The project brought together artists, writers, scientists, and filmmakers for a voyage across the central Pacific, with a primary focus on the Marshall Islands—a nation composed of 29 atolls and over 1,000 islets, spread across 750,000 square miles of ocean.
This academic paper situates the exhibition within the broader context of environmental humanities, postcolonial critique, and art activism. It examines how Our Life is Here reconfigures dominant narratives about the Anthropocene by centering marginalized voices and histories. The Marshall Islands, often rendered invisible in global discourse, become a critical site for understanding the entanglement of militarism, climate change, and Indigenous survival.
- Historical Context: A Nuclear Laboratory in Paradise
Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands, part of Operation Crossroads and subsequent Cold War nuclear trials. These tests, conducted under the guise of national security and scientific advancement, transformed inhabited atolls into laboratories of destruction.
Bikini Atoll, the most infamous site, was forcibly evacuated in 1946 as the U.S. Navy declared it necessary for “the good of mankind.” In reality, the displacement was a colonial violence—a severing of people from land, culture, and cosmology. The detonation of Castle Bravo on March 1, 1954, remains the most catastrophic: a 15-megaton thermonuclear bomb, over 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, exploded with unanticipated yield. The blast radius extended far beyond projections, irradiating nearby atolls like Rongelap and Utrik, where inhabitants suffered acute radiation sickness, long-term cancers, and birth defects.
Despite the official narrative of “testing for peace,” declassified documents reveal that the U.S. government intentionally exposed Marshallese people to radiation to study biological effects—a program now recognized as unethical human experimentation (Bradley, 2020). The aftermath included forced relocations, loss of traditional food sources, and cultural disintegration. Even after some islands were declared “safe” for return, radioactive contamination in the soil and food chain—especially via coconuts and crabs—rendered resettlement hazardous.
The nuclear legacy is not merely historical. As of 2026, several atolls remain uninhabitable. The concrete Runit Dome on Enewetak Atoll, constructed in the late 1970s to contain over 73,000 cubic meters of radioactive soil and debris, is cracking and leaching into the groundwater. Sea-level rise exacerbates the risk of catastrophic leakage, turning a Cold War containment site into a ticking environmental time bomb (Robinson, 2022).
- Climate Crisis: The Slow Violence of Rising Seas
While the nuclear past remains unresolved, the Marshall Islands face a new—but eerily similar—existential threat: climate change. With an average elevation of just six feet (1.8 meters) above sea level, the nation is among the most vulnerable to rising oceans.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2023), even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios, global sea levels are projected to rise by 0.3 to 1.1 meters by 2100. For the Marshall Islands, a rise of just 0.5 meters could render over 40% of housing uninhabitable and salinize vital freshwater lenses—underground aquifers that are the primary source of drinking water.
Coastal erosion, saltwater intrusion, and increasingly frequent king tides already disrupt daily life. In cities like Majuro and Ebeye, communities confront “sunny day flooding,” where streets fill with seawater despite calm weather. Families retreat to higher ground within their own homes, and cemeteries are submerged—displacing the dead as their ancestors were displaced in the 1940s.
The climate emergency in the Marshall Islands exemplifies what Rob Nixon (2011) calls “slow violence”: a form of environmental harm that is incremental, dispersed, and often invisible to global audiences. Unlike the sudden explosion of a nuclear bomb, sea-level rise operates in silence, erasing land inch by inch, year by year. Yet its consequences are no less devastating.
- Art as Witness: Cape Farewell’s Expedition and the Genesis of the Exhibition
The Our Life is Here exhibition is the artistic culmination of a 2023 sailing expedition led by Cape Farewell. The voyage, aboard a research vessel equipped for both science and storytelling, enabled interdisciplinary collaboration between Western creatives and Marshallese communities, artists, and elders.
