Gazi Nafis Ahmed. Shahinoor & Nipa #2, 2013. Courtesy of the Artist. “I am a woman and I love another woman. I want to live with my lover. I don’t want anyone to come between us. We don’t want anyone among us to commit suicide, to get hurt, to become addicted to drugs, to cut themselves. Let us live the way we want to. Now is the time to open up and talk about it.”

In the United States, we tend to think of citizenship as a privilege, but it is not hard to imagine how it could instead be a curse when your very right to exist is challenged in your home country. In 2015, Europe received more than a million refugees—many of whom destroyed their own identity cards in order to erase their national identity so that they could not be deported back to their home countries. The UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention guarantees asylees the right of non-refoulement, which prevents any signatory state from sending refugees back to countries where their lives are in danger due to persecution. This was a response to the persecution of Jews and others under Hitler’s Third Reich, and the Convention constitutes an effort to ensure that such genocides never happen again. But as the global refugee population climbs to sixty-five million, receiving countries struggle to adjust, and many countries have closed their borders altogether so that refugees might never arrive. Forced migration is an issue that often remains in the shadows, but many artists are struggling to find a place where they can express their own views without fear of persecution.

The singer Paul Robeson famously quipped that he was a citizen of the world, and while this sentiment is more common than ever in our globalized age, Robeson’s own experience demonstrates citizenship’s limitations. While speaking out against injustice in the United States, he was hounded by Joseph McCarthy’s infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and was even denied the right to travel abroad in the 1950s. Robeson’s story is tragic and represents a kind of wound that many artists confront to this day. Ai Weiwei was jailed in 2011 and had his passport confiscated for years by Chinese authorities due to his criticism of the government. These cases are but symptoms of a much larger trend of persecuting artists whose work transgresses the norms of their eras or expands social or political conversation beyond the views advocated by the government. Robeson and Ai allow us to see how making art with a conscience can lead to a form of precarious citizenship.

Read the full article here.

Zihan Karim and Chang Wan Wee. Habitat, 2013; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist, Dhaka Art Summit, and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter.

Even before entering the exhibition gallery, viewers are confronted with a video work by Zahin Karim and Chang Wan Wee on a large flat screen. Habitat (2013) has a Beatles soundtrack, and as viewers listen to the refrains of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, they watch images of children living in the squatter settlements of Chittagong, Bangladesh’s second-largest city. The project was made in response to the destruction of a previous settlement, which was bulldozed to make room for an airport. A text included in the video explains that the new settlement is on public land that might be developed in the future, so these inhabitants are living with no money and very little security. Bangladesh, the birthplace of microfinance, is a poor country, yet Habitat is not a form of poverty sensationalism, but a moving treatment of its citizens’ lives, and was created by Bangladeshi and Korean artists. It was difficult to tell if the soundtrack was chosen as a feel-good lure to make people watch, or if it was meant to elaborate the excitement felt by the children, who did not despair but in fact enjoyed mugging for the camera and showing off their village.

Gazi Nafis Ahmed. Inner Face series, 2014; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist, Dhaka Art Summit, and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter.

This impulse to document social issues was also central to Gazi Nafis Ahmed’s photos of gay Bangladeshis in his project Inner Face (2013–2014). According to the artist, the acceptance of sexual diversity in Bangladesh is very low, and the LGBT community lives in the margins. His work follows a photojournalistic aesthetic of cropped black-and-white shots with strong contrasts; quotidian images that feature lovers in casual contact introduce an intimacy between the artist and his subjects that is passed on to the viewer. The artist movingly, compassionately captures the inner lives of his subjects, and his explicit intention is to use photography to advance social inclusion and acceptance of these marginalized people.

Rasel Chowdhury. Railway Longings, 2011-2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist, Dhaka Art Summit, and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter

Rasel Chowdhury, who won the Samdani Art Award, presented an extensive series of small landscape photographs titled Railway Longings (2011–2015). Born in the town of Jamalpur but now residing in Dhaka, Chowdhury determined to walk the 181-kilometer stretch of rail line that was once the only way of traveling between these two towns. The artist is interested in the rapid pace of development and environmental change in Bangladesh, and the impressive series of photographs he presents chronicles these changes in complex and perceptible ways, mixing nostalgia with a fascination for a landscape in transformation. The artist photographs station buildings and the people he meets along the tracks, and he uses the orthogonal of the rail lines in every imaginable way. The most impactful images are those that feature industrial buildings and shantytowns that crowd the railway lines when they reach the capital.

Shumon Ahmed. When Dead Ships Travel series, 2015; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist, Project88, Dhaka Art Summit, and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter

In another series of photographs, When Dead Ships Travel (2015), Shumon Ahmed presents another side of landscape and change in Bangladesh through the subject of shipbreaking. The industrial practice of taking cargo ships apart piece by piece has been memorably chronicled by Edward Burtynsky, but Ahmed’s images are less didactic and more replete with pictorial complexity. These images are, for the most part, blurry, and a single panoramic image can be broken into multiple exposures so the shoreline is repeated and seems to stretch on forever. It is not merely that the artist is toying with the border between abstraction and documentation; the nature of his imagery points to a difficulty in perception and to the impossibility of grasping the work of taking apart by hand an industrial structure the size of a small city. The pictorialist aesthetic that the artist sometimes employs references Stieglitz and Steichen, who were celebrating the arrival of modern life in New York; Ahmed seems instead to salute its demise on the shores of Bangladesh.

Shimul Saha. Rebirth, 2012; installation view. Courtesy of the Artist, Dhaka Art Summit, and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter.

The documentation of social forces is not the only refrain in Dhaka. Another view is provided by Shimul Saha, whose sculpture Rebirth (2012) is a transparent dollhouse of Plexiglass. Saha is an artist who experiments widely with materials and light, but this work is both a basin and a model of the artist’s bedroom, representing the two lives he has lived, both in the world and in his mother’s womb. The dual nature of life the artist addresses, combined with the crystalline beauty of the transparent model house, brings to mind the ideal conditions of an artistic life. To make art is to make an alternative world, and this perfectly calibrated object generates an apparent beauty and a vivid energy. Looking at the world reveals many complexities, but it is sometimes necessary to look inside to seek the principles that move the artist to create. In this sincere and haunting evocation of life, it is clear that “something was going on there.”