Ek Khaale The Rohingya: A Visual Restoration

July 26 @ 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

For people in Myanmar, the Rohingya community’s history has been, at best, questioned, and at worst —and in reality—rejected outright. Much of the Rohingya’s visual history has been lost, confiscated or destroyed during waves of violence, forced displacement and genocide over the past 60 years.  This destruction continues today. This has severely undermined ways in which the Rohingya preserve and share their collective memory, identity and history with others.

In late 2021, several years after genocidal violence forced three quarters of a million Rohingya into Bangladesh, the project Ek Khaale was launched by photographer Greg Constantine. Ek Khaale is the Rohingya expression for Once Upon A Time. It is a collaborative, co-participatory storytelling and visual restoration project. It was launched in collaboration with Rohingya in refugee camps in Bangladesh, as well as those still living inside Burma, and among the diaspora in the US, UK, Canada, Malaysia and Europe.

Working with Rohingya youth and Rohingya elders, the project seeks out historical visual materials that Rohingya have miraculously preserved, secretly held on to all these years (often at great personal risk) or have salvaged and carried with them under the most unimaginable circumstances.

Old photographs, family collections, documents, letters and illustrations contributed by Rohingya are combined with historical materials from a variety of public and private archives. These memories of family and evidence of historical existence as a community have been displaced and separated into pieces all over the world, just like the Rohingya community.  This project brings these materials and stories from the past back together again and activates them in the present.

By exposing this unseen past, this project aims to share a visual portrait of the Rohingya most people have never seen before. It also challenges narratives and reconstructs what Burmese regimes and other communities have spent decades trying to destroy.

This will be the first public presentation of the project since it was launched in 2021. On 26 July at 5.30 pm at SEA Junction, Constantine will talk about the history of this groundbreaking project, its significance for the Rohingya community and share several of the most important discoveries over the past three years as well as the stories behind them. He will also have a slideshow of the most significant documentation of Rohingya history in Burma. For more information about the project, visit www.ekkhaale.org.

The project Ek Khaale has been supported by: the Independent Social Research Foundation, National Endowment for Democracy, Queen Mary University of London and CENTER. Participation of the speaker at this and other events in Thailand is supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC).

Speaker’s bio

Greg Constantine is an award-winning documentary photographer, author and journalist. He has dedicated his career to long-term, independent projects that explore the intersection of human rights, inequality, injustice, citizenship, identity, belonging and the power of the state. His long term projects include: Nowhere People,  Exiled To Nowhere and Seven Doors.  Constantine has been documenting the persecution of the Rohingya community for the past 18 years.  In 2021, a major exhibition of his work on the Rohingya genocide titled, Burma’s Path To Genocide, opened at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.  For the past three years he has been working on the project Ek Khaale. He received his PhD from Middlesex University and most recently was an Early Career Fellow with the Independent Social Research foundation and Queen Mary University in London. 

Venue

SEA Junction, 4th floor, BACC

Details

Date: July 26

Time: 5:30 pm - 7:00 pm

Organizer

SEA Junction

Website: http://seajunction.org

For more information, please email: info@seajunction.org or phone/wa: +66970024140

NB: The event is free, but donations are welcome to support SEA Junction activities.