David Buckland, Cape Farewell’s founder, described the project as “not about coming to document, but to listen.” Over several weeks, the team visited Bikini, Enewetak, Rongelap, and other atolls, conducting interviews, collecting oral histories, and participating in communal rituals. This methodology aligns with relational and decolonial art practices, emphasizing reciprocity and co-creation.
The exhibition, which opened in November 2025 and runs through June 2026, features over 40 works spanning painting, sculpture, photography, soundscapes, and immersive video installations. Crucially, it includes contributions from both international artists and Marshallese creators—an intentional effort to avoid extractive representation.
Key installations include:
“Bravo” by Isaac Chong Wai (Germany/Hong Kong): A large-scale sound sculpture composed of metal resonators tuned to frequencies of the 1954 detonation. Played continuously in a darkened room, the low-frequency hum induces visceral unease, simulating the physical sensation of a nuclear blast.
“Watermark” by Emily A. Johnson (USA) and Kajung Joab (Marshall Islands): A dual-channel video projection contrasting archival footage of U.S. military parades on Bikini with present-day footage of elders walking along eroding shorelines, narrating displacement in Marshallese.
“Rooted” by Lani Stemmer (UK/Marshall Islands descent): A mixed-media installation of woven pandanus mats embedded with soil samples from displaced atolls. The mats are slowly disintegrating due to embedded salt crystals, symbolizing cultural erosion and ecological fragility.
Photography Series by Jiban Maki: A collection of intimate portraits of Marshallese youth, elders, and climate activists, shot during high tide events. Each image is printed on translucent film and backlit, casting shadows that resemble rising floodwaters on gallery walls.
These works do not merely depict, but perform the trauma and resilience of the Marshallese people. By blending scientific data with poetic form, the exhibition creates an affective space where visitors can feel the weight of history and impending loss.
- Decolonizing Representation: Centering Marshallese Voices
A central achievement of Our Life is Here is its commitment to decolonizing the gaze. Unlike earlier Western narratives that exoticized Pacific Islanders or framed nuclear testing as a “necessary evil” of progress, the exhibition foregrounds Marshallese subjectivity.
This is evident in language: signage and audio guides are bilingual (English/Marshallese), and the exhibition title appears first in Marshallese script. Guided tours are led by Marshallese cultural ambassadors when possible, and recorded testimonies from elders are integrated into multimedia displays.
Moreover, the curation explicitly critiques the role of museums in colonial knowledge production. A panel near the entrance acknowledges:
“This museum was built during the age of empire. Today, we confront our complicity in stories that erased small island nations. This exhibition is an act of reparation through visibility.”
This self-reflexivity echoes recent postcolonial museum reforms but is rare in climate-focused exhibitions, which often prioritize scientific data over cultural context.
The inclusion of Marshallese artists like Kajung Joab and Jiban Maki is particularly significant. Their works assert aesthetic sovereignty, resisting the tendency of Western art institutions to tokenize Indigenous creators. Joab’s Watermark, for instance, uses traditional storytelling techniques—such as repetition and oceanic metaphor—to convey intergenerational trauma, challenging linear, Eurocentric narratives of progress and recovery.
- The Exhibition as Epistemic Resistance
Our Life is Here transcends mere documentation; it functions as epistemic resistance—a term used by scholars like Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) to describe the reclamation of knowledge systems suppressed by colonialism.
In this context, the exhibition becomes a space where Marshallese cosmologies—their understanding of land, ocean, and intergenerational responsibility—are validated as legitimate ways of knowing. For example, the concept of kajoor (stewardship) is introduced through didactic panels and artworks to explain how Islanders maintain reciprocal relationships with their environment, even in exile.
Furthermore, the exhibition challenges the temporal dissonance of climate discourse. While policymakers speak of “2050 targets” and “net-zero futures,” for Marshallese people, the future is already here. As one video interviewee states:
“We don’t have 25 years. We are living climate change every day. We were the first to suffer nuclear violence; now we are the first to face climate doom.”
By collapsing distant futures into present reality, the exhibition disrupts the false comfort of delayed action. It insists that climate justice cannot be abstract—it must reckon with historical accountability.
