Projects
Aura Contemporary Art Foundation pleased to inform that we support "The Documentation Project of Myanmar Contemporary Art, Vol: 4"
PHENOMENA: Exploring Art in the Time of Political Crisis in Myanmar, 2021-2023
Project Brief:
Phenomena: is refer the term came into its modern philosophical usage through Immanuel Kant, who contrasted it with the noumenon, which cannot be directly observed. The term phenomena means things as they are experienced through the senses and processed by the mind as distinct from things in and of themselves (noumena). Immanuel Kant (1770) theorizes that the human mind is restricted to the logical world and thus can only interpret and understand occurrences according to their physical appear- ances. He wrote that humans could infer only as much as their senses allowed, but not experience the actual object itself 1. As the Graham Harman’s “Object-Oriented Ontolo- gy (OOO)” 2 rejects the idea of human specialness: the world, he states, is clearly not the world as manifest to humans. “To think a reality beyond our thinking is not nonsense, but obligatory.” At OOO’s heart is the idea that objects—whether real, fictional, natural, artificial, human or non-human—are mutually autonomous.
The Documentation Project of Myanmar Contemporary Art, Vol:4 Facebook
In this core thinking, the phenomenological approach investigates the interconnections of existence, our being as being-in-the-world and methodologically speaking, a pheno- menological perspective aims at people’s interpretations of their lived experiences with a particular phenomenon as a basis of action. The role of art is often as the evidents or measuring the impact of social and political subject matters. These evidences are alwaly became human history (or living history) for the anthropologies gaze related to sociology, anthropology, mythology, psychoanalysis and cultural theories to the global changes. The world is changes by the socio-political conflicts in postmodern eras, and the multi- culturalism and diversity are more debated today. These changes are effected to global explosions of humanity as well as man-made disasters and the wars.
The political instabilities and civil-wars that some Southeast Asian countries have ex- perienced within many decades and it effected of changes in global views. As known to be the longest in the world, Myanmar’s civil-wars, which is based on the political conflict since the country’s independent form the British colonialism in 1948. It’s happened even today as it is become a situation where people and all ethnic citizens or classes in the country are facing a major catastrophes 3. Situations leading to Societal collapse mong the general tensions including culture and art are the most fragile and the most suscepti- ble of influences. However, a new generation of artists in the meantime has become fore- front of art scene and they bring some way of new approaches and making voices of their own. This “Documentation project” will feature this artists who resists and survives with their responses to this conditions.
“PHENOMENA” will present documented in three main approaches, which is connected each other to observe the current artistic responses with their creativities.
There are;
(a) Degree of resistance
(b) Power and strengthen and
(c) Futuristic thinkings.
