Chaw Ei Thein

Artists’ Street, Chaw Ei Thein’s Myanmar protest landscape in fabric sculptures epitomizes the relational nature and mutual support of human ties, knotted in the transitional phase between enforced exile and a fragile, yet powerful, diasporic agency. Meandering through the 13th Berlin Biennale’s eponymously titled exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, it signals an engagement with place and community commensurate with the hope in a common destiny. Where the yard is the measure of yearning, monumentality emerges through intimacy—marked by minute details from stories shared only in secrecy, murmured messages that might carry a penultimate warning of impending demise—or simply be the last.

The hand-stitched textile sculptures depict architectures and scenes of artistic protests against Myanmar’s military regime, spanning from the 1996 student demonstrations to the 2007 Saffron Revolution and the aftermath of the 2021 coup. Taken together, they form a palimpsest of decades of accumulated resistance, and act as the embodied memory of an episode of protest, of a performance of refusal, either witnessed by the artist firsthand or passed on to her by secondhand accounts, oral histories, and other documentation. At the seams of its memorial fabric, Chaw Ei Thein’s Artists’ Street materializes the performative necessity of the political under circumstances of dispossession such as those encountered by her community, which has been subjected to recurring assaults on its integrity.

In her emboldened embodiment of feminist resistance and transnational grassroots activism, Chaw Ei Thein and her companions delineate the blueprint for further actions so long as they will be needed, and the roadmap for the miles left to march.

Text: Claire Tancons