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Radical Housing and Socially-Engaged Art

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Three Addresses

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Syeda Farhana’s Three Addresses – a series of enigmatic photographs that layer fragments of cities through multiple exposure. Only the photographer seems mobile here, traveling from location to location to bring together images of stasis at different sites. A bird perched upon a windowsill that floats over electric lines and streetscapes. Graffiti on a wall in two different scripts, scaffolding, a billboard, a silhouette, a house. The ghostly images that float upon each other cannot reconcile into ‘real’ spaces that obey the laws of physics or geography. Instead they hover like memory-images that drift at the edge of forgetting, almost, almost meaning something in the face of imminent loss.

Being Bangladeshi, traveling in South Asia, Farhana would have been struck by what it means to be a Bangladeshi who does not live in Bangladesh. Everywhere else in the region, the term ‘Bangladeshi’ connotes ‘refugee,’ ‘migrant,’ stateless person, orphan of accidental history. Take the group who inspired this series of photographs: Muslims who, at the moment of Partition, felt they had no place in what they had called their home in Bihar in eastern India. In 1947, they moved, hoping for a life in East Pakistan, where, presumably, their hopes met with what usually meets poverty and dispossession. And in 1971, when Bangladesh was formed, they realized that religion Farhana, Three was not enough of a glue: their language and Addresses, ethnicity betrayed them and they became refugees 2007 Karachi, once again, now seeking shelter in what had been photograph West Pakistan. For this group in Karachi, Farhana following page visited the three addresses in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan where they might have lived and worked, three places sometime called ‘home,’ three places to feel out of place. It is the dim sense of exclusion that haunts these photographs, with their pale and ungraspable images.

Elsewhere in the exhibition is