Rec/Age
(REK-ij)
“In these times, what do I still have? …my desire to keep producing artworks…I have become greedier with the way I spend my time on making art. I find myself reflecting more on the uncertainty of it all. One good thing in all of this is my steadfast desire to work. This has remained intact and even become stronger.”
-Wunna Aung 2025
Rec/Age is a living and evolving project, designed to respond to the ‘crisis-mode’ reality of life in this 21st century. From conflict and climate to shifting political and economic realities, societies are reshuffling and relocating across our world. Rec/Age asks how people learn to navigate such enduring uncertainty while preserving a sense of agency, meaning, and possibility.
Moving beyond immediate reactions to crisis, the project examines the deeper architecture of prolonged transition: what happens when communities live for years, decades, or even generations in states of uncertainty, struggling to preserve and control meaning even as the familiar structures around them begin to break down. Rec/Age starts from the premise that what ails contemporary societies may not simply be an accumulation of catastrophes, but a persistent condition of unresolved transitions that somehow never arrive at transformation.
Amid uncertainty of all varieties – political, social, existential – cultural heritage, memory, and identity become the arenas in which struggles over power are staged and contested: over authority and resistance, but also over the recovery of individual and collective agency. Paradoxically, heritage, memory, and identity can also become invaluable cultural anchors. Even after lived reality comes apart, they can offer comfort, community, creative inspiration, and ways to begin again – the very resources through which individual and collective agency can be recovered.
Rec/Age joins a growing chorus of people working not simply to diagnose this contemporary global condition, but to seek and share ways through it. To do this, we work strategically backwards. Rather than beginning with crises and searching for their effects, we look for places where people and communities are already finding creative, innovative, deeply human – and humane – ways of coming to terms with enduring uncertainty. We look, in other words, for people recovering agency against the odds, in ways from which others might learn.
This means looking for the methods and vehicles of recovery first, rather than chasing crises themselves. By beginning with what people are actually doing, we aim to avoid becoming absorbed by the spectacle of catastrophe and turns our attention instead toward creative solutions, unexpected forms of resistance, and the practices through which people rebuild some measure of control over their lives. In a sense, the method of Rec/Age mirrors the sociopolitical dynamics it seeks to understand: the project itself grows by finding and following real people who are recovering agency in real life.
(REK-ij)
“In these times, what do I still have? …my desire to keep producing artworks…I have become greedier with the way I spend my time on making art. I find myself reflecting more on the uncertainty of it all. One good thing in all of this is my steadfast desire to work. This has remained intact and even become stronger.”
-Wunna Aung 2025
Rec/Age is a living and evolving project, designed to respond to the ‘crisis-mode’ reality of life in this 21st century. From conflict and climate to shifting political and economic realities, societies are reshuffling and relocating across our world. Rec/Age asks how people learn to navigate such enduring uncertainty while preserving a sense of agency, meaning, and possibility.
Moving beyond immediate reactions to crisis, the project examines the deeper architecture of prolonged transition: what happens when communities live for years, decades, or even generations in states of uncertainty, struggling to preserve and control meaning even as the familiar structures around them begin to break down. Rec/Age starts from the premise that what ails contemporary societies may not simply be an accumulation of catastrophes, but a persistent condition of unresolved transitions that somehow never arrive at transformation.
Amid uncertainty of all varieties – political, social, existential – cultural heritage, memory, and identity become the arenas in which struggles over power are staged and contested: over authority and resistance, but also over the recovery of individual and collective agency. Paradoxically, heritage, memory, and identity can also become invaluable cultural anchors. Even after lived reality comes apart, they can offer comfort, community, creative inspiration, and ways to begin again – the very resources through which individual and collective agency can be recovered.
Rec/Age joins a growing chorus of people working not simply to diagnose this contemporary global condition, but to seek and share ways through it. To do this, we work strategically backwards. Rather than beginning with crises and searching for their effects, we look for places where people and communities are already finding creative, innovative, deeply human – and humane – ways of coming to terms with enduring uncertainty. We look, in other words, for people recovering agency against the odds, in ways from which others might learn.
