Essentialist Images curated by Louis Ho

While the ubiquitous panoply of traditionally-derived images that dominate popular forms of Burmese art – from monks to landscapes – are absent here, the work in this exhibition foreground other familiar tropes that have come to define the country in the twentieth century and beyond: political authoritarianism, the anti- colonial legacy, and, especially, the lingering spectre of its long, rich cultural history. The essentialist character of these works is not one of fixed geo-cultural essence, but a complication of received ideas and images, from iconography to anatomy to photographs to film, that serve as a response to contemporary issues that have increasingly stereotyped depictions of Myanmar today.