AWT VIDEO

Screened at a special pavilion in the lobby of SMBC East Tower in the Marunouchi district, AWT Video presents a selection of single-channel moving image works by Japanese and international artists drawn from Art Week Tokyo’s participating galleries. Overseen by X Zhu-Nowell, the executive director and chief curator of the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, this year’s program, “Your Travel Guide To . . . ,” features works by 10 Japanese and international artists.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

A travel guide promises that a place can be made legible. It selects routes, fixes landmarks, and turns movement into portable, consumable knowledge. “Your Travel Guide To…” leaves the destination open. Rather than describing a place, the works gathered here ask how it becomes visible at all: what receives a name, what enters history, what is mapped, and what remains at the edge of view.

Following Canadian scholar Katherine McKittrick’s proposition that “geography is always human,” this year’s AWT Video program approaches geography not as a bounded territory but as something continually produced through migration, memory, infrastructure, labor, technology, and the circulation of people, images, and ideas. Place emerges not as a neutral backdrop but through lived experience, uneven histories, and everyday practices.

Across the program, handwritten diaries, repeated journeys, seasonal returns, domestic routines, drawings, and largely invisible digital infrastructures become ways of reading the world. History appears not as a stable record but as a layered field shaped by movement, projection, forgetting, and contested forms of knowledge. Ordinary gestures—walking a familiar route, marking the turn of a calendar day, entering a shared kitchen, or holding a phone to a sensor—become ways of navigating these complex geographies.

—X Zhu-Nowell

ABOUT THE CURATOR

X Zhu-Nowell is a curator, writer, and institutional practitioner, currently serving as the executive director and chief curator of the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai. Zhu-Nowell’s practice is shaped by relational authorship and an approach to exhibition making that foregrounds contradiction, displacement, and the labor of (mis)translation. At RAM, they have led a structural shift toward a resistant institution by advancing artist commissions, research-led practices, and radical pedagogies through initiatives such as AUUUUDITORIUM and Complex Geographies. Recent projects at RAM include “Irena Haiduk: Nula” (2025–26), which transformed the museum into an active film set and participatory economy, and “The Great Camouflage” (2025–26), an exhibition cocurated with Kandis Williams. Prior to joining RAM, Zhu-Nowell was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2014–21), where they organized “Wu Tsang: Anthem,” which was named one of the best exhibitions of 2021 by the New York Times.

PROFILE