South Asia Wired - 1 April 2010:
Shahidul Alam is elated – he’s won the battle, if not the war, with the authorities. In Bangladesh, that’s no mean feat.
In mid March, the scheduled opening of his exhibition of photographs called Crossfire at Dhaka’s Drik Gallery was closed down by the police. The photos are a quiet evocation of the legacy of the estimated 1000 extra judicial deaths caused by the country’s Rapid Action Battalion since its conception in 2004.
The photos show no sign of violence; they are devoid of blood, death or even a single individual. But the images of silent ghost haunted paddy fields and alleyways – the scenes of some of the killings - were so threatening to the authorities that the police were sent to lock out the public. Shahidul Alam sums up the situation ironically:
“So you’ve got a situation where you can have a government force killing people without legal permission but talking about it suddenly brings about rules of law.”
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Dheera Sujan talks to Sri Lankan artist Jagath Weerasinghe and Bangladeshi photographer and activist
Shahidul Alam about the role of art in a conflict-riven society.
However the police raid didn’t have exactly the effect that the authorities intended: the exhibition organizers showed the pictures in the street and gained an international audience as the media recorded the growing number of demonstrators who came out to protest.
Shahidul has been running from lawyer’s office to court for days, but made time to join a discussion on South Asia Wired about the place of art in a society where freedom of expression is still out of the grasp of most people.
And in Sri Lanka too, artists, along with journalists and writers know all too well that the watchful eye of the government is always on them, ready to threaten, arrest or assassinate anyone who steps too far over the line of dissent. Jagath Weerasinghe is one of the country’s most prominent artists. Over the years he’s learnt how any work of art stands to be used by the government, adding that “even your most radical art may be used by ultra nationalist schemes”.
