ﷺ“You never had those yellow slippers,” my mother insists, her certainty making the memory feel like a betrayal. Yet, I see them so clearly—the yellow soles, the black braided straps—left behind on the day we moved. I was four, and that image has stayed with me ever since, or so my memory dictates. But did I ever own those yellow slippers? Could my mother’s memory be wrong, or is mine warped and twisted by time? This memory clings uneasily to me even after all these years, leaving me to question which version of the past truly belongs to me. This seemingly trivial memory mirrors the greater dissonance and fragmentation I would face year later when I was forced to flee Myanmar.
𝔍‘Soft Ruins’ invites viewers into fractured memories shaped against the backdrop of Myanmar, a country profoundly marked by a legacy of colonialism, protracted civil wars, and enduring dictatorships. This project emerges from my forced displacement following the 2021 military coup, as I navigated through different countries, each adding layers of distance to my memories of home. Now, familiar aspects of myself and my homeland feel fragmented, intensified by the guilt of leaving behind the places and people I love.
🉐The work draws on photos from my family album and personal archives—images taken before I fled and undeveloped films left untouched. These photos carry the marks of time—scratches and fading that now hold new meanings. The visible defects in these frames reflect the erosionof memory and illustrate how displacement reshapes our perceptions. ‘Soft Ruins’ becomes a process of reconciliation—accepting the distance between who I was and who I am now. Just like with the images, each story forms a slightly different meaning in every subsequent reading, becoming one of a dozen different truths. I aim to open a conversation about how memory evolves and how we continue to carry fragments of the past, even as they decay-and how we reconcile who we are becoming.
Text & Photographs by Min Ma Naing
Min Ma Naing, a Myanmar exile artist based in Berlin, began her career as a press photographer before transitioning to a slow contemporary documentary practice. She adopted this temporary pseudonym to continue her work due to the political situation in Myanmar
(This appeared in the print as 'Soft Ruins')
