Nikkei Australia’s Mayu Kanamori to hold exhibition in Japan

A Compendium for Navigating Borderlands is a collection of photographs, collages, poetry and moving images upon the themes of borders and border crossings.

I took photographs along the borders of the Sydney suburb of Marrickville where I lived duing the covid lockdowns, during which border restrictions divided residents from the neighbouring suburbs of Earlwood and Marrickville. Each lived under a different set of rules from the other.

In the exhibition, these photographs are placed on glass walls, representing mostly invisible boundaries, much like the concept of glass ceilings, although the visibility of the images and of the space change, depending on the light conditions at the time of viewing, and on whether the viewer is inside or outside the exhibition space.

A series of collages were also made during the pandemic, beginning with an image of a bridge across the border between Marrickville and Earlwood and a poem written on the day Australia closed its international border; and ending with a poem written on my first flight to Japan from Australia after the borders re-opened. This is shown with an image of the screen on the back of the airline seat showing the flightpath we took over Guam, a territory fought for eighty years ago, and now within the borders of the United States.

The videowork Blurring Boundaries was created the year after in Matsuyama in collaboration with haiku poets to explore different types of borders and their ambiguities. Some of the ideas investigated in this work concern the ambiguities and the shifting borders, if any, between territories and boundaries, this world and another, inside and outside, epochs and eternity.

from Mayu Kanamori’s website