I fist saw Bridging the Naf as an exhibition in Yangon at Myamar Deitta in 2019 with the artist Yuyu Myint Than. Displayed as grouped, collaborative projects between pairs of women practitioners of two collectives, from Myanmar and Bangladesh, the sense of trans-nationality and the crosspollination of ideas regarding gender, location, and broadly identity on the one hand and their mixed media iterations on the other, seemed part of their freewheeling interactive/intermedia process.

In the centre of one of the display rooms were unbound copied of the book, being hand woven, after having been artistically, and meticulously designed by Yu Yu Myint Than (Thuma Collective) and Sadia Marium (Kaali Collective), consisting of 6 handmade zines. The publication was eventually placed in the handmade box. I was interested in how the book imagined the fluidity of borders by using the symbolism of the river, Naf – and arriving at a bridge between creative play and political subjectivity, between the illustrative form of the book and a gallery exhibition.