Torn First Pages, “The Bodhi Tree”
Methods of Memorialization in Art on Burma (Myanmar): The Torn First Pages vs Burma VJ
Abstract:
Spring 2019
“The people’s ideas are changing very fast, and without books or histories their memories are short. In a few years, the King and Queen, and all the stories of the Palace, will survive but as a tradition of the long past.”
––Burmese Palace Tales (1900), Harold Fielding-Hall.
Fielding-Hall’s quote from an old story book would perhaps be a completely irrelevant reference to open this essay. By “the King and Queen,” Fielding-Hall was referring to the last king and queen of Burma, captured and transported to India by the British. It was a turbulent time when society was in turmoil and the archival of history was executed in a hurried, manipulated and biased manner. The British colonization was not the first nor the last time archival efforts would face a sudden awkward shift. Since the beginning of so-called “Burmese history” to the current era, we see this pattern of rather reaching attempts and the anxiety to archive historic events. In this paper, I would like to critically analyze this archival phenomenon as it manifested into contemporary art on the Burmese condition.
My point of departure is the Saffron Revolution of 2007 and the different attempts to archive the event by two different agencies in the years following the tragic historic event: the video installation Torn First Pages by Indian artist, Amar Kanwar, and a documentary film Burma VJ by Danish filmmaker, Anders Ostergaard.
For full-length dissertation and citations, please contact me through email: thtwe@artic.edu, thet2nh@gmail.com