Cartologica: Reflected Coordinates (2025)
Installation Title: Cartologica- (ongoing project)
Medium: Cardboards and Atlas
Size: Variable
Year 2025
Cartologica: Reflected Coordinates (2025)
Cartologica is a fusion of two core concepts—cartography and logic—that together explore how we map and make sense of the world, both geographically and intellectually.
Cartography, the practice of mapping, forms the foundation of this installation. Hundreds of thin, round cardboard shapes, each filled with pages from atlases, represent both physical landscapes and the mental terrains we navigate—memories, perceptions, and the shifting topographies of identity and history. The use of atlas pages is intentional: maps are tools that shape our understanding of geography, but they are also tied to migration, displacement, and exploration. Their fragmented and overlapping territories reflect the fluid nature of experience and the constant process of negotiating between places, cultures, and memories.
The second element, logic, points to the frameworks we use to impose order on the world. It speaks to how we organize our journeys—through systems of knowledge, reasoning, and lived experience. The hollow centers of the circular pieces suggest gaps in memory: moments and places left unfinished, yet open to reinterpretation.
Cardboard itself reinforces the theme of movement—lightweight and flexible, it carries the qualities of migration, transience, and adaptation. The organic arrangement of the pieces mirrors this flux, evoking the rhythms of departure, return, and re-establishment in new spaces.
In Cartologica, these two elements—mapping and meaning—remain fluid. The installation challenges the idea of maps as fixed, suggesting instead that our geographies of identity and memory are always shifting. By suspending these circular forms in space, the work invites us to reflect on our own processes of mapping—how we chart personal journeys through time, place, and memory.
Notes on Cartologica
Cartologica: Reflected Coordinates extends Amir Zainorin’s long engagement with atlas pages into a suspended constellation of rotating circles. Each form—layered with fragments of maps, gauze, and reflective surfaces—suggests a world both fragile and resilient, shifting as light and movement change the installation.
Here, maps are no longer stable documents but living surfaces of memory. They evoke journeys across Malaysia, the United States, and Denmark, along with the artist’s rhythm of yearly returns to Malaysia—except during the stillness of COVID. These recurring movements give the work its pulse, echoing the migrations that shape both personal and collective identities.
Suspended in space, the forms mirror and refract one another, creating double images and fleeting alignments. Rather than charting fixed borders, Cartologica reveals identity as a geography in flux—constantly redrawn by memory, experience, and resilience.
Technical Details
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Materials: Cardboard, atlas pages, gauze, round mirrors, colored acrylic film, disco ball motors
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Dimensions: Variable, site-specific
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Adaptability: Fully modular; installation can expand or contract depending on space
Exhibition History
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Edinburgh Printmakers, Scotland, UK (2023, group exhibition In from the Margin)
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Kapallorek Artspace, Malaysia (2024, solo exhibition In Between Worlds))
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Kunstpakhuset, Ikast, Denmark (2025, solo exhibition Rhythm of Identity)
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Museo delle Mura, Rome, Italy (2026, solo exhibition, forthcoming Gravity of the Walls)
Home studio, Copenhagen 2022
Test installation, 2025
Silk Screen on atlas during residency at Fyns Grafiskeværksted, Odense, Denmark, 2022
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