When do you realize you have to fear or hate the military?
It’s the basic question that started this project. This project inlooking into the fear of the Myanmar people toward the military.
The stories of military’s cruelty on protestors and the supporters of revolution are told as in verbal stories like ghost stories we tell the children. Parents, elders have to whisper. Whisper the names so that no surveillance people can hear it.
With this project, I started traveling through my own memories of growing up under military rules: shaped by the education system, propaganda, and entertainment that the regime controlled. I can’t help but fear that the next generation will fall into the same traps set by the new military regime.
To resist this, I began asking a simple question to my friends and family: “When did you learn to hate or fear the military?” Their answers hold the truth even though they are just fragments of memories, and I hope they can become an antidote for the generations to come, to resist and to survive.
“What we remember, when we remember” is a conversation between the past and the present. It’s my way of revisiting the memories of the past to understand or even awaken the actual power that lies in us. When we are so oppressed, the fear can take over us and then we forget. To survive in this severely oppressed country, the only best way to survive is to remember. This project is to keep reminding myself and to whoever sees this about the core belief of our resistance. To survive is to remember, to remember is to resist.
Ri is a lens-based visual artist based in Myanmar. They work on stories that are entrenched upon being part of a queer community and intimate relationships. Along with this, they work with visual poems, geopolitical landscapes, and stories that have connections to their country’s complex political situations. Their artworks have been showcased at international photo festivals and venues, such as the Bangkok Arts and Culture Center, Jakarta Photo Festival, Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India, Verzasca Foto Festival in Switzerland, and Asia Art Biennale in Taiwan. They recently joined a 50-day artist-in-residency program in Switzerland, supported by Pro Helvetia New Delhi. They were also selected to be part of Joop Swart Master Class 2024 organized by the World Press Photo Foundation.
