Recovering Agency Through Art-making Amid Political Uncertainty And Exile
OUTPUTS : “How Do You Create When the World Shakes?” Publication, Rec/Age Website
How Do You Create When the World Shakes grows out of two pressing questions: What happens to artistic practice – and the agency it sustains – when ‘normal life’ is upended by political uncertainty, armed conflict, or forced migration? When artists are severed from their communities, what do they most fiercely protect within themselves, and what can this inner life reveal about the relationship between creative practice, memory, and identity? These questions are particularly urgent in Myanmar, where generations have lived through military rule, political upheaval, armed conflict, and displacement. Following the 2021 military coup and the collapse of the country’s fragile democratic transition, millions more have been displaced within Myanmar or driven into exile. Artists and cultural practitioners have found themselves navigating not only profound personal and political uncertainty, but unexpected questions about what it means – and what it takes – to continue creating.
Rather than approaching these experiences through familiar narratives of trauma and resilience, How Do You Create When the World Shakes turns inward, toward the creative process itself. We are interested in what artists carry with them when so much else is disrupted: the memories, practices, relationships, humour, habits, contradictions, and imaginative worlds that remain their own. When political upheaval threatens to conscript both artist and artwork into a narrative of ‘artivism’, reducing the complexity of a creative life to a single legible identity, we ask how artists preserve the freedom to remain artists on their own terms.
In spring 2025, we brought together participating artists and curators for three closed-door workshops. The first gathered visual artists still living in Yangon under military autocratic rule; the second brought together artists living in exile in Paris and Marseille, France, and Shigaraki, Japan; and the third convened curators in Yangon and Bangkok. Kyaw Moe Khine led each workshop with prepared questions, but also with a commitment to allowing the conversations to travel where participants wished to take them.
That openness was paired with a clear ethical framework. Participants received a statement of ethics and consent forms, and each chose to be named and quoted. They also generously entrusted us with original artworks for inclusion in the publication. The conversations were conducted in Burmese and translated into English with great care by Ko Maung Day, who is a poet in addition to his visual work, and Ko Kyaw Moe Khine, preserving as much as possible the individual voices and meanings spoken in Burmese.
Phase One has resulted in the publication How Do You Create When the World Shakes and this companion website for the overarching project, Rec/Age. Phase Two will carry these conversations into new forms, with plans for a travelling exhibition and a book – extending the project while keeping its central purpose intact: to listen closely to how people recover and protect agency when the ground beneath ordinary life gives way.