Steel-structured playground installation
Three-channeled audio-visual work
Dimensions variable
2023
Yadanar
Yadanar believes that her art works are experimental learning adventures of self identity rather than putting out what it had already known. She found herself gleaning back at its childhood memories and experiences, grasping the nostalgia of toys that it enjoyed playing with. The artist illuminates fuzzy and distorted childhoods, confronting its own angst, by engulfing the space with playground structures and monotone visual works of her childhood toys, lacking strawberries. Visitors engage with this neighbourly, accessible playground in the space, delving into the conceptual possibilities behind Yadanar’s strawberries. The installation will respond to visitors’ interactions with it, making the playground structures a key component of this artwork. Where All The Strawberries Grow allows the visitors to recalibrate personal convictions of a childhood which is a living and breathing entity that has been existing and grows through time.
Diana
In her own parallel universe, Yadanar is a superhero.
In this universe, Yadanar is more than a superhero. She is a big sister.
Growing up, it was not so strange to go through armed soldiers and barbed wires to get to school. That was normal.
But after 2021, there were more soldiers and even more barricades. Yadanar now thinks that is not so normal. When she sends her sister, Barbie, to school, Yadanar feels a dis-ease: why should little kids be exposed to these scary weapons at such a young age?
These scary weapons are becoming Barbie’s normal too, as well as inflation, hiking dollar exchange rates, electricity cuts and nightly curfew. With each passing day, Yadanar also struggles to find safe spaces to take Barbie to play.
She began reflecting on her own childhood. Come to think of it, there has never been that many playgrounds and spaces for children in Yangon. There is one called “Happy World”. Her ex used to comment on how sad, dirty, and poor the place and the people there felt.
But Yadanar still finds Happy World fascinating. Perhaps, she just needs some childhood memories.
Where All the Strawberries Grow came as a reminiscence of such distorted childhood memories of play and safety. It is a eulogy for all the lost children of conflict zones who were forced to grow up quickly and recognize the violent realities of the world.