Min Ma Naing
Min Ma Naing, a Myanmar exile artist based in Berlin, began her career as a photojournalist before transitioning to a slow contemporary documentary practice. She co-founded Myanmar’s first women photographers’ collective, Thuma, to challenge gender inequality within the industry.
Beyond image-making, she uses photobooks as art objects to invite viewers into an intimate engagement with her narratives. By employing the photobook as a storytelling tool, she counters censorship in Myanmar, bypassing restrictions on online posting and exhibition permissions. This format serves as a traveling museum, promoting a sustainable exhibition model that avoids power dynamics, bureaucracy, and censorship.Her works have been exhibited and published widely, both locally and internationally, in venues such as the Johnson Museum of Art (New York), Basic Gallery (Frank- furt), and the Singapore International Photo Festival, among others. Drawing from her experiences of exile and diaspora, her recent work intertwines personal history with themes of political upheaval, borders, and displacement.
(Min Ma Naing is a temporary pseudonym she adopted to reclaim her voice and express her art freely, escaping both the cultural restrictions in Germany and the po- litical repression in Myanmar.)