STORIES

In a country unraveling under military rule, the artists who once dared to speak now whisper—or fall silent. Some paint in exile, struggling to summon inspiration while navigating survival jobs and cultural dislocation. Others, still in Myanmar, work behind closed doors, knowing that a single brushstroke deemed political can lead to prison. “I can afford the materials,” Emily Phyo, a feminist artist now living in Texas, told me. “But I can’t afford to feel.”

Throughout Myanmar’s turbulent past, its poets have weaponized language in the struggle against oppressive regimes. Now, Joe Freeman and Aung Naing Soe have gathered the work of a new generation of literary dissidents in a book that offers an intimate, unflinching perspective on the country’s troubled present.

I recently spoke with Joel Bergner, the co-founder of Artolution, a collaborative arts organization whose programs support vulnerable communities around the world. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The sentiment among Srinagar’s youth is not defined solely by reactive anger, but by “quiet forms of resilience.”

Since mid-2024, Islamist militants known locally as Mahmuda have waged a violent offensive across the Borgou department of northern Benin, targeting villages along the border with Nigeria's Niger and Kwara states. The group takes its name from its leader, Mahmuda Sani, who was arrested by the Nigerian military in August 2025. Operating from the Kainji Lake nature reserve, a protected area spanning more than five thousand square kilometers, the militants carried out attacks, kidnappings, and looting on both sides of the border. Gawezi, a village of roughly a hundred households, had not been spared. When militants attacked its mosque and killed more than half a dozen residents, the community did not scatter. The villagers told me their story: a tale of tradition, pride, and identity.

There are thousands like him; graphic designers, photographers, graffiti artists, poets, painters. They are producing underground work, smuggling symbols, building visual languages of resistance. They are documenting the authoritarian decay as it happens.

For decades, Myanmar's peace process has been dominated by a familiar cast: senior military figures, ethnic armed organization leaders, veteran politicians, and international donors. Decisions have been made behind closed doors. Young people have been expected to watch, wait, and accept the outcomes.

Issue areas: Biodiversity and Wildlife Protection, Economic Diversification, Conservation Finance, Emerging Green Finance

Dismissed but still fired up, the luminous Mr. Fish speaks with THROAT about self-censorship and state censorship. “As an artist, you want to take chances,” he says, “and be fearless enough to reveal the ache in your heart.”

Arielle made a choice that shouldn’t feel radical. Her father’s health had buckled, and the quiet Florida retirement they’d planned could no longer keep pace with the bills. In Portugal, a doctor saw him the week they arrived—efficient, affordable, almost disarmingly humane. It wasn’t an act of defiance, or something “un-American.” It was simply what survival looked like.

“Genocide in Gaza has changed everything. Radicalized more people…
From Gary Lineker and Kneecap or Bob Vylan, to Miss Rachel, speaking out is normalized. And from BlackRock to Palantir, exposing how imperialism IS capitalism, and has to be challenged.”

The crisis I observed was not the crisis being represented. Refugee-ness is a visual grammar: unwritten rules insisting refugees look a certain way to be recognized. It edits people into narrow roles: the helpless victim or the criminal threat. It disciplines what the public is permitted to feel.