A stark white board with "Nirvasan Mein Yawnghwe Karyalaya" (Yawnghwe Office In Exile) painted in bold red Hindi letters introduces the plight of Mayanmar's Rohingya community showcased through an exhibit at the India Art Fair here.
Influenced by the signages in Hindi across Delhi, Burmese Canadian artist SawangWongse Yawnghwe, who is on his first visit to the national capital, painted a Hindi signboard to invite visitors to the booth showcasing his works at the India Art Fair.
His works comprising a handful of black rectangular canvases pinned on to the wall besides two rudimentary sketches in black paint on either side of the board is a stark contrast to the sculptures and paintings splashed with the brightest of the colours at the Fair, which opened to the public on January 29.
Yawnghwe draws attention to the ethnic violence in Myanmar against minorities that once forced his family to escape to Thailand when he was barely a year old, and which continues even today in the form of denial of Burmese citizenship to the Rohingya muslims.
"I have tried to bridge the distinction between art and the political world. I wanted to question if the Burma that I left is still the same country.
He uses documents based on the archives and photographs of his family which was an active participant in the country's politics. His grandfather, says Yawnghwe was the first elected president until the military intervention in 1962 that was the genesis of an "endless civil war."
"To offer a clearer picture, I have reproduced a page from my father's political autobiography," says the artist.
The two paintings he has pinned on the wall of the gallery booth depict the inhuman killings of the Rohingya community in Myanmar, the inspiration for which he says was the regular media reports that he read in the newspapers.
While one image shows a man being shot in the head the other is a depiction of the brutal mass graves of the Rohingya community.
"The continuing atrocities in my country emotionally drive me to raise the issue. Wen I read the newspaper reports about ethnic violence, I get images in my mind and I paint them. In one such report I read about a man who saw his friend being shot in the head. So this is what came to my mind," the artist says.
Yawnghwe and his Cuban colleague Adrian Melis, who are
being showcased by the Amsterdam based Clark House Initiative, have attempted to come to terms with the oppressive histories of their respective places of origin and forced creativity out of agnostic situations through art.
Speaking for Melis who couldn't make it to the fair, Yawnghwe explains that in the former's work, a video titled "The New Man and my Father", the artist poses questions to his father about the communist revolution in Cuba.
The video highlights the uncomfortable expressions on the father's face in response to the questions asked by the artist that appear as subtitles.
"For Melis' work, communism in Cuba forms the central focus of creativity. His father has always been an avid supporter of the movement but Melis who is an artist and a global traveler has a different opinion about it," Yawnghwe says.
Both artists question the "propaganda driven principles of nationalism" of their respective societies while attempting to overcome feelings of apathy associated with the same through the medium of their art.
