Exhibition: September 16 – December 5, 2026
Where: University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries
Elysha Rei’s Australian Internment Garden Series is now showing in DIS – displaced, dispersed, dispossessed at the University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries in Canada.
DIS – displaced, dispersed, dispossessed pairs concurrent group exhibits at the Nikkei National Museum & Cultural Centre and the University of Victoria Legacy Art Gallery, bringing together work from contemporary artists exploring the lasting influence of the Second World War on Nikkei communities globally. Through installation, video, sculpture-informed 2D/3D work, performance, illustration, and text-based practices, participating artists engage inherited memory, cultural continuity, and intergenerational experience. For more information, see the University of Victoria Legacy Art Galleries website.
The ‘Australian Internment Garden Series’ features intricate, hand-cut paper studies of archival photographs from the Australian War Memorial collection, documenting Japanese gardens created by Japanese internees in the Loveday Internment Camps in South Australia. Through the painstaking process of paper cutting, Rei carefully recreates the ornate details of these gardens, exploring the tension between their beauty and the harsh realities of the internment environment in which they were constructed.
The series reflects on the resilience of Japanese communities in maintaining cultural connections and transforming their surroundings under conditions of racial persecution and displacement. Working with archival imagery as both source material and process, Rei draws attention to the histories and lived experiences that can remain unrecorded or overlooked in official archives. The delicate paper cuts hold space for these complex narratives, inviting viewers to consider how memory, identity and cultural continuity endure across generations.