Rea Tajiri
b. 1958, Chicago, IL 
History, Memory, Vertical Stack, 2024
Mixed media
Courtesy the artist

Inspired by roadside shrines found in the U.S., the shelf installation incorporates Rea Tajiri’s experimental documentary History and Memory: For Akiko and Takashige (1991), stones gathered from the Poston War Relocation Center, a concentration camp in Arizona, family photographs, and notes inventorying dispossession incurred by the U.S. government's imprisonment of Tajiri’s family during World War II as authorized by Executive Order 9066 in 1942.

In a contemplative disquisition on Tajiri’s film, literary critic David Eng describes photography as a type of performative imaging of loss that defies conventional representation and identity politics. Instead of operating in the realm of traditional documentary, photographs can create an embodied archive of knowledge and feelings. Both mother and daughter in the film share symptomatic blind spots stemming from the family’s history and trauma of Japanese incarceration during World War II. As a result, images and memories are discontinuous for them, and their relationship is forged by psychic forfeitures endured in private.

In Tajiri’s recent film, Wisdom Gone Wild (2022), Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of her life as a person living with dementia. Among the various events, the family makes a pilgrimage to Poston to explore a return to a place where memory is unstable, physically erased, or unconsciously forgotten.