Exhibit | Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here
About
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. That expedition, Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here (https://www.ourlifeishere.org), 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. An exhibition in Doe Library's Bernice Layne Brown Gallery gathers reproductions of works made during and after the voyage together with rare books, maps, and photographs drawn from UC Berkeley's own libraries—The Bancroft Library, the Earth Sciences & Map Library, the Environmental Design Library, Morrison Library, and the Main (Gardner) Stacks. Six cases move from the conditions that shaped the voyage, through the journey itself, to the living Marshallese knowledge and youth-led activism that carry it forward. Interpretive text is punctuated by QR codes linking to films, poems, and the organizations at the center of the project. This presentation is part of a series of exhibitions, installations, courses, and public programs across UC Berkeley during the 2026–27 academic year (https://cici.berkeley.edu/komij-mour-ijin-our-life-here-uc-berkeley), guided by the Environmental Arts and Humanities Initiative. The exhibition was co-curated by independent curators Amy Kisch and Svea Lin Soll, in partnership with UC Berkeley librarians Becky Miller and Susan Powell. The Kōmij Mour Ijin / Our Life Is Here expedition was organized by Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Michael Light, and David Buckland, and supported by Stellar Blue Fund and Cape Farewell.
