Mundane
Social violence in Bangladesh has increasingly become part of everyday life, creating fear, anxiety and a gradual sense of numbness. Mundane began in 2018 as my attempt to understand this violence and how we live with its repeated presence.
I collect accounts of violence from newspapers, social media and people I know, preserving them as an archive. For me, this archive is a way of acknowledging that these events happened and resisting their disappearance from collective memory. From this research, I create staged photographs with models in familiar domestic spaces. I do not recreate specific incidents literally. Instead, I use bodies, gestures, objects and imagined situations to explore the psychological and emotional experiences surrounding violence, including fear, trauma, vulnerability and resilience.
Working on Mundane since 2018 has taken me through three changes of government in Bangladesh. Over time, this has brought a new question into my research: does violence really change when political power changes? Looking across these different periods, I have observed different forms of violence emerging under different circumstances, yet returning again in other forms. This continuing cycle has made me think more deeply about how violence becomes normalised and how quickly individual lives can disappear behind a constant flow of news and images.
Mundane refuses this normalisation and forgetting. It tries to hold on to the individuality and dignity of each victim while creating a space to reflect on the psychological impact of violence on victims, families and society. The project is also an ongoing inquiry into our collective psyche: what happens to us when violence becomes part of the everyday, and how can an image help us remember, feel and remain empathetic?
Gloomy Sunday
Gloomy Sunday, inspired by the song of the same name, is the attempt to visualize psychological and physical struggles women face on a daily basis. Salma Abedin Prithi’s photographs oscillates between poetry, light humor and vulnerability, and transgresses between the imaginary and the almost violently real. Prithi consciously combines glossy, fake, and contrived arrangements with references to conflicting gender rituals. In dialogues with the women around her, she realized that the severe power asymmetry within the endorsed gender roles was neither limited to the public places, nor to someone’s personal experience in private sphere, and continues to haunt in everyday moments.
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Torn
Torn explores the minds of patients in Bangladesh during the Covid-19 outbreak. I researched newspaper coverage of people in hospitals, collected the images, and reconstructed and enriched these personal situations, which tend to be absent in mainstream media. Mainstream media homogenises. It does not attempt to delve into people’s sufferings. I have viewed it differently, using the technique of stage photography to express people’s anxieties.
Translucence
A body occupies space, but how freely it can move within gravity? A trained gesture makes a body a social being, but often not in a lucid form. There is a conscious act of intimacy, dependency, ignorance or enmity, but some acts lose control and expose unrecognizable gestures. Prithi invited people from diverse backgrounds into her studio and allowed them to act upon intimacy or separation. There are real and unreal moments. She preferred a mix of both.
