Ek Khaale: Once Upon A Time - The Rohingya

 

The Rohingya have often been described as the most persecuted minority in the world. Ek Khaale, the Rohingya expression for “Once Upon A Time,” presents them in a different light. It is a collaborative, co-participatory storytelling and visual restoration project. Working with Rohingya youth and Rohingya elders, the project seeks out historical visual materials that Rohingya have miraculously preserved, secretly held on to all these years (often at great personal risk) or have salvaged and carried with them under the most unimaginable circumstances.

 

Old photographs, family collections, documents, letters and illustrations contributed by Rohingya are combined with historical materials from a variety of public and private archives. This project brings these materials and stories from the past back together again and activates them in the present. By exposing this unseen past, this project aims to share a visual portrait of the Rohingya most people have never seen before. It also challenges narratives and reconstructs what successive Burmese regimes have spent decades trying to destroy. The project was launched by photographer Greg Constantine in 2021. At this event, Greg will present the project, alongside reflections from members of the diaspora from Myanmar.

 

 

Greg Constantine is an award-winning documentary photographer, author and journalist. He has dedicated his career to long-term, independent projects that explore the intersection of human rights, inequality, injustice, citizenship, identity, belonging and the power of the state. His long-term projects include: Nowhere People, Exiled To Nowhere and Seven Doors. Constantine has been documenting the persecution of the Rohingya community for the past 18 years. In 2021, a major exhibition of his work on the Rohingya genocide titled Burma's Path To Genocide, opened at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. For the past three years he has been working on the project Ek Khaale. He received his PhD from Middlesex University and most recently was an Early Career Fellow with the Independent Social Research foundation and Queen Mary University in London.