A solo exhibition by photographer Rieko Shiga has opened at the Aomori Museum of Art, running through 14 March 2027. Titled in Japanese Nanumo Kanumo, it is the artist's largest exhibition to date and her second solo presentation in the Tohoku region since her Spiral Coast series. The show also marks the museum's twentieth anniversary and offers a space to reconsider the fifteen years since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami through Shiga's work.

Born in Aichi in 1980, Shiga has lived in Miyagi prefecture since 2008, recording the land and its people while collecting oral histories. Her photographs and videos are rooted in bodily sensation and carry a theatrical quality. The exhibition draws together old and new works in photography, video, text and installation, following her gaze across Miyagi, Fukushima, Yamagata, Akita, Iwate and Aomori. It was developed through a long dialogue with curator Takahiro Okuwaki, and Shiga has described the month-long installation itself as a period of making.

The show is organised around Enao, a fictional figure Shiga invented from a custom of the Sanriku coast, where a child born with the umbilical cord wrapped around the neck is given the name Enao. Six galleries flow into one another without clear boundaries, so the whole space reads as a single continuous organism.

Near the entrance, Shiga has hand-copied in ink part of a prayer for peace written by Fujiwara no Kiyohira for the dedication of Chuson-ji temple, onto the back of a huge tarpaulin banner. Behind it hangs a photograph of tsunami debris that a resident of Fukushima gathered onto private land and marked with red crosses to preserve as treasured belongings. Shiga rebuilt the scene into a single image using montage.