This means looking for the methods and vehicles of recovery first, rather than chasing crises themselves. By beginning with what people are actually doing, we aim to avoid becoming absorbed by the spectacle of catastrophe and turns our attention instead toward creative solutions, unexpected forms of resistance, and the practices through which people rebuild some measure of control over their lives. In a sense, the method of Rec/Age mirrors the sociopolitical dynamics it seeks to understand: the project itself grows by finding and following real people who are recovering agency in real life.
Our first Rec/Age project, Recovering Agency through Artmaking amid Political Uncertainty and Exile, explores what happens to creative practice when political upheaval, armed conflict, and forced migration disrupt the conditions of ordinary life, with focus on the case of contemporary Myanmar since the 2021 military coup that upended the country’s experimentation with democracy and sparked the Spring Revolution on current civil war. Unfortunately for its nearly 55 million citizens, none of this is new. Since British colonial invasion and occupation, Myanmar has endured more than two centuries of unbroken armed conflict, shaped in the postcolony by a long sequence of shifting autocratic military regimes. Of the past 200 years, Burmese society has been free of authoritarian rule for only about a collective quarter century. Burmese citizens have endured long stretches of authoritarian rule while also navigating repeated regime change, so that just as society begins to grasp the rules, the rules shift again. Multiple conflicts shaped by persistent transition have suspended society in uncertainty – a kind of liminal doom loop that has, for generations, failed to transform into some new and stable state of ‘normal life’. Through intimate conversations with Burmese artists and cultural practitioners living through displacement and exile, the project moves beyond familiar narratives of trauma and resilience to ask what artists protect within themselves – and within their creative practices – when so much else is taken from them. At its heart is an exploration of art making as a deeply personal form of agency, through which memory and cultural identity can be preserved, carried forward, and continually reimagined.
Rec/Age is designed to grow. Myanmar and the experience of political conflict and exile provide its starting point, but not its boundary. As the project develops, it will expand to other geographies and conflicts that have produced dislocation and exile, while also asking what happens when we loosen those categories themselves. Forced displacement does not arise from political violence alone: the climate crisis is already separating communities from landscapes, livelihoods, and ways of life, from Pacific Island nations to pastoral and nomadic communities in Mongolia – and, in very different circumstances, to people rebuilding after catastrophic environmental loss elsewhere in the world.
There may also be forms of exile that require no geographical border crossing at all. What does it mean to become exiled from one’s productive life, from family or community, or from a world that once made sense? These are more difficult territories, and Rec/Age does not presume that all forms of dislocation are equivalent. But the larger questions remain compelling: What do people reach for when continuity is broken? What do they carry with them? What enables them to recover a sense of agency, belonging, and possibility? As Rec/Age expands across formats, voices, and communities, these questions offer a way to broaden the conversation without losing sight of the project’s central concern: how human beings find ways to make lives within uncertainty.
In this way, Rec/Age joins a growing body of work seeking to understand the forces that bring societies – and our global collective – to the precipice, while turning our attention towards something equally important: what people do when they find themselves there. By finding, understanding, and sharing the ways people recover agency amid uncertainty, we hope to help illuminate informed, imaginative, and deeply human paths towards whatever comes next.
Rec/Age is designed to grow. Myanmar and the experience of political conflict and exile provide its starting point, but not its boundary. As the project develops, it will expand to other geographies and conflicts that have produced dislocation and exile, while also asking what happens when we loosen those categories themselves. Forced displacement does not arise from political violence alone: the climate crisis is already separating communities from landscapes, livelihoods, and ways of life, from Pacific Island nations to pastoral and nomadic communities in Mongolia – and, in very different circumstances, to people rebuilding after catastrophic environmental loss elsewhere in the world.
