We honor two years of collaboration between the Goethe-Institut Myanmar and the Myanmar Photo Archive. Archives in Focus, an international meeting for photography and visual culture, concluded on December 15th. It marked the final initiative of our project to reinterpret Myanmar’s visual culture through archival material.
Together, we created a large-scale open-call grant project for 45 Myanmar artists, organized seven exhibitions in Yangon and Chiang Mai, and conducted workshops on bookmaking, collecting, digitization, and archival practices. The project also initiated think tanks and discussion incubators to explore ideas on how local visual culture can be presented in the future.
We published books such as Taunggyi Represent, featuring images taken by U Aung San, who documented life in Shan State during the 1980s and 1990s, and Hand-Colouring, which showcases historic photographs. Additionally, we released our highly popular Rethink Newspaper, offering new interpretations of the Myanmar Photo Archive materials.
The great success of our public digitization station, with over 600 historic images digitized, will continue next year. People can bring their old photos to the Goethe-Institut auditorium foyer to have them digitized.
Thank you to the incredible team, project partners, artists, volunteers, and participants for creating new ways of seeing the past and sparking inspiration for the future.
