(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
By Cunningham.
Karl Ingar Røys' video installation Burmese Days. (2014) has taken its name from George Orwell's novel from 1934. The novel is based on the author's experiences as a policeman during the British colonial administration in Burma (which was much later called Myanmar), and reflects Orwell's hatred of imperialism. He gained this insight by participating in and witnessing the oppression, exploitation and racism of British colonialism. In a later essay, Orwell wrote the following about this time: “I hated the job I did, stronger than I can explain. In such a job, you see the dirty methods of the empire in close quarters. ”
Røys has not linked his own work to Orwell just for fun. In an interview, he mentioned how "many intellectuals in Myanmar almost viewed Orwell as a prophet." This was due to Orwell's ability to predict events, as he demonstrated in both Animal Farm og 1984. These books were seen as anticipations of the authoritarian post-colonial regime.
Røys' Burmese Days. begins with a typewriter, which is used to record – with great precision – the next day's typewriter. The viewer's gaze follows the industrial, mechanical rhythm of his fingers banging against the keyboard to document the female typist's tomorrow: a day's journey to breakfast, work day at the office, lunch, coffee break, and return home. The typewriter's presentation of tomorrow can be read as self-monitoring reporting. This is a distinctive Orwellian machine: a means of communication that becomes a tool for managing everyday life.
Although Orwell resonates throughout Røys' Burmese Days. , the video installation is most concerned with social conflicts from the perspective of politically engaged, Myanmarian cultural actors of today. The installation charts various attempts to intervene in the fighting against the military junta, which has been in power since 1962, performed by artists, a documentary, a rapper and a punk musician, both before and during the painfully slow transition to what the regime calls "disciplined democracy" .
Burmese Days. is concerned with both broken, forgotten materials and the injured, but not the victims of the sociopolitical oppression. The repeated penalty "we are the urban rubbish»Goes like a chorus through the installation, a red thread that binds the various fragments together. How to show Burmese Days. how cultural resistance on a
shakily balanced against scarce political, cultural and material resources. Røys does not try to be instructive by shouting and shouting through visual ambiguities. The fragmented expression in the installation emphasizes the fragility of the resistance's expression rather than polemical oblique certainties. Burmese Days. does not have a simple narrative to follow, nor does it give a sense of completion or completion. The various and ever-recurring cliffs break into each other, and poverty and everyday life are mixed in the cultural production.
The repeated stanza «we are the urban rubbish»Runs like a chorus through the installation, a common thread that binds the various fragments together.
Awareness of the problematic of cultural resistance and the dangerous consequences it can have are pervasive in Burmese Days. . Central to this is how materials that have been thrown away and turned into rubbish and scrap are reused to express resistance. In a clip, San Zaw Htway talks enthusiastically about the experiences from when he was in prison during the military regime, and how the prisoners continued to express resistance:
"If they did not let us use pen and paper, we improvised with what we had at our disposal. We used sharp objects, such as broken bricks, to write on the walls […]. This became our principle in prison. "
This example shows how prisoners – a group deprived of their usual opportunities to express themselves – resort to what they have available to circumvent the restrictions imposed on them. Just as political prisoners are seen as rubbish by the regimes that have taken them prisoner, it is precisely the rubbish in the form of "broken bricks" that the prisoners resort to. A conceptual dissolution with the help of a "crushed brick" sabotages the boundaries that are drawn around both bodies and language in institutions such as prisons. This depiction of dissatisfaction is a valuable reminder that cultural resistance – which is often stunned by the forces of capitalism and easily curbed in galleries – can often be fraught with real risk.
Consistently in Burmese Days. it is as if punk – as the Myanmarers discovered in the 1990s – itself has been scrapped in the rubbish bin of cultural clichés before it was again messed up, retrieved and glued together again by Myanmar musicians like Skum. Suddenly we see that anarchist policies and texts such as "we are homeless, unemployed and hate everyone" do not recovers a validity – for such feelings are always valid. Rather, they are building up a new power in this new context, such as toxic detergents.
packaging can recreate an ancient myth. Instead of showing clips where Skum and his band perform, shows Burmese Days. the punk musician while reading out his lyrics in an elegiac and melancholy way, in different contexts throughout the installation. Along with these fragments of songs manufactures Burmese Days. the artistic production process and describes the materials, which are often recycled scrap and rubbish that is recycled into art. Burmese Days. purposefully returns to the fragmented, destroyed sources of cultural production – the angry exhaustion in Skum's voice, goods that have become rubbish, experiences of resistance and poverty – in a way that reflects a damaged social environment.
The decision on not to show a completed cultural product – with the exception of the hip-hop songs, although these are also shown as fragments to emphasize the process rather than the product – is also reflected in the fact that proper names are not associated with statements.
The participants are anonymous and unidentified, just like the people in the streets who are occasionally shown. How to emphasize Burmese Days. the crucial thing about the anonymous and the collective in a lot of cultural resistance, and at the same time avoids building up under and fetishizing the individual artist. This, in combination with the focus on the challenges of the process rather than the finished product, gives the fragile cultural resistance in Burmese Days. a touch of openness and opportunity.
With its fragmented shape reveals Burmese Days. ways to live in the ruined – without this implying hopelessness. A fragment is not just a part that is broken loose by a whole – it is also defined through its own incompleteness. In this incompleteness lies a potential that is expressed in this careful documentation of the vulnerable, broken and messy forms cultural resistance can take.
Here you can see parts of the video installation Burmese Days.
Cunningham is a critic.
