November 2014–March 2015
Asia Art Archive
233 Hollywood Road
Sheung Wan
Hong Kong
Asia Art Archive (AAA) and Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive (MARCA) announce Mobile Library: Myanmar, which will run from November 2014 to March 2015.
Mobile Library is a periodic initiative organised in partnership with cultural collaborators in different countries throughout Asia to provide a platform for the exchange of ideas. By co-organising events and enabling the circulation of printed matter, this programme activates new possibilities to engage with art as a form of knowledge.
Over 450 publications—from periodicals, artist monographs, and exhibition catalogues, to books on theory, philosophy, independent art spaces, curating, and archives—have been gifted to the emerging non-profit Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive. MARCA, having translated synopses for many of the books into Burmese, will circulate the entire book collection to Goethe-Institut, Myanmar Deitta, National University of Arts and Culture, New Zero Art Space, Pansodan Scene, and TS1 Gallery in Yangon before moving on to various locations in Mandalay.
Prior editions have included Mobile Library: Vietnam with Sàn Art in Ho Chi Minh City (2011) and Mobile Library: Sri Lanka with Raking Leaves in Jaffna and Colombo (2013).
Programme highlights
– Educational workshop (November 26–27, 2014) led by Jaffna-based artist and educator Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan at Yangon’s National University of Arts and Culture.
– Panel discussion on archives (November 28, 2014) with Clark House Initiative’s Zasha Colah and Sumesh Sharma; AAA Head of Research & Programmes Hammad Nasar; and Mobile Library: Sri Lanka participant Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan.
– Digital archiving workshop (November 29, 2014) that willintroduce and share standards, tools, and methodological approaches for digital archiving through case studies.
– Call for materials on contemporary art in Myanmar to facilitate AAA’s ongoing development of a dynamic, publicly accessible collection and resource sharing platform on recent art of Asia.
– Free Parking is a new programme series that will run concurrently to Mobile Library: Myanmar. Located in the AAA library in Hong Kong, and featuring “art libraries from elsewhere” in conversation with the AAA collection, the inaugural presentation will focus on books and related ephemera from past and present editions of the Mobile Library.
Complete Mobile Library: Myanmar programme details can be found here.
Special thanks to publications donors:
ArtAsiaPacific, John Clark, Green Cardamom, Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, Institute of International Visual Arts, Para Site, Raking Leaves, RogueArt, Singapore Art Museum, Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, TAKE on art, Tate, West Heavens, Yishu
Asia Art Archive is an independent non-profit organisation initiated in 2000 in response to the urgent need to document and make accessible the multiple recent histories of art in the region. With an international Board of Directors, an Advisory Board made up of noted scholars and curators, and an in-house research team, AAA has collated one of the most valuable collections of material on contemporary art in the region—open to the public free of charge and increasingly accessible from its website. More than a static repository waiting to be discovered, AAA instigates critical thinking and dialogue for a wide range of audiences via public, research, residential and educational programmes.
Myanmar Art Resource Center and Archive aims to become the largest bilingual digital resource on the history and current state of Myanmar arts; to stimulate and nourish creative teaching and learning as well as provide research materials for students, teachers, artists, and the greater public. The center and archive will provide an environment for creative and analytical thinking in the country’s time of transition, where the end of censored education and closed markets means the beginning of creative thinking and inter-regional and global exchange. MARCA was founded by artists Khin Zaw Latt and Zon Sapal Phyu along with researcher Nathalie Johnston.
