Guidebooks promise to contain everything a traveller needs: landmarks, customs, places to eat and sleep. This year's Art Week Tokyo video programme sets out to puncture that promise. Titled Your Travel Guide To..., the selection of single-channel moving image works asks what gets mapped and what is left out of view, treating geography as something shaped by migration, memory, labour and ideas.

Sector curator X Zhu-Nowell, executive director and chief curator of Shanghai's Rockbund Art Museum, is less interested in guidebooks as literature than as a form that choreographs bodies within inhabited spaces and idealised landscapes. Of the ten artists in the show, five are from Japan and one is from the Japanese diaspora. Berlin-based Kandis Williams, who has never shown in Japan before, contributes A Travel Guide: Black Gothic in South Korean Horror (2025), drawing on Victor Hugo Green's Green Book, the Jim Crow-era guide that told Black Americans where they could expect to be served. Williams frames the work around the idea that mobility equals power, connecting the two countries through shared musical aesthetics, suppressed mourning and experiences of militarisation and state violence.

New York-based Ken Okiishi's Brian at Home (2020-25) takes a different route into the same questions. Built from Zoom calls with the artist's personal trainer, who lives in a New York smart-home building called Denizen, it walks the viewer through a space packed with app-based appliances, watching its promise of frictionless inclusivity come apart. The programme also includes Berlin- and Beijing-based He Xiangyu, Japan-based Linda Iha, Fuyuhiko Takata and Atsushi Yamamoto, and the late Keiichi Tanaami and Hiroyuki Oki, both masters of handcrafted moving images.

Zhu-Nowell traces the guidebook's loaded history back to the 18th-century ars apodemica manuals that instructed wealthy young European men how to observe and behave on their world tours, an entitled inverse of the Green Book, and forward to today's digital guides from travel influencers. In every form, the curator argues, the framing power of travel guides underlines philosopher Katherine McKittrick's point that geography is never a neutral space. AWT Video runs 4 to 8 November at SMBC East Tower in Marunouchi.