- Global Implications and the Politics of Visibility
Despite contributing less than 0.01% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the Marshall Islands is at the frontline of climate catastrophe. This paradox underscores the geopolitical inequity inherent in the climate crisis.
The exhibition’s location in London—a former imperial capital and current global financial hub—amplifies this critique. By placing Marshallese stories within a British national museum, Our Life is Here forces a confrontation with the colonial roots of environmental degradation. The British Empire extracted resources across the Global South; today, its descendants benefit from fossil capitalism while small island nations pay the price.
Moreover, the exhibition arrives at a critical moment in climate diplomacy. In late 2025, the Marshall Islands led a coalition of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in petitioning the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on state obligations to protect people from climate harm. The London exhibition has supported that campaign, hosting panel discussions with UN delegates and climate lawyers.
As David Buckland noted in a Reuters interview (2026),
“The atolls are six feet above sea water. That doesn’t take much of the Pacific Ocean to rise, to actually make them uninhabitable. So that threat is hanging over them.”
This statement, simple and stark, encapsulates the moral urgency of the exhibition.
- Critique and Limitations
While Our Life is Here represents a significant step forward in ethical art activism, it is not without limitations. Critics have questioned the logistics of representation: Can a London museum truly honor Marshallese sovereignty when the art is displayed thousands of miles from home? And does the reliance on Western funding (including Arts Council England and private donors) risk co-opting the message?
Additionally, some Marshallese diaspora voices argue that the exhibition’s emphasis on “resilience” could inadvertently normalize suffering—what scholars call “resilience fatigue.” There is a danger that by celebrating endurance, the world absolves itself of responsibility to act (Neubauer & Munshi, 2009).
Finally, practical concerns remain: How can exhibitions translate into reparations? While the museum has partnered with the Marshall Islands Climate Advocacy Network to raise funds, material support for relocation, healthcare, and environmental remediation remains insufficient.
These critiques do not diminish the exhibition’s power but underscore the need for art to be part of a broader ecosystem of justice—including legal, financial, and political action.
- Conclusion: “Our Life is Here”—A Testament to Existence
Our Life is Here is more than an exhibition. It is a testimony to survival, a wake-up call to the world, and a reclamation of narrative control. Through art, it renders visible the invisible: the buried isotopes of plutonium in Enewetak soil, the salt in the breadfruit trees, the dreams of children who may never know their ancestral atolls.
The Marshall Islands’ dual crisis—nuclear and climatic—reveals the layered violence of the Anthropocene: a geological epoch shaped not by all humans equally, but by extractive systems rooted in colonialism and fossil capitalism. By centering Marshallese voices and aesthetics, the exhibition challenges the viewer to see climate change not as an abstract crisis, but as a continuation of historical injustice.
As rising seas swallow shorelines and the Runit Dome cracks beneath the waves, Our Life is Here affirms what the Marshallese have always known: land is memory, ocean is kin, and to exist is resistance.
References
Bradley, M. (2020). The Atomic Pacific: Nuclear Testing and the Postcolonial Imagination. Duke University Press.
IPCC. (2023). Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report. Geneva: Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Neubauer, C., & Munshi, D. (2009). “The Rhetoric of Resilience: Neoliberalism, Resistance, and the Matter of Fact.” Science Communication, 30(4), 539–557.
Nixon, R. (2011). Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press.
Robinson, S. (2022). “The Runit Dome: Nuclear Legacy and Sea-Level Rise in the Marshall Islands.” Environmental Research Letters, 17(4), 044001.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Zed Books.
Reuters. (2026, January 26). “Marshall Islands’ nuclear past and precarious future explored in London exhibition.” Reuters News Agency.
Cape Farewell. (2025). Exhibition Catalogue: Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life is Here. London: National Maritime Museum.
Marshall Islands Government. (2025). National Adaptation Plan (NAP) 2025–2050. Majuro: Ministry of Environment.