letters to & fro (2025)
Installation
ALab, Purdue University

In much of the world, letters feel like relics of the past. Yet in Myanmar, for families of political prisoners, they are the only bridge across the walls of incarceration from the outside world. No phone calls. Only handwritten letters–every two weeks, or sometimes once a month. Each letter that escapes the prison has already passed through the careful inspection of prison authorities determined to let nothing of prison life reach beyond the walls.

Letters to and fro is an installation that emerges from the very absence, and my own frustration over the long distance separating me from family members currently held captive in Burmese prisons. The upper part of the installation gathers the letters from the prison–some officially sent through the prison system, and others written on the back of torn calendars or sheets of paper smuggled out. The fragments of voices that survive despite censorship. At the same time, the traces of those that could not.

The lower section recollects the letters I wrote to them in response. Looking back to the last two years of being here, I noticed how many of my responses were written on the reverse sides of printed academic texts from my master’s program in Human Rights. On each sheet, theory and lived experience occupy opposite sides of the page. Coexisting. Contradicting. Corroborating.

This installation reflects on my own making-sense-ing of the institutional discourse and everyday reality back home. On the fragility of communication under authoritarian rule, and the ways in which love and obligation persist despite the oppressive state’s attempt to sever them. And it insists–with might and main–that lives made invisible by power must be witnessed, and grieved.