There may also be forms of exile that require no geographical border crossing at all. What does it mean to become exiled from one’s productive life, from family or community, or from a world that once made sense? These are more difficult territories, and Rec/Age does not presume that all forms of dislocation are equivalent. But the larger questions remain compelling: What do people reach for when continuity is broken? What do they carry with them? What enables them to recover a sense of agency, belonging, and possibility? As Rec/Age expands across formats, voices, and communities, these questions offer a way to broaden the conversation without losing sight of the project’s central concern: how human beings find ways to make lives within uncertainty.
In this way, Rec/Age joins a growing body of work seeking to understand the forces that bring societies – and our global collective – to the precipice, while turning our attention towards something equally important: what people do when they find themselves there. By finding, understanding, and sharing the ways people recover agency amid uncertainty, we hope to help illuminate informed, imaginative, and deeply human paths towards whatever comes next.
Multidisciplinary Artist
MIT Global Humanities Artist-in-Residence
Producer, Curator
Kyaw Moe Khine (b.1996), professionally known as Bart Was Not Here, is a Burmese artist based in New York. Raised on imported subcultures, his visual language evolved out of subversion, fiction, and a practiced investment in narratives. Working across large-scale canvases, sculptural installations, figurines, and drawings, Bart constructs sprawling narrative worlds inhabited by recurring characters and shapeshifting motifs.
Born and raised in Burma under military dictatorship, he grew up alienated by a broken school system, religious orthodoxy, and the inability to assimilate into conservative Burmese culture. Graffiti became his first tool of agency at age 13, adopting the pseudonym Bart Was Not Here to conceal his identity. With limited access to global culture, he found a window through dial-up internet and bootleg markets, absorbing foreign films, literature, and numerous subcultures as maps to other worlds.
Bart’s practice walks the line between blending cinematic compositions with gallows humor, internet semiotics with folklore, and conventional beauty with anti-aesthetic resistance. Drawing from a wide net of visual influences ranging from media smuggled through satellite dishes and black markets to canonical art history, his work engages themes of violence, voyage, worship, agency, and myth-making.
Bart graduated in Fine Arts from LASALLE College of the Arts Singapore in in 2018. He has exhibited internationally in New York, Paris, London, Oslo, Hong Kong, and Yangon. In 2021, following his involvement in the resistance against Myanmar’s military coup d’état, he went into exile. He was artist-in-residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (2021–2022) and at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York (2023-2024). His recent work continues to push toward unstable forms and narrative thresholds, disassembling what is sacred, familiar, or fixed.
Assistant Producer
Founder - Myanm/art Gallery
Independent Curator
Nathalie Johnston is a writer and independent curator specializing in contemporary art from South and Southeast Asia. In 2016, she founded Myanm/art, an independent exhibition space, archive and library located in Yangon, Myanmar, dedicated to promoting exchange, opportunities, and inclusion for artists from a multiplicity of backgrounds. She was based in Yangon, Myanmar from 2012-2021.
Previous curatorial collaborations include: Sunshower: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now at the National Arts Center Tokyo; Balance and Provocation – Contemporary Art in Burma/Myanmar at Fargfabriken in Stockholm, Sweden; 3AM performance art collective in the 10th Asia Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia; and A Beast, A God and a Line exhibit in Hong Kong, Yangon and Warsaw.
She has presented her research at Haus der Kunst in Munich, the National Gallery Singapore, Asia Art Archive in Hong Kong, Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India and Asia Society New Delhi. She has also lectured at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In 2015, she was a selected scholar of the Getty Foundation program Ambitious Alignments, hosted by the University of Sydney.
Her work is published in Frieze Magazine, Art Review Asia, The Art Newspaper, Art Asia Pacific, Nikkei Asia Review and numerous international exhibition and art fair catalogs. Her essay Homegrown: the origins of performance art in Myanmar, appears in Curating Art, published by Routledge.
