At Chobi Mela, images’s contradictions are uncovered and engaged with

The worldwide competition set in Dhaka reemerges for its twenty fifth anniversary with a staggering forged of lens-based artists from around the globe

In his ebook The Burden of Representation, John Tagg argues that the digital camera, regardless of being utilized by the state as proof since its invention, is rarely impartial. Instead, he insists that it has the capability to supply representations coded with historic biases. Even within the palms of artists, the {photograph} is imbued with questions on who will get to take an image and who or what turns into the topic of the digital camera’s subjective gaze. This yr’s Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography, which might be held in Dhaka from 16 – 31 January, intends to grapple with these very questions and have interaction critically with the contradictions inherent to the medium.

Working with 58 artists and collectives from throughout 5 continents, most of them from the Global Majority, this yr’s competition, led by creative administrators Munem Wasif and Sarker Protic alongside visitor curators Tanvi Mishra and Shohrab Jahan, is centred on the thematic framework of ‘Re’. According to the curatorial textual content, ‘Re’ symbolises “repetition, reversal, and reopening”; it urges the customer to bear witness, to confront and rethink the order of issues, insisting that doing so is how we will resist erasure. The images and shifting picture on present, and the corresponding programme of lectures and different public occasions, are attentive to the imperial historical past of the lens-based apply, contemplating what’s seen and what’s left unseen, and the way images can resist or uphold the prevailing state of affairs. 

Crucially, this yr’s politically charged Chobi Mela succeeds July 2024’s protests in Bangladesh, which led to a mass rebellion in opposition to then-prime minister Sheikh Hasina and impressed younger individuals globally to stay hopeful and steadfast of their defiance. It additionally laid the groundwork for the competition, which the Festival Director Rezaur Rahman describes as “a space for photographers and audiences to engage with urgent social, cultural, and political questions through images”. One such occasion is within the group exhibition But a Wound that Fights, which borrows its title from Mahmud Darwish’s poem ‘Diary of a Palestinian Wound’ and shows work that encounters the psychic and emotional toll of loss, particularly on account of political violence and displacement by artists akin to Ernest Cole, Salma Abedin Prithi, and Myriam Boulos. Central to this show is the notion that image-making in moments of battle and violence is an act of “reopening the wound” to grieve with it, take care of it, however in the end, because the title suggests, to withstand and combat with it. 

Another group exhibition Rights of Passage, curated by Tanvi Mishra problematises the logic of borders, nation-states and the violence that may accompany migration by illustrating each fictional and actual confrontations with border regimes, akin to in Iranian photographer Hoda Afshar’s collection of portraits of refugees who fled their homeland to be mistreated by hostile border enforcement in Australia and detained in an offshore immigration centre in Papua New Guinea. Other works on present are Felipe Romero Beltrán’s Bravo, which pictures life alongside the Rio Bravo River in Mexico and the 270-kilometre stretch to the United States border, and Dhaka-based Sumi Anjuman’s images challenge that highlights the struggling that 1000’s of ladies from Bangladesh face upon migrating to Gulf nations in hopes of employment. 

Argentinian photographer Alessandra Sanguinetti’s The Adventures of Guille and Belinda and The Enigmatic Meaning of Their Dreams provides to this glorious dialogue as one among three solo reveals on show at Chobi Mela. The challenge, which began as a documentation of two cousins taking part in dress-up amongst different childhood video games of make-believe, quickly turns into an outline of the 2 women rising up in rural Argentina and of how their paths diverge as they get older, change into unbiased of one another and tackle completely different roles as moms and lovers. It is a long-term meditation on familial relationships, needs, feminine intimacy, and the way these aspects evolve over time. Together, these exhibitions, amongst 9 others, unfold throughout completely different venues in Dhaka, insist on situating images as a stressed language and never one among finality. Under the signal of ‘Re’, Chobi Mela reclaims the picture as much less a report than a web site of encounter the place one is invited to stick with a picture and query it.

Discover a few of the featured photographs under.