EXHIBITIONS /

POLLINATION 4: the palms of y/our hands

Created by Diana Nway Htwe, Jae Jae, M, Mark Teh, Okui Lala, Steven Nyi Nyi & collaborators

20 April – 20 July 2025 (Level 3)

This edition of POLLINATION, titled the palms of y/our hands, connects, compares, and converses with multiple generations from Myanmar. Embracing hidden migration stories, particularly anchored between, and from, Penang and Yangon, the palms of y/our hands explores the overlaps, parallels, repetitions, and differences, as well as cycles of migration, mobility, and waves of flight.      

The co-creators in this endeavour strive to go beyond the representation of despair, violence, broken-ness, and negative affect that often accompanies exhibitions or artistic projects concerning contexts of conflict. The 2021 military coup in Myanmar, which serves as a critical juncture to this edition of POLLINATION, has brought large scale violence, forced conscriptions, and economic hardship, spurring many to flee their homes and their country. Confronted with this ongoing trauma, the curators, artists, and collaborators behind this edition desire a reparative project that offers a multi-layering of the spatial, relational, spiritual, inter/national vibrations between the contexts of its creators, namely Myanmar and Malaysia. Yet it is not bound only to these two contexts, for it seeks to give agency to the universal role of friendship and trust in times of conflict and its often enforced dislocation, towards the writing of stories whose experiences are rarely given legacy.

These explorations make use of video, photography, poetry, collective mapping, and a presentation of archival and personal materials to reflect on and perform the multi-layered conversations of histories, memories, people, and places that are woven into this project. The process of creating space for the palms of y/our hands stretched across 13 time zones — across Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Yangon, London and Washington D.C.      

Mark Teh and Diana Nway Htwe were invited to curate POLLINATION edition 4. Research began in March 2024 resulting in this interdisciplinary collaboration including Jae Jae, M, Okui Lala, Steven Nyi Nyi & collaborators. in-tangible institute, the organizer and commissioner of POLLINATION, wishes to extend sincere thanks to this edition’s curatorial advisors, Rahel Joseph, Sumit Mandal, Penwadee Nophaket Manont and Zoe Butt; with particular gratitude to ILHAM Gallery, SAM Fund for Arts and Ecology and The Foundation for Arts Initiatives, for their support.
     
POLLINATION is a biannual platform connecting emerging curators and artists in Southeast Asia with critical financial and educational support to investigate narratives that move across assumed borders. It offers the opportunity to co-produce and collaborate; to mutually benefit from platforms in the region’s private arts infrastructure that recognize the value of sharing (pollinating) their critical ideas and activities. 
 

Sunday, 20th April

11.30am - Curatorial walkthrough led by Steven Nyi Nyi (in Burmese) 

2.30pm - Curatorial walkthrough led by Mark Teh, Diana Htwe, Okui Lala, Jae Jae & Steven Nyi Nyi (in English)

Tues, 22nd April, 8.00pm

Lecture Performance  by Diana Htwe followed by a post-performance discussion