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GHOSTS AT A DINNER PARTY

BHARTI LALWANI IN CONVERSATION WITH DINH Q. LÊ

Bharti Lalwani
Eyeline 83
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Dinner plates and cutlery, abandoned
Unwashed dishes 
Remnants of rice and congealed gravy
Wilting flowers in vases forgotten
Wine glasses empty of their contents…

A trail of ants, a buzz of flies, 
Seating for twelve
A stench
A teak staircase…
A house uninhabited. 

Ghosts have surely been here, 
their ceaseless echoing in a villa of a hundred years.

 

The villa in question is a 1920s-built Tudor-style home on No 8, Ko Min Ko Chin Road in Yangon, that embodies a hundred year history of Burma. Originally built 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, this splendid building became the Headquarters of the Burmese independence movement, Aung San’s and U Nu’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League (AFPFL) at the end of the war. Since then the building has witnessed the vicissitudes of Burmese politics pre- and post-independence.

Today the villa stands as the premises of the newly reinstated Goethe-Institut, which had closed after the 1962 military coup, and now was cautiously hosting its first thematically curated exhibition ‘Building Histories’. One of the nine artists invited by Southeast Asia specialist Iola Lenzi, to consider Myanmar’s complex past through the hundred-year history of the building, was Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. Lê. Lenzi has collaborated with Lê previously on exhibitions such as ‘Negotiating Home, History, Nation: Two Decades of Contemporary Art in Southeast Asia 1991-2011’ and recently ‘The Roving Eye: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia’. 

Dinh Q. Lê orchestrated a performance titled Aung San’s Dinner on 28 February 2015. Widely recognized for his video and installation-works, his woven photographic imagery of war and its victims... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline

Dinh Q. Lê, Aung San's Dinner, 2015. Table setting, No 8, Ko Min Ko Chin Road, Yangon. Currently occupied by the Goethe-Institut. Courtesy the artist.

Dinh Q. Lê, Aung San's Dinner, 2015. Table setting, No 8, Ko Min Ko Chin Road, Yangon. Currently occupied by the Goethe-Institut. Courtesy the artist.

Dinh Q. Lê, Aung San's Dinner, 2015. Performance. Zarganar leading Burmese activists in discussion. Courtesy the artist.

Dinh Q. Lê, Aung San's Dinner, 2015. Performance. Zarganar leading Burmese activists in discussion. Courtesy the artist.