Photography at the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit: A Review¹

Introduction

The 2020 Dhaka Art Summit (DAS), held from February 7-15 at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, gave exhibitionary life to the intersectional and reflexive ethics of engagement memorably called for by the scholar Sara Ahmed in Living A Feminist Life.² In their curatorial note, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Reckvana Q. Choudhury and Teresa Albor invoked Ahmed’s phrase, “movements require us to be moved”, to explain the significance of the Summit’s theme, Seismic Movements, as signalling art’s power to shake up and shape the world as geological movements do.³ DAS brought this idea to life through a series of exhibitions, screenings, and conversations that showcased art from around the world, and from Bangladesh and South Asia in particular. This essay reviews the photography works on display at the Summit, focusing in particular on how the tensions between photography’s capacity to bear witness to social and political movements and its ability as a site of the aesthetic to negotiate the idea of movement in formal terms, is shaping contemporary photographic practice.

Photography, bodies, politics

Photography’s capacity to make visible mass movements was emphatically showcased in Rashid Talukdar’s Arms drill by women members of the Chatro Union (students union) 1^st March, 1971, Outraged artists holding placards bearing the Bangla letters Sha Di Na Ta (independence)..., and A sea of people move towards Ramna Racecourse...⁴ The enlarged photographs of crowds of women and men claiming the streets of Dhaka provided a visual glimpse of the historic political mobilizations that culminated in the demise of East Pakistan and the birth of Bangladesh in March, 1971. Evoking the figure of ‘the people’, they greeted visitors to the gallery by underscoring the enduring role that photographic reportage has played in shaping photography and activism in Bangladesh.

Other works showcased photography’s capacity to bear witness to those who are marginalized and discounted from the status quo. For instance, Faiham Ebna Sharif’s Cha Chakra: Tea Tales of Bangladesh (2016-ongoing) focused on the exploited baganiya or tea worker communities of Bangladesh, whose lives are shaped by the entwined histories of the colonial production of tea plantations and indentured labor. Sharif’s black and white images of subjects attest to the dehumanizing conditions of labor that persist in the tea plantations, while also highlighting everyday scenes of leisure, domesticity, ritual, and mobilizations through which the baganiya challenge their marginalization. Sharif’s work critiques the colonial typology of the anonymous laborer without replacing it with the trope of the heroic worker, instead attuning the viewer to the fullness of life lived in the tea gardens of Sylhet and Chittagong. Similarly, Samsul Alam Helal’s Disappearing Roots (2019) drew attention to the devastating impact of Bangladesh’s big dam initiative in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which has accounted for the displacement of 100,000 people since the 1960s.⁵ Helal’s work incorporates colour photographs, pigment prints, and video with sound to both document the costs of ‘development’ on the region’s ethnic minorities, which are largely Indigenous, and reclaim a sense of home via staged portraits set in submerged landscapes.

Tahia Farhin Haque’s Shadows of a Wooden House was another notable instance of photography’s capacity to illuminate discounted realities, in particular, those pasts that have shaped South Asia’s post-partition citizen subjects yet are excised in dominant narratives of national history. Haque’s black and white images of public and domestic spaces and figures enact an imaginary of Bangla belonging that the political and violent upheavals that birthed the independent nations of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have since sought to erase. Haque’s visual memory field challenges the linear-modernist idea of the past as a distant place, drawing attention to its embodied endurance in and through the image. Zhou Tao’s Winter North Summer South (2019) obscured photography’s indexical stability in a different way. Tao’s photographs offer close-ups and sweeping views of the peculiar landscape of an “eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains” in China. These images simultaneously cast a critical light on the effects of man-made alterations to the physical environment while also revelling in the dystopic worlds they conjure, thus blurring the boundary between photography as fact and fiction.

Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934-1975 (2009-present) and Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s Solidarities Between the Reincarnated (2019) draw on the historical photographic archive to interrogate the politics of movements. While Jafri’s work focusses on images of pageantries that accompanied the independence from colonial rule of numerous nation states in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, Nguyen’s work turns to images that narrate a history of Afro-Asian connections that resulted from the French colonial act of sending Senegalese soldiers to Indochina to quell the Vietnamese uprising in the mid 20^th century. In distinct ways, both artists mobilize the archive’s capacity to bear witness to the passage of historical time, interrogate it, and to nurture new futures.

“The Illumination of Detail”

In the essay “Small History of Photography” (1931), Walter Benjamin recognizes in Eugene Atget’s photographs of the empty streets of 1920s Paris a critically important moment that, in departing from contemporary trends such as the popular practice of portrait photography, prepared the ground for the emergence of a “politically schooled gaze, according to which all intimacies abate in favor of the illumination of the detail”.⁶ This sensibility surfaced in Neha Choksi and Taslima Akhter’s artworks. Neha Choksi’s The American President Travels (East) (2002; remade 2019) is a mixed media installation that incorporates images of nine US presidents travelling to various Asian nations drawn from the press, printed on fabric hung like curtains in two concentric circles around a central table. The images capture scenes from various pageantries and gatherings arranged by the host nations for the viewing pleasure of the American presidents, which bring the neo-imperial and gendered nature of power performed by the United States in the 20^th century into stark relief. Choksi’s use of a sheer fabric dyed pink, itself tied to gendered notions of femininity, performs a feminist critique of hegemonic power, while the allusion to a massage parlour that the installation creates serves to queer it.

Fabric plays a constitutive role, albeit to very different ends, in Taslima Akhter’s Stitching Together: Garment Workers in Solidarity (2017). Akhter’s work, done in collaboration with the Bangladesh Garment Sromik Samhoti (Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity), consists of Kantha stitched textiles, associated with a cultural tradition particular to Bangladesh and West Bengal in India, embellished with photographs—some passport-sized portraits, others taken in studios with elaborate painted backdrops that are printed on cloth and stitched into the fabric—of garment factory workers who had lost their lives in the horrific Rana Plaza building collapse in Dhaka in 2013. The calamity, an outcome of entrenched structures of power that resulted in the willful negligence of workers’ safety, caused the death of over 1000 people.⁷ Akhter’s work memorializes their lives by stitching together “messages, photographs, and belongings donated by surviving relatives” on a stitched canvas that doubles as an enduring symbol of cultural tradition and industrial production.⁸ Akhter employs photography’s most common currencies, the passport photo and the popular studio portrait, in association with the Kantha stitched textile, to memorialize the labor and loss of life of the industrial worker, which showcases the personal as political, and critiques the exploitation of labor in the 21^st century.

Photography and collectivity

The range of photo-based works made by collectives such as ArTree Nepal, the Britto Arts Trust (Bangladesh) and Shelter Promotion Council (India), the Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organization (Nigeria), and Drik, Pathshala, and Chobi Mela (Bangladesh), raises yet another way to parse how the theme of Seismic Movements was fielded in the photography on display at DAS. Notably, these artworks mobilized photography’s documentary function, for instance casting an eye on the social solidarities that emerged in the wake of the 2015 earthquake in Nepal (ArTree Nepal) or tracking how the statist imaginary of “terra nullius” is both made and unmade in the borderlands of India and Bangladesh (Britto Arts Trust and Shelter Promotion Council; Invisible Borders Trans-African Photographers Organization, in collaboration with Drik, Pathshala, and Chobi Mela). But their significance within the hallowed space of the exhibition cannot be comprehended apart from the social worlds the collectives have constituted outside it. As a case in point, Bangladesh’s iconic Drik Picture Library, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, and the Chobi Mela International Photography Festival have been, over the past three decades, at the forefront of developing a photographic practice that is unwaveringly responsive to the region’s social and political struggles.⁹ As such, their work materializes an ecology of collective practice that affirms but also exceeds the modernist paradigm of the artists’ collective or group united by a shared set of “ideologies, aesthetics, and, or, political beliefs”.¹⁰ In addition, it also speaks to the entanglements between art and social life in South Asia’s changing social and political formations. As such, the work of the collectives highlights the documentary as an ethics of practice more than simply an aesthetic, which demonstrates that art’s relationship to the issue of movement is not only about what the curators of the Summit highlight as a case of ideas moving “from inside the exhibition to the larger reality outside”. Additionally, it is also about the constitutive role those external realities play in the shape art assumes within the space of the exhibition.¹¹

Documentary’s forms

If the collectives at DAS pointed to the significance of the documentary as an ethics of practice, Munem Wasif and Dayanita Singh’s artworks highlighted photography’s potential to enact this ethics in rigorously formalist terms. Among Wasif’s many works on display that emerged out of the artist’s visits to the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh, the one that commanded particular attention was Kala Pani (2019) (literally, dark or black water), a set of seven photographs of the ocean, presumably the Bay of Bengal, shot at night or before dawn. In the installation, these were paired with seven printed and framed testimonies of refugees that provided a taste of the deeply unsettling nature of their escape from state violence. What makes Kala Pani particularly powerful is that it demonstrates what it means to give visual form to the despair that surfaces in the textual testimonies of those who survived the ocean crossing. This is encapsulated in the darkness that the photographs capture, all-encompassing as despair inevitably is, which evoke a sense of the sublime. But the many shades of grey the images retain also interrupts the abyss of the sublime, demonstrating to the viewer that the artist is not invested in illustrating despair in singular or reductive terms but instead encountering, exploring, and reading it for form. Hence, the images constitute an artistic response to its experience in a manner that embraces—rather than recoils from—the ethical imperative of bearing witness to the fullness of despair in visual terms.

Dayanita Singh’s Box of Shedding included a set of thirty black and white photographs drawn from widely disparate contexts that collectively express the idea of what Singh calls “shedding”.¹² For instance, in a close-up of South Asian ascetic figurines, artifacts of the colonial Indian state’s fascination with typology enact the notion of shedding that ritual acts of renunciation entail. In other instances, images of modernist architectural spaces engage the idea of shedding through a highly pared down play of light and lines. Collectively considered, rather than uphold the association of photography with reportage, Singh’s works showcase the ability of images, in all their open-ended multiplicity, to connect with others to form an “unbound book” shaped by “chance” rather than narrative. As such, Box of Shedding also constitutes a critique of the singular work of art.¹³ In doing so, the artist demonstrates the documentary mode as critical to the process of arriving at—instead of securing—the photographic work of art.

If Rashid Talukdar’s iconic images flagged off the 2020 DAS with a resounding affirmation of history as what grounds photography’s power to move, Wasif and Singh’s work highlighted that photography’s aesthetic autonomy anchors an equally significant force of movement, reminding the viewer of Roland Barthes’s oft-quoted formulation that while “...a little formalism turns us away from History,...a lot brings one back to it”.¹⁴

Notes