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Paper short abstract

How can art open new relational possibilities in ethnography? This paper presents a chapter from my manuscript showcasing artistic practice in an epistemological mode: rich field sketches of Yangon General Hospital reveal how care and healing are negotiated in the spaces in-between structures.

Paper long abstract

Here, art practice emerges as a way of knowing that complements, complicates, and deepens the ways we come to understand, critique, and re‑imagine the world around us. Presenting a chapter from my manuscript, I offer of a two-tired discussion: the promise of artistic practice as more than a methodology and the question of how to publish and present multimodal work.

To do so, I will show an intimate ethnography of daily life on Yangon General Hospital’s downtown campus. Rich artistic reproductions of field‑sketches will transport the audience into the hospital’s interstitial spaces where care and healing are constantly negotiated and “in‑betweenness” becomes institutionalised.

Working from a position of in‑betweenness (anthropology, architecture, art), I employed an experimental methodology that coalesces art practice with classic ethnographic inquiry: participant/observant‑participant observation, archival research, and interviews. This concrete example shows how this innovative mode of what I call artful ethnography functions in practice, answering decade‑old calls from feminist, anti‑colonial, and Indigenous scholars for knowledge production that is more than textual and more than visual. It also responds to contemporary questions about how ethnographic methods can meaningfully follow the affective turn, at a moment when the next generation of anthropologists seek alternatives to the dominance of texts.

This presentation gestures toward the complexity of institutions without collapsing into simple explanation, illustrating how art practice generates new relational possibilities in a polarized world.

In addition to a ppt presentation, I could install (parts) of my Hospital Echoes installation; a spatial argument on interstitiality at Yangon General Hospital.