MIT Global Humanities
Pillar coordinator for Heritage, Memory, & Identity
Postdoctoral Member, Cambridge Heritage Research Centre
Gates Cambridge Scholar | University of Cambridge
Alicia V. Stevens, Gates Cambridge Scholar with MPhil (distinction) and PhD from the department of archaeology at the University of Cambridge, and a postdoctoral member of the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre coordinating the Heritage, Memory, and Identity Pillar with Dr Dacia Viejo-Rose. Her research intersects heritage studies and political anthropology with focus on the political uses of culture amid repressive regimes, from colonialism and military authoritarianism to transitioning political systems. Her monograph, Heritage, Power, and Liminality: Culture and the Crisis of Authoritarian Transitions in Myanmar (2026, forthcoming) appears in the Routledge Contemporary Liminality Series.
Prior to Cambridge, Dr. Stevens spent two decades in the museum sector running global programs for the Smithsonian Institution, the American Museum of Natural History, and Columbia University. Her professional work has taken her to 120+ countries, and she is a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society. Dr. Stevens also holds an MSc. from Columbia University in communications and a BA from the University of Michigan in writing and Russian literature.
The production team wishes to thank MIT’s Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) for funding, of course, but above all for creative support, friendship, and inspiration. The GHI is that rare community of people working at the top of their fields with a kind, inclusive spirit and genuine interest in making our 21st century world a better, more tenable, more human place. Specifically, we wish to thank Wiebke Denecke, GHI Faculty Lead and Professor of Chinese, Japanese and Korean Literatures & Philosophies and S.C. Fang Chair of Chinese Language and Culture at MIT; Yoh Han Noh, GHI Program Coordinator and Research Professor at the Institute for Sinographic Literatures and Philology, Korea University, where he also heads the nascent Global Humanities Center; Magdelena Ho-yan Tang, GHI Research Coordinator and Choral Conductor and Researcher at the York Center for Asia Research at York University in the UK; and Zachary Peña, MIT financial and administrative assistant.
We also wish to thank the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre (CHRC) at the University of Cambridge (UK) for their long-term collaboration. Heartfelt thanks to Dacia Viejo-Rose, Co-Coordinator of the MIT GHI Heritage, Memory, and Identity Pillar, Cambridge Associate Professor of Heritage and the Politics of the Past, and Director of the CHRC, for essential guidance and the opportunity to present our early work at the 2025 CHRC Annual Symposium.
Above all, we wish to thank the participating artists and curators who, with open hearts and minds, gave their time, candor, and deeply personal insights into their creative processes, along with their original artwork and so much more: Wunna Aung, Thynn Lei Nwe, Kaung Su, Maung Day, Nge Lay, MayCo Naing, Pinky Htut Aung, Soe Yu Nwe, Sid Kaung Sett Lin, and Aung Myat Htay.
Additionally we thank Maung Day, who took the long hours of recordings, transcribed them, and turned them into beautiful translations from Burmese to English. We sincerely hope that the generosity, openness, and spirit of exchange that made our Phase One Workshops so meaningful will carry forward for years to come – growing to include others who wish to become part of what the MIT GHI has set in motion.
We also wish to thank the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre (CHRC) at the University of Cambridge (UK) for their long-term collaboration. Heartfelt thanks to Dacia Viejo-Rose, Co-Coordinator of the MIT GHI Heritage, Memory, and Identity Pillar, Cambridge Associate Professor of Heritage and the Politics of the Past, and Director of the CHRC, for essential guidance and the opportunity to present our early work at the 2025 CHRC Annual Symposium.
Above all, we wish to thank the participating artists and curators who, with open hearts and minds, gave their time, candor, and deeply personal insights into their creative processes, along with their original artwork and so much more: Wunna Aung, Thynn Lei Nwe, Kaung Su, Maung Day, Nge Lay, MayCo Naing, Pinky Htut Aung, Soe Yu Nwe, Sid Kaung Sett Lin, and Aung Myat Htay.
Additionally we thank Maung Day, who took the long hours of recordings, transcribed them, and turned them into beautiful translations from Burmese to English. We sincerely hope that the generosity, openness, and spirit of exchange that made our Phase One Workshops so meaningful will carry forward for years to come – growing to include others who wish to become part of what the MIT GHI has set in motion.