Forget Me Not

 Exhibition Highlights

A Fresh Series Of All-New Material, And A First Foray Into Video-Art

The present exhibition revolves around a completely new series by Fujioka titled “Forget Me Not”, which includes her very first attempt at video-art.

The work, which took three years to conceive and produce, deals with an unsolved incident that actually happened to the artist. As an involved party, the artist witnessed the reality of a situation—whose outcome even the artist could not predict—carved out moment by moment through her choices and the press of the shutter. Rather than being a documentary or a journalistic report, the experience rather aligns with the characteristics of a “non-fiction novel”—often defined by the particularities of “① the author not appearing in the work; ② the author’s perspective being conveyed through choices; and ③ creative processing becoming a necessity”*—

The exhibition is constructed using an ambivalent approach: it presents material grounded in the definitive facts of photography while simultaneously presenting it as a story that stirs emotions.

The Lives Of Women Who Tie Together Kure, Melbourne And São Paulo

Hiroshima Prefecture, Fujioka’s hometown, once ranked first nationwide in the number of people who emigrated overseas. Fujioka’s grandmother herself was born in Brazil as a second-generation (nisei) immigrant. When she was 20 years old, a lottery ticket her parents bought happened to win, and the family returned to Japan—specifically to Kure, Hiroshima—. After receiving a message from a woman living in Melbourne, Australia—who was searching for a woman named Kimiko Fujioka, whose name differed from her grandmother’s, Kimie Fujioka, by a single Japanese character —Fujioka set out for Kure and Melbourne to solve the mystery of who this woman with the one-character difference—who wasn’t her grandmother—could be.

The journey to find Kimiko—whose very existence was uncertain—drew in a variety of people; their wild speculations flew back and forth, and the experience touched on the human absurdity often found amidst both laughter and tears.

Fujioka turned her gaze to the postwar history of Kure and Melbourne, the lives of the women who lived through that era, and the present state of Kure—a regional city that once flourished as a military port and, after the war, as a coastal industrial zone, but is now in decline.

A central theme of this exhibition is the capturing, through Fujioka’s lens, of the lives of all of those women—lived with resilience despite being swayed by chance and necessity—and the cities in which they spent their days.

Photography Is Something That Can’t Be Undone.

Aya Fujioka, who has often employed “snapshots” as a photographic technique in her work, has described the irreversibility of capturing what she sees in an instant with a small camera—which inevitably captures even things she did not see—as “something that can’t be undone.”

In creating the works for this exhibition, Fujioka encountered photographs preserved in a private home and undertook a creative process centered on what we could call “found photographs”. Although found photographs share the anonymity of their subjects with snapshots, the mystery of “who” they are hangs more heavily in the air than in snapshots.

Through photographs from the distant past, where even the subjects are unknown, complete strangers meet and interact; yet the more they try to solve the mystery with them, the less they serve as a clue and the more they become the mystery itself. When photographs—which were once merely captured—transform into something to be unraveled, the meaning of photographs “that can’t be undone” also undergoes a profound change.

*As elucidated by translator Naotaro Ryuguchi, on the “Commentary” section of his translation of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”,  p. 557 (Shinchosha, 1978)