Sub Saharan Africa

Protected: Natacha Gloria Inasuku

Burundi

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Sai

Multidisciplinary artist

Shan multidisciplinary artist, curator, and human rights advocate

His practice turns atrocity, survivor memory, and political disappearance into public evidence through photography, installation, cartography, performance, archives, and digital painting. He is cofounder and director of the Myanmar Peace Museum, the first institution in Myanmar’s history dedicated to memorialization and the creation of a counter archive documenting war crimes, survivor testimony, and resistance.
Since the 2021 military coup, Sai’s life and work have been shaped by direct political persecution. His father, Dr. Linn Htut, a democratically elected Chief Minister, was abducted, tortured, and sentenced to twenty years in prison by the junta. In 2024, Sai’s childhood home was destroyed in an airstrike. In 2023, he filed the only known formal communication from Myanmar to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention since the coup, leading to Opinion No. 5/2025, which found his father’s detention arbitrary and called for his immediate release.
His work continues across international platforms despite censorship and transnational repression. In 2025, Constellation of Complicity, co-curated with K at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, came under pressure from the Chinese Embassy, Thai authorities, and police within 72 hours of opening after the exhibition exposed authoritarian solidarity and included Tibetan, Uyghur, Hong Kong, and Myanmar resistance. The censorship drew international media coverage and public campaigns in Thailand.
Sai’s work has been exhibited across Asia, Europe, and the Americas, including through Magnum Photos’ Beyond the Silence project in Kazakhstan, Mexico, Cambodia, Ukraine, Nigeria, and beyond. He is the Southeast Asia Representative of Beyond the Silence, a nominee for the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award, and the elected Asia Pacific and Southeast Asia representative on the Leadership Council of the World Liberty Congress, where he focuses on political prisoners and cultural freedom.
In 2026, Sai received the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent at the Oslo Freedom Forum.