Mundane

Mundane is a photographic series capturing intimate, staged moments of social violence in Bangladesh, revealing unseen emotional struggles and inviting reflection on resilience, humanity, and everyday oppression.

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 an intimate 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 by portraying their resilience and mental strength. Mundane tries to focus on the mental image beyond the physical picture. A trained gesture makes a body a social being, but often not in a lucid form. There is a conscious act of intimacy, dependency, ignorance or enmity, but some acts lose control and expose unrecognisable gestures.

As an artist developing socially-engaged photography projects, I try to develop photographic language on a political sensitive social narrative to overcome the struggle of censorship and also to design public engagement programs to create public intelligence and awareness on the most urgent social issues. It is important to create a fearless environment for them to express their concern about social safety and free society against all forms of oppression. Today, there is growing control and pressure through censorship and surveillance, which has kept the people silent and less aware of their social rights. My work is trying to reassemble politically motivated narratives with subtle and experimental language to avoid censorship and to mobilise 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 strategise a collective action in an inclusive and collaborative process. The ordinary people enact the very moment of violence as a psychological depiction of collective trauma, and the interactive process helps them to free their bodies from suppressed gestures. Mundane is an attempt to pay attention to everyday social violence and to remember the individuality and sovereignty of each victim. It is also an inquiry of our psyche when it grasps a moment of violence.