(Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home & Universe One is rooted in self-empowerment and rebellious spirit, reclaiming our own spaces from which we have been exiled. But there is also a bigger conversation surrounding this work. It is a chance to think about how our cities are built and our relations to them. Who has more space and who doesn’t? Which spaces are accessible to us, which are not and why? What can we do about it? (Re)Imagine City/ (Re)Imagine Home is an experimental exploration of art-making with Augmented Reality and introducing an alternative way of art infiltrating public spaces without permission or request to access, what we so need to do to express anything in Myanmar.

C a r e. Exhibition took place in Yangon at Goethe Instiut Myanmar Auditorium, from 26th July to 1st August 2022. The exhibition explored the concept of “Care”, what kind of activities/ actions could belong to this expression. The exhibition examined artistic ways of community care and collective trauma healing, which is seen as essential work for the public after the February 2021 coup in Myanmar.

The exhibition book features artworks from the exhibitions, conversations with artists moderated by the curator, articles on trauma art/ trauma healing art practices in Myanmar.

/Shi is an art exhibition in the city of Yangon, Myanmar. /Shi is on for 44 days from 12 November 2022 to 12 January 2023.” It is based on the bus routes, the backbone of Yangon’s DNA and includes 40+ artworks from 50+ artists spreaded across 7 venues in the city.

This essay reflects on the exhibition and the relationships between art communities & cultural institutions.

“Cloud” is the third painting series and the fourth solo exhibition by artist Thukhamein Hlaing or AM (Aung Min) as he signed his painting artworks. Painted in acrylic on canvas, the series was made in 2022 from the months of July to September, and includes around 30 paintings of different manners of clouds with varying colors of skyscapes as backgrounds.

“Cloud” exhibition is a deep reflection of life. Thukhamein Hlaing’s works are spaces for him and for the viewers to contemplate about morals and ethics of living as well as about truth and justice.

Curatorial work in Myanmar can be done more efficiently if the work is not approached in a stagnant form of already established structures outside in developed countries. It should find a way that is most suitable to fill the necessities of the scene.

In-betweenness is a weird space to be in. Bodies/ materials stayed in suspension between various planes, never truly becoming either one of them they belong to. We belong to the public spaces that we have been cast out of but we cannot belong to them artistically, at least not at the moment. Our AR artworks will infiltrate many places but it will never materialize in the physical reality. We can pretend that we have created a utopian cityscape in the premises of this exhibition or that we have reconstructed a new world but we cannot deny the truth that it is just a room. A simple idea to comment on the scarcity of public art has become a longing to ever find belonging in our own spaces again.

Why have there been no great Myanmar Contemporary artists? What this question demands is a tackling from various stakeholders in the cultural field, posing crucial additional questions about bias, spaces, relationships, resources, and creating critical dialogues that could help Myanmar cultural workers imagine a collective future together that is away from the narrative they have been jammed into for many decades.

In this space, we dismantle the idea of an art exhibition and refuse to tell a one-dimension story. We seek non-existence in existence. In this space, we are actively running away from ordinary, forming new alliances, new ideas of exhibitions, curators and artists. However, this is in no way done as a rebellion but rather a self-analysis of ourselves as curators and artists; deconstructing, rebuilding and finding coexistence in a physical/ virtual space, together with our audience. In this space, we are getting out of our own crises and seeking our freedom. In here, we are experimenting, winning and failing.

From September 2018 to March 2019, I worked together with the Japan Foundation Yangon for Creative Platform Talk series, which invited Southeast Asian artists and art practitioners to Yangon, offering Myanmar-based artists a chance to exchange experiences and knowledge with other countries in SEA region.

Over the period of 7 months, 7 talks were held. My role in this project is writing reviews for each talk, which are later published through social media platforms and as a booklet, so as to let knowledge gathered by the project spread to a wider audience.