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 DAS2016 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.