The United Photo Industries presents Exiled to Nowhere, Burma’s Rohingya, a photographic exhibition by Greg Constantine at PowerHouse Arena, Brooklyn. He is an award-winning documentary photographer from the United States currently based in Southeast Asia. In 2005, he moved to Asia and began work on his 9-year project, Nowhere People, which documents stateless communities around the world. Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya was produced from twelve trips to southern Bangladesh and inside Burma between 2006 and 2014.
Since I started documenting the Rohingya in early 2006, I’ve been determined to create a sustained, comprehensive documentation that exposes the slow, strategic and tragic destruction of this community. While it is just one chapter of a 9-year project documenting stateless communities around the world, it is by far the most extreme situation of statelessness and human rights abuse I have encountered. Years, even decades of human rights abuse often become invisible to the world due to the demands of current events as well as the fatigue of the international community toward human rights issues. Situations like that of the Rohingya are recognized and acknowledged by the world’s diplomatic elite. But as is often the case, the will of the international community as well as those of domestic leaders to actually find solutions and stop abuse, are easily sidelined by the pressures of realpolitik. The situation for the Rohingya is a perfect example of this.
Since democratic reforms were launched in Burma in 2010, the international community has described Burma as being a ‘foreign policy success story’. Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of development money have poured into the country, while at the same time, ‘ethnic cleansing’, ‘crimes against humanity’, ‘apartheid’ and even ‘genocide’ have been used to describe the ongoing, State-supported human rights abuse towards the Rohingya in Burma. Stateless and friendless, unwanted and unwelcome, the Rohingya have been called, ‘the most oppressed people in the world’, yet each year, the situation for the Rohingya continues to dramatically worsen.
To me, the Rohingya is a story of monumental proportion. At its core, my work tries to highlight the dramatic impact and damage racism, discrimination, intolerance and exclusion has inflicted on the day-to-day lives of the Rohingya community while at the same time, trying to reveal this community’s sheer determination to find a way to survive year in and year out. Yet at the same time, I have always viewed the story of the Rohingya as a story that challenges much larger themes such as the meaning of ‘citizenship’, the definitions of national identity and the fragility of ones right to ‘human rights’. It exposes the overarching power of the sovereign State to do what it may within with impunity within its own borders and it highlights the indifference and ineffectiveness of the international institutions created to monitor and enforce international obligations to human rights.
Unfortunately, the importance of the Rohingya story continues to be overshadowed by the enormous amount of political and economic interests invested in Burma. Now, with tens of thousands of Rohingya each year paying human smugglers to get them out of Burma, the Rohingya story is impacting the entire region of SE Asia. Regardless, the roots of the Rohingya story are embedded in the abuse Rohingya men, women and children continue to face in the country they consider home: Burma.
As a means to further engage any number of strategic audiences with this story, exhibitions/programs of Exiled To Nowhere: Burma’s Rohingya have been held in London, Canberra, Washington DC, Brussels, Bangkok, Phnom Penh, Tokyo, Jakarta, Yogyakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Geneva. Panel discussions, presentations and lectures have been coordinated in over 13 local universities and other significant venues in these locations as a way to provide a platform for discussion and debate among academia and civil society. By taking this approach, this project aims to not only spread awareness, but also to serve as a tool, as evidence and as a point of departure for better understanding of this very complicated story and also to hopefully make some contribution to the efforts organizations in all these places are making to end this ongoing persecution of the Rohingya community.
EXHIBITION
Exiled to Nowhere, Burma’s Rohingya
By Greg Constantine
May 12 – 28th, 2015
Power Arena
37 Main Street Brooklyn
NY 11201 Brooklyn
United States
http://www.unitedphotoindustries.com
http://powerhousearena.com
