'I C U JEST' is an exhibition about the quest for justice in Burmese art. The scrambled letters 'I C U JEST' – an anagram for ‘justice’ – reflect on how the attempt is often foiled by the military's overwhelming grip on legal institutions. This play on words is inimitably Burmese, and the title is chosen by an artist, Htein Lin, in whose life the realms of Judge and Jester have become inextricably confused.

The exhibition tells the story of how artist Sitt Nyein Aye taught the then young law student Htein Lin to draw on the forest floor in an enclosed refugee camp in Manipur in 1988 after fleeing Burma during the 8888 Uprising. It also tells the story of the friendship between Htein Lin and the comedian filmmaker Zarganar in Rangoon that began at their university in the mid-1980s and has survived each other’s multiple imprisonments and exiles. While at university they reinvigorated the ancient comedy and dance tradition – anyeint – in two directions. For Zarganar (whose name means ‘tweezers’), it took the form of stand-up comedy routines. Htein Lin used its recognizable structure of a princess and a comedian to create small acts in the streets of Rangoon, that in retrospect are among the first works of performance art in Burma.

Htein Lin was sometimes detained by Burmese authorities for his art, and spent six years as a political prisoner. From prison he made works with syringes, smuggled colour, and on prison-issue clothing, which show bodies in postures of despair fitted into small crevices of space, that are often lit from within. In prison he also wrote humorous, experimental short stories about the judiciary, which he circulated to the two poets who shared his cell. The two sides to Htein Lin’s practice, his aesthetics and satire, are mirrored in the combined influence of Sitt Nyein Aye, a senior artist and his mentor, and Zarganar, his college friend, who was released after serving three years of a six-decade prison sentence for his satires of the regime.

The exhibition is about the spirit and vitality of that comic force, against the formality of the courts of law. It is about how humour has an existential register, seen in some of Sitt’s poems, Zarganar’s jokes, and Htein Lin’s performances, and how those forms move easily between the political and the philosophic.

Featuring: Htein Lin, Sitt Nyein Aye, Zarganar & Amol Patil, G.R IRanna, Nikhil Raunak,Poonam Jain, Prabhakar Pachpute, Rupali Patil, Yogesh Barve

-Zasha Colah

Venue: Mandalay Hall, a yellow house next to the Paradesi Synagogue, Synagogue Lane, Jew Town, Mattancherry, Kochi