Myanmar: Sharing is Key
Ilaria Benini
Hailing from Italy, IIaria Benini has been working in Southeast Asia for five years, spending the past two years in Yangon, Myanmar, researching the impact of the internet on the art community and the cultural scene there. A project to which she devoted a great deal of time was Contemporary Dialogues in Yangon, a festival of contemporary arts and culture.
In Benini's eyes, sharing is an important aspect of human dynamics that Myanmar has been sadly lacking for a very long time. The country ethnically, linguistically, and artistically diverse, but its turbulent history of colonization, civil war, and military rule has seen the practice of sharing restricted under the country's censorship laws. Myanmar today is still a very isolated country, so isolated that it seems to be shunned by the rest of world, with its artists barred from accessing the international scene and making their art known to the rest of the world.
This was the starting point of Contemporary Dialogues of Yangon. When Benini first arrived in Myanmar, which was still under military rule, she realized that arts and artists did exist, but there very little was known about the cultural situation there, either within the country or outside.
In one of the Contemporary Dialogues sessions, a man who had been imprisoned for eight years for his participation in a student movement told the roomful of people how, inspired by an article by a famous Myanmar artist he read while in prison, he started using recycled materials to create art. Benini said that the reason she set up Contemporary Dialogues in the first place was to create an environment where people like this man would finally be able to express their ideas freely.
Censorship was lifted a few years ago, but the opening up of the country also brought new job opportunities, and with new job opportunities artists became too busy to stop and talk about what was changing. But of course, it is essential for artists to keep communicating and sharing ideas so that they can decide how they want to relate to the international scene. Curators from around the world are flocking to the country, bringing in an exogenous dynamics that is completely unknown to the Burmese people. According to Benini, bringing international influence into a country that is so unprotected from this kind of force will lead to instability.
Thus, Contemporary Dialogues was part of Benini's attempt to bring home the importance of public discussion. She also encourages anyone planning to travel to Myanmar to try to set up a public lecture so that emerging, young artists who are without access to email can expose themselves to new thinking and decide if they want to join the international scene. If not, they can develop their own system.
On the topic of potential collaboration between Taiwan and Myanmar, Benini said she has high hopes for book publishing. Books are a crucial tool because "books stay”: they can be read by many people and they can circulate. With Taiwan's vibrant publishing industry, this could be a very important area for collaboration between the two countries.