In post-'revolution' Bangladesh, a photography festival questions how to rebuild after ruin

History is being made in South Asia. In fits and starts over the past four years, the old order has buckled under the weight of Gen-Z frustration, with youth protests toppling governments from Colombo to Kathmandu. No rupture was more dramatic than the ‘Monsoon Revolution’ that shook Bangladesh in the summer of 2024—and none more fraught with disappointment.

As the country gears up for general elections in three weeks’ time—touted as the first free ones since 2008—the Chobi Mela, a Dhaka-based international photography festival, interrogates what it means to seek to recreate your society.

It opens at a perilous time for the arts in Bangladesh: mob violence targeting arts and media groups in December has drawn outrage from the UN and secular cultural organisations. Nevertheless, Chobi Mela's co-organiser, the photographer and curator Munem Wasif, felt that “we can’t just sit at home and hide”, even if political exigencies have forced him to change the dates three times.

“We have to address the time we are in, across the region,” Wasif tells The Art Newspaper. “There is a sense of collapse of order but also of solidarity—a sense that certain things need to be changed.” Consequently, he has curated a festival that unfolds the idea of a ‘revolution’, considering how history repeats itself even as we seek to reform and renew the present.

The Mela comprises a series of themed and solo exhibitions, by international and Bangladeshi artists at venues across downtown Dhaka. Until 2024, Bangladeshi artists had to contend with the former prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s authoritarian government, which monopolised access to funding and foreign collaboration. Many arts institutions were turned into propaganda machines, as Hasina's cultural officials "just wanted to please the national leader," one Bangladeshi artist told the Financial Times last year. In the post-revolutionary insecurity, artists have begun to experiment with an uncertain independence. The Chobi Mela has allowed them to better engage with foreign artists on their own terms.

Exhibitors like the Pakistani multi-media artist Bani Abidi have engaged their Bangladeshi peers in a meaningful, outward-looking discourse. She will show a series of 2021 photographs satirising male political authority, as well as delivering a workshop on her artistic practice. Abidi wishes to draw out the underlying similarities in how “Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have dealt with our dictatorships and social structures over the decades,” she tells The Art Newspaper, emphasising that such dialogues were necessary “to innovate a South Asian imaginary” which is “not focused on the nation state” but still “deeply rooted in a detailed understanding of locality”.

The Mela also connects moments of solidarity across time and place. The exhibition But a Wound that Fights, whose title taken from the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, shows us the horror of war and displacement as “a portal, opening new territory,” Wasif says. “You can sense it as a point of resistance.” Rejecting the siloes of national identity, the exhibition places Bangladeshi indigenous artists like Mong Mong Shay, whose digital and oil works use the human body to great, unsettling effect, alongside Myriam Boulos, whose sparkling, unflinching photographs depict violence being visited on the people of Lebanon.

Another exhibition, If the Land Could Speak, uses ecology as a symbol of oppression, focusing on land-grabbing from Mexico to the slums of Karachi and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, where a million indigenous people live under military occupation in the dense jungle. The exhibition shows us how community and land are deeply entwined in the struggle between indigenous customs and brute force. It asks us to connect the dwindling olive groves of Palestine with the vast mangrove swamp, known as the Sundarbans, divided between Bangladesh and India at the mouth of the Ganges. Here, according to Bangladeshi photographer Mrittika Gain, villagers must "wage an endless war, floating above the saline waters”. Her photographs, documenting the hard lives of those who live on the front-lines of climate change, are placed alongside those from similar contexts around the world.

Gain, who is from Bangladesh’s minority Hindu community, tells The Art Newspaper that today she feels “more free but less secure”—a predicament that, in different ways and for different reasons, she shares with artists from across the global South. Some of those artists have come together in Dhaka this week to show what Abidi calls a “gentler tone of love for ordinary people and their choices, vulnerability and resistance.”

The Mela has sought to put granular authenticity at the service of universal artistic concerns: “Now that the West has shown us its uglier side,” says Abidi, “we are all just clambering back to our own histories to figure out what the fuck is going on.”