IDEA & GOALS:
With its abilities for strategic political expression, visual art is a powerful tool for subverting authority and establishing individual agency and socio-cultural resilience in difficult political times. For those living under the yoke of authoritarianism, painting, photography, sculpture, and graffiti art provide a subtle yet/thus potent form of soft power activism allowing artists and those who follow them to maintain some sense of cultural identity and empowerment amid oppression. What happens to this form of strategic political-cultural expression when artists are internally displaced or exiled? How does the fundamental uncertainty of exile impact such creative expression and vice versa? Since the turn of the 21st century, forced human migration due to armed conflict, climate, or other catastrophic realities has fast become a multi-parameter global issue requiring innovative approaches and unconventional solutions: the unique contribution of exiled visual artists is one such approach. Drawing on common themes such as the power of art making to reunite cultural communities and re-imagine Home, this stream aims to identify understudied aspects of the problem by engaging deeply with exiled artists in their own words.
One focus will be on Burmese artists, with potential to expand to other regions and communities. On February 1st, 2021, democratization in Myanmar ended abruptly with a military coup d’état that sparked Myanmar’s Spring Revolution. Since then, 2.6 million Burmese citizens have been displaced inside Myanmar and another 2.4 million have fled the country. Blueprinting workshops with Burmese artists, gallerists, and scholars will lead to innovative approaches to the problem of navigating the uncertainty of dislocation which we will then share widely through public humanities approaches such as publications, a traveling exhibition, and a podcast. Early conversations with collaborators already suggest innovative topics such as: using visual art as a tool for achieving agency amid oppression and later navigating the uncertainty of exile; and a Western institutional preoccupation with non-Western “Artivists” (artist activists) that favors themes of political violence and fosters often problematic archetypes, when instead many refugee artists prefer to be known for the objective quality of their work (politically-themed or otherwise) and simply to get on with life.