Japanese photographer, entrepreneur and inventor Yasukichi Murakami was the talk of the town in Broome and Darwin in the early 1900s, until the outbreak of the Second World War saw him and his family, like all Japanese in Australia, interned as enemy aliens. Murakami’s photographs were impounded and subsequently lost.
Using photographic projections, video, original music and soundscape, Japanese-Australian photographer and writer Mayu Kanamori goes in search of Murakami’s lost photographs. Uncovering a fascinating story of unlikely friendships, thwarted ambition and unrequited love,Yasukichi Murakami stirs our collective amnesia about the history of the Japanese in Australia.
Yasukichi Murakami is a meditation on love, truth and, in a digital age where cameras proliferate, the nature of photography.
A Performance 4a production, co-presented by Performance 4a and Griffin Theatre Company.
09 September. 2014. 7:30pm followed by Artist Talk 8:45pm
10 September, 2014, 7:30pm
Space Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre
Murakami is developed with the assistance of the Federal Government through its arts funding and advisory body, the Australia Council; Creative Ecologies Lab, Media, Music, Communications and Cultural Studies, Macquarie University; the Northern Territory Government; and Playwriting Australia.
A huge thanks to Pozible supporters and generous donors for helping us get our new production to Darwin Festival .