Annotations to the Image

Across histories of militant image-making, annotations have served as instruments of transmission and political instruction; they anchor images within the crucible of struggle and allow them to acquire new meanings as they travel across space and time. An annotation can also be an interruption, an act of reorientation that unsettles what we presume to know or see. On 31 October 2026, as part of the opening weekend of Life After Love: In Search of the Militant Image, participating artists revisit their contributions to the exhibition through walkthroughs, lecture presentations and readings.

The programme Annotations to the Image features interventions by artists Chaw Ei Thein [https://framerframed.nl/mensen/chaw-ei-thein/], Isshaq Albarbary [https://framerframed.nl/mensen/isshaq-albarbary/], Sawangwongse Yawnghwe [https://framerframed.nl/mensen/sawangwongse-yawnghwe/], Haig Aivazian [https://framerframed.nl/mensen/haig-aivazian/], Hannah Black [https://framerframed.nl/mensen/hannah-black/] and Nolan Oswald Dennis [https://framerframed.nl/mensen/nolan-oswald-dennis/], tracing the material conditions and political commitments informing the works on view in the exhibition Life After Love: In Search of the Militant Image [https://framerframed.nl/exposities/life-after-love/].

Please register here [https://framerframed.stager.co/shop/default/events/11171325…

Programme

15:00 Artists’ Street: A Walking Tour with Chaw Ei Thein 16:00 The making of Kharajat (She Went Out) with Isshaq Albarbary 17:00 The making of People’s Defence Force I–X with Sawangwongse Yawnghwe 18:00 Readings by Haig Aivazian, Hannah Black and Nolan Oswald Dennis

Artists’ Street: A Walking Tour with Chaw Ei Thein Join Chaw Ei Thein for a walking tour through Artists’ Street, her installation of thirty-eight hand-sewn textile figures that reconstruct scenes of artistic protest against military rule in Myanmar, from the student demonstrations of 1996 through the 2007 Saffron Revolution to the aftermath of the 2021 coup. Moving from figure to figure, the artist tells the stories behind each scene, some she witnessed, others passed to her through orality and scattered documentation. The dolls form an archive of street performance that exists almost nowhere else, a record of coded gestures, staged interruptions and small public absurdities improvised against censorship and violence. Light enough to travel in a bag, they follow the path of the exiled.

The making of Kharajat (She Went Out) with Isshaq Albarbary Isshaq Albarbary retraces the making of Kharajat (She Went Out), his film co-commissioned for Life After Love. The work takes as its starting point two recordings of Israeli mustaʿribīn, undercover units who disguise themselves as Palestinians. In 2015, security cameras at a hospital in al-Khalil captured a unit entering the premises, one member disguised as a woman in labour, another pushed in a wheelchair. In 2017, handheld cameras at Bethlehem’s northern entrance recorded…