CIVICUS discusses the risks and purpose of art under military rule with a Myanmar-based documentary filmmaker, multimedia artist and poet who asked to stay anonymous for security reasons.

Myanmar’s civil war, sparked by its February 2021 military coup, continues. The military junta has waged a sustained crackdown on artists, civil society and journalists, banning independent media and imprisoning dissenting voices. Many artists have gone into exile, while those who remain often work underground or anonymously.

What drives your artistic practice?

Growing up in Myanmar, I always asked myself: why are we made to feel so small? That was a question that always ran through my work.

I began my career as a performance artist, but my practice spans digital art, documentary filmmaking, painting, performance and video. It centres on the relationship between society and personal emotion.

A documentary filmmaker once told me that what artists do is find the humanity within conflict. We are all broken, and it’s from that shared brokenness that we can connect. I think that’s what artists do. We keep the memory.

My documentary work has been about understanding people other than myself: connecting with them and being part of their story. This has taken me into direct, sustained engagement with various communities including LGBTQI+ people, street children and youth groups.

How has your work changed since the coup?

When the coup happened in February 2021, every artist put all their energy into resisting the military. The political landscape shifted, and so did our priorities. In the early days of the coup, I took part in a peaceful protest led by poets on Pansodan Road in downtown Yangon. We held public readings and sold artwork and poems to creatively oppose the coup. I was arrested and detained during a protest on 27 March and held for three days before being conditionally released.

Five years on, I continue to ask myself the question of why I want to be an artist and what the role of an artist is. When I was younger, it was all about becoming established and gaining recognition. After all I’ve been through, I’ve realised that isn’t what I want.

Now I’m interested in ecological consciousness. I worry about how disconnected we’ve become from nature and each other, and how that separation creates suffering.

How do you manage risk while doing your work?

If you think too much about risk, your body and your thinking get blocked. Sometimes you just have to do it. Of course you need risk management, but a lot of what happens depends on context, experience, common sense and decisions made on the fly. We live in a high-risk country, so every choice about our work is inherently risky. Sometimes I stay anonymous.

The media I work with – installation, multimedia and video – aren’t well established in Myanmar, so my work stays relatively under the radar. But that also means we lack good facilities for that kind of exhibition, and funding options are scarce, particularly for documentary work, which requires significant resources.

Fortunately, I can still travel to show my work abroad, and I’ve applied for international residencies and short-term programmes, which give me an artist’s fee to keep going. I already own my production equipment, so I can shoot without much funding, but for post-production we rely on filmmakers helping each other out.

What’s it like to document Myanmar’s crisis?

I keep shooting documentary footage, even if I don’t get the chance to show it, because this is a historic moment and it needs to be recorded. Holding a camera can be dangerous, and you have to manage a lot around that.

Sometimes you take the risk and nothing happens with the footage. Nobody sees it, nobody cares. At one point I lost hope and stopped recording properly. I just let it go. That made me question why I want to tell these stories at all, and what kind of stories I want to tell.

Increasingly I’m trying to understand something more universal about humanity, not just about Myanmar, and to find a way to liberate my thinking from the noise around me. But authoritarianism and repression keep coming back.

CIVICUS interviews a wide range of civil society activists, experts and leaders to gather diverse perspectives on civil society action and current issues for publication on its CIVICUS Lens platform. The views expressed in interviews are the interviewees’ and do not necessarily reflect those of CIVICUS. Publication does not imply endorsement of interviewees or the organisations they represent.