Agenda

Ek Khaale
တရံရောအခါက
Once Upon A Time

The project Ek Khaale was launched by photographer Greg Constantine in 2021 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. Ek Khaale is the Rohingya expression for Once Upon A Time. It is a collaborative, co-participatory storytelling and visual restoration project. 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.  www.ekkhaale.org

Ek Khaale is an independent project and will be part of the Knowledge for Democracy Myanmar (K4DM) initiative Knowledge Marketplace event. The visual presentation will be at the 4th International Conference on Burma /Myanmar Studies (ICBMS).

Ek Khaale has been supported by grants and funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, Queen Mary University of London, the Independent Social Research Foundation and CENTER Santa Fe. www.ekkhaale.org

Project Ek Khaale Website