Intersections
Art Stage Singapore 2016

Unknown Women 04: Siege Unit
By Zoncy

For the Southeast Asia Forum, Intersections will present mixed media artworks from 2014 and artworks specially created for Art Stage Singapore 2016. The show will encompass photo collages and a teapot installation titled Listen to Me.

Zoncy started the Unknown Women series, with a performance, which took place in 2009. The Unknown Women series addresses the social status of women in Myanmar, denounces violence committed against women and praises their role in building a better future in their country.
Unknown women 04: Siege Unit questions the current transition period in Myanmar and the changes of the city landscape. In the wake of the political changes and of the opening of the country to foreign investors, condominiums, business centers, lavish shopping malls and restaurants have been mushrooming in Yangon. However, for Zoncy, the poor people and among them the women do not benefit from the long awaited economic development. As long as the society will be plagued by corruption and by the opacity of the administration the wealth of the country will not be better distributed, the rich people will become richer and the poor people will not have access to education, to better jobs and healthcare.
In this series, Zoncy represents women working in the streets of Yangon and Mandalay. She strives to draw the attention on the struggle and on the social role of these women as guardians of Myanmar identity and culture.

In Zoncy’s words:
“Women are the fortress of the cultures of the future, where seeds of the New Human Visions are stored up.
Women are the capitals producing the fates, the generations and the quality of those generations.
Women are the traps or the baits that can be used for the castigation for the political tactic, in the nationalist state.
Women are the siege unit, to occupy the cities, the classes, the nationalist states and their fates, and the cultures. “

Zoncy lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar. She was born in 1987 in Thenasserim, a region located in the most Southern part of Myanmar. Many ethnic minorities live in Thenasserim, and Zoncy who has a Karen father is very much aware of the ethnic and religious problems, which plague her country. With a Muslim mother and a Buddhist father, she personally experienced the tensions that different religious beliefs can provoke in a family. After the divorce of her parents, she also witnessed the difficulties that a single mother faces to sustain her family and raise her children. Therefore, gender issues and social bias are two themes, which are central to her practice. Journalist, writer, activist, social worker, visual artist, Zoncy does not want to be only a witness; she wants to be an agent of change.