JOGaJOG যোগাযোগ no.0 (edition 2)

Among the 17 solo projects of Dhaka Art Summit, VIP

project is one of the interesting work done by Burmese

Artist Po Po and curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt.

Po Po, a Burmese legendary, promising and pioneering

conceptual and performance artist. Self-taught artist

Po Po has been practicing as an artist since the late

1970s. He has gone from painting to assembling,

from monotype to installation and from design to

architecture.

With a long history creating paintings, sculptures

and land-based works, Po Po began working with

photography since 2005, and describes it not as a visual

record, but as a means to reflect his thoughts regarding

political social and cultural concerns. His works are often

challenging audience's ideas to see through five senses,

his concept has no fixed medium or fixed discipline.

This visionary artist has exhibited in Asia and Europe

including the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Singapore

art biennial and many other distinguished galleries and

biennials.

Po Po did his first VIP project during 2010 in Yangon,

the capital of Myanmar. Po Po complete his revised

version of VIP project at Dhaka which exhibited at DAS-

2016 and the international film festival Rotterdam 2016.

At DAS-2016, Po Po created a installation with these two

series of photography and 2 video documentaries.

South Asia has a deeply entrenched VIP culture

where certain individuals are given preferable treatment

as Very Important Person. Even in the public sector, with

special entrances in airports, special parking space,

special religious centre, stadium, public road, and other

basic facts of daily civic life. Po Po placed some VIP signs

in public bus stops in the cities of Myanmar and

Bangladesh, recording the politics of how public

space functions under those very different political

conditions. He was particularly interested in how these

elitist, exclusionary signs operated in countries that have

been under dictatorship or volatile political system.

Standing across the street from the bus stop, he took

a series of photography and videos, documenting the

reactions of people to the signs, from feelings of threat

or oppression to avoidance or humour that the signs

would be placed within the context of public transport.

After creating the second chapter in Dhaka, Po Po saw

a city with similar social VIP culture and historically under

the same British rule as Yangon, but with a different

political history of over forty years of democracies as

opposed to Myanmar's over the five decades of Military

rule, while the reactions of the public seem similar

in the video and photographic documentation across

Yangon and Dhaka.

But the Bangladesh political scenario opened up the

possibility for a few members of the public to think Po

Po’s intervention as a joke. This reaction never occurred in

the intervention in Myanmar, the people in Myanmar was

taken the VIP sign too seriously. Po Po’s work touched

the south Asian viewers for their political reliability. Po

Po’s work is thoughtful and full of depth. There is no

complexity in his work.