Social violence in Bangladesh is recently a frequent phenomenon which is creating fear and anxiety between the ordinary people of society. I staged the moments of violence with aintimate household interior setup to associate our collective memories with these recent events. These photographs are the imaginary enactments of the actual violence to trace the psychological expressions of the victims or relatives during the moment of violence.Ordinary people have growing anxiety to talk about these crimes and to develop persistence. The viral news is fear-mongering without any psychological conduct. Most of my cast are ordinary people who generously participated in the acts in my studio. My core intention is to give voice to the community to talk about social violence and to realize the psychological aspects including collective trauma and persistence.
My work never tries to naturalise the event, but to support the position of the victims byportraying their resilience and mental strength. Elegy tries to focus on the mental imagebeyond the physical picture. A trained gesture makes a body a social being, but often not in alucid form. There is a conscious act of intimacy, dependency, ignorance or enmity, but someacts lose control and expose unrecognizable gestures.
As an artist developing socially-engaged photography projects, I try to develop photographiclanguage on a political sensitive social narrative to overcome the struggle of censorship andalso to design public engagement programs to create public intelligence and awareness on themost urgent social issues. It is important to create a fearless environment for them to expresstheir concern about social safety and free society against all forms of oppression.Today there is growing control and pressure through censorship and surveillance which haskept the people silence and less-aware of their social rights. My work is trying to reassemblepolitically motivated narratives with subtle and experimental language to avoid censorship and to mobilize social movements against social violence.
The importance of mediating own work as an artist has become more important today when there is a growing silence on the socially important issues due to oppressive measures. Elegy tries to share concerns with the communities and also to strategize a collective action in aninclusive and collaborative process. The ordinary people enacts the very moment of violence as a psychological depiction of collective trauma and the interactive process helps them to freetheir bodies from suppressed gesture. Mundane is an attempt to pay attention to everyday social violence, and to remember theindividuality and sovereignty of each victim. It is also an inquiry of our psyche when it grasps amoment of violence.
Salma abedin prithi 