Inertia

‘Inertia’ perceptibly investigates a mob lynching murder scenario accompanied by an abstract disposition.

Cluster of mob lynching, fanned by social media rumors, caught Bangladesh by surprise. The victims were targeted over rumors that human sacrifices were needed to build the Padma Bridge, south of the capital Dhaka. The rumors were mostly spread in posts on Facebook and videos on YouTube. Eight people have been killed within one month (July, 2019) in mob attacks in Bangladesh after false rumors about child abductions spread online.

Each murder on the streets by an unruly mob may appear like a puzzle to many, experts feel that this sudden escalation in number of mob lynching is connected to the absence of rule of law, culture of impunity, whereby killers and wrongdoers are exempt from punishment, improper criminal justice system, impatience in civic life, not respecting dissenting voices and frequent extrajudicial killings. Mob lynching paints grim picture of lawlessness.

The trajectory focuses on, one of those incident happened in Dhaka in July 20, 2019. Taslima Begum Renu, 40, a single-mother of two, suspected of being a child abductor, was brutally beaten to death by a mob, in front of North Badda Government Primary School on that morning.

Renu went to that school regarding the admission of her child where she talked with a female guardian of a student about the admission process. At one stage of their conversation, the guardian suspected Renu as a child abductor after she (Renu) asked the address of the guardian. After hearing this, a boy named Ibrahim Ridoy (19) along with 15 to 20 other went to the school. In such a situation, the school authorities locked Renu in a room on the first floor as a suspect. As the news spread, more people from the nearby market went there and broke into the room and started beating her to death.

'Inertia' visually investigates Renu's murder scenario accompanied by an abstract approach which includes screenshots collected from the original video footages of the incident which were recorded by the mob and the traces of the incident are staged according to the traces those were visible in the video footages. The complex weaving of the real incident and staged images enlightens several perspectives of the same narrative, forming a cryptic framework to be decoded by the audience where deeper tragedy of violence has been portrayed. To a deeper extent the work also underwent an evolutionary process of clarification.