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The opening up of Myanmar in 2011, after five decades of military rule, has naturally ushered in sweeping transformations along with opportunities to strengthen international cultural ties and foster inter-regional artistic exchanges. As Myanmar heralds in an ostensibly new era for freedom of expression, the recent exhibition ‘Building Histories’ at the Goethe Villa in Yangon, tested the limit of this freedom.
A cultural agreement was signed by Myanmar and Germany that led to the reopening of Myanmar’s Goethe-Institut, which had closed after the 1962 military coup. In 2013, during the negotiations on this agreement, Myanmar’s Ministry of Culture offered the stunning villa at No 8, Ko Min Ko Chin Road as the premises of the Goethe-Institut, the German cultural centre in Yangon.
The building itself is an astounding mirror of Myanmar’s history of the past hundred years. Built in the 1920s as the extravagant abode of an affluent Burmese-Chinese family and abandoned in the chaos of the British retreat after the Japanese attack on Yangon in 1942, after the war the splendid building became the headquarters of the Burmese independence movement, Aung San’s and U Nu’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL). Since then the building has witnessed the vicissitudes of Myanmar politics pre and post independence. For many years the villa housed Yangon State School of the Arts, where generations of Burmese artists received their training until the University of Culture moved to its new campus in South Dagon.
Now standing as the Goethe Villa, Director Franz Xaver Augustin hosted their first thematic group exhibition in early 2015, before the building underwent extensive renovations. For ‘Building Histories’ curator Iola Lenzi invited nine artists from Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia to