As Chobi Mela XI unfolds in the country’s capital, cruelty around the world continues without interruption. In the United States, a two-year-old child was detained by ICE. ICU nurse Alex Preti was killed by the same system, his hands trained to mend bodies recast as a threat. Gaza remains under occupation. Across the world, immigrants are detained, ecologies are bulldozed, communities are uprooted from ancestral homes so land can be repackaged for profit.
Some of these crises dominate headlines. Others dissolve into silence, not because they lack urgency, but because fatigue has settled into the throat, and pleading begins to feel indistinguishable from being ignored.
In an interview, poet Richard Siken says, “Art doesn’t come from trauma, art comes from curiosity.” And we are most curious when the emotions we feel are so intense that even more than tending to them or managing to live through them, understanding them feels as crucial as breathing. Living with grief is painful, but living through meaningless grief is impossible. It is easy to mistake this exhibition as portrayals of trauma, of grieving, but such can’t be said when that is the reality people exist within. But it is just an exhibition of resistance, resilience and endurance than of torture and exploitation, sometimes more former than the latter.
It is imperative to understand what it means to live within a wound because what follows is tracing the architecture of violence and in doing so, discover the possibilities within the cracks.
Chobi Mela, in its eleventh year, gathers artists and activists from across the world to chart an atlas of violence and the survival that insists beneath it. Samar Abu Elouf’s “Out of Gaza”, the face of the festival, documents survivors evacuated to Qatar for medical treatment. Samaa Emad’s “Genocide Kitchen” speaks to the ingenuity of human beings who find ways to sustain one another within systematic starvation.
The exhibition refuses to locate violence in one geography or one type of body. Karachi LaJamia documents the filling of rivers and canals to produce hegemonic infrastructures, displacing native communities to serve a privileged fraction. Through a Guided Meditation in Urdu, the artist asks the listener to return the body to itself, to sit with the tremor beneath the surface, imagine themselves as one with nature, and of the sea’s tides towards the Mazar as someone attempting to reconnect with their lover.
Since the dawn of the world, the atlas has shifted many times. The cartographer has erased and made up demarcations. Through colonial extraction and militarization, rivers are rerouted. Dams are built for human advantage. But water finds its path. Returning to its course cannot be called destruction when the land is reclaiming what was taken from it.
Toni Morrison describes flood as a way of remembering. The flood that we know now used to hold a different meaning. It was regarded as a blessing, a force that replenished soil and promised harvest. People in their rightful land, who knew how to respect and love the soil that sustains them, stood on mountains and offered gratitude for what the waters carried.
Thao Nguyen Phan’s “Becoming Alluvium” tells of two brothers who died in flood and return as an Irrawaddy dolphin and a water hyacinth, speaking of past lives and altered forms. There is tenderness in the idea that their new existence holds less power to harm, as opposed to being humans. Vietnam’s rapid commercialization, driven by tourism and the desire to avoid obsolescence, frames renewal as progress. But the actions of capitalism, speaks more of what it discards than what it creates: histories of violence, of destruction and injustice. The infrastructure is a front attempting to hide and erase its recurring impurity, unforgivable sins towards humans, towards nature.
Nature does not forget. Nature does not negotiate. But unfairness exists here too. The burden falls unevenly. The people least responsible remain the most exposed.
The World Bank notes that the seventy-four lowest-income countries contribute only a small share of global emissions, yet they face a dramatic rise in climate-related disasters, nearly eight times more in the past decade than in the 1980s. By 2050, unchecked climate change could drive more than 200 million people into internal displacement and push up to 130 million into poverty.
The exhibition continues to widen its lens throughout multiple geographies. Myriam Boulos documents the Lebanese revolution of 2019, the economic collapse that followed, and the Beirut port explosion in “What’s Ours”. Felipe Romero Beltrán traces the suspended lives of nine young men in detention centres, waiting for a verdict while trying to cross a border. Daniel Chatard records infrastructural destruction in Germany. Mosfiqur Rahman Johan holds memories of enforced disappearance. Jannatul Mawa draws attention to the erased contributions of women. Sumi Anjuman documents violence in domestic spaces endured by women who work simply to survive.
The art extends beyond photography across multiple mediums. Short films, bioscopes, interactive pixel games, flipbooks, television screens, guided meditations. The exhibition does not allow distance. It pulls the viewer into the grain of other lives until engagement becomes unavoidable. It demands introspection, to open your eyes and unbrand liberation. The outrage that you inevitably feel is its own form of clarity.
Chobi Mela is taking place across multiple locations: DrikPath Bhobon, Shilpakala Academy, the National Museum, Alliance Française Dhanmondi, and the Joyeeta Foundation. Artist talks are scheduled at the Joyeeta Foundation, while workshops and portfolio reviews take place at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in DrikPath Bhobon. Shilpakala Academy is also arranging art and education programmes for school children from 25 to 29 January. The opening rally was held on 16 January, and the festival is scheduled to continue until 30 January.
