In August of 2017, thousands of families from the Rohingya culture fled on foot and boats from Myanmar when their villages were attacked and burned to the ground, forcing over a million Rohingya refugees to flee their homes in Rakhine State. Hundreds of thousands of Rohingya women, men and children made the perilous journey across the border into Southern Bangladesh and settled in what became the largest refugee camp in human history. The extreme violence, severe trauma, and attempted cultural eradication endured by the Rohingya culture has been called by the US Government an attempted genocide. Artolution has created a cultural renaissance out of the brutal violence and arduous journey the Rohingya community endured, and has become a new defining movement for those who live in the most crowded refugee camp in the world; where disease, stagnation and the unknown of tomorrow become a daily way of life.

Utilising its community-based public art education methodology, in 2017 Artolution forged a partnership with UNHCR and has sought to ignite positive social change through art in the Rohingya crisis.Through this partnership, Artolution has facilitated the scaled growth of a local team of Rohingya Refugee teaching artists from 2 to over 30 all of whom have been trained in the Artolution methodology and are now leading community based art programmes year-round. Ongoing professional development is provided to the Rohingya teaching artists introducing them to global public arts approaches. They have learned to conduct interactive storytelling workshops to reflect the needs of their communities, and have painted over 200 collaborative murals in partnership with their communities, including; painting a school bus, developing a team of folkloric musicians, and hosted the first retrospective exhibition of Rohingya paintings in the history of Bangladesh at the US Embassy. These collaborative arts initiatives have provided interventions across the Rohingya communities in more than 35 sub-camps of the larger Balukhali Mega-camp, as well as the first pilot program on the Remote Bhasanchar Refugee Camp Island.

This movement in the arts in Bangladesh has created opportunities for participants to share their cultural values and beliefs, promote resilience and positive identity, and strengthen a sense of ownership within their community, providing a forum for open dialogue on the issues affecting their daily lives within the refugee camps. This team of women and men are demonstrating how community-based public art education in crisis contexts can be used to facilitate open dialogue and distribute key life-saving behavioural messages from local leadership in the language and traditions of their communities.

The Colour of Resilience project became an opportunity for the team of Rohingya teaching artists and children to tell their story of where they came from and where they dream to go as a tangible artefact of their migration embodied through a narrative that tracks the migration of the Rohingya culture, and proclaims the existence of the Rohingya culture and defines their history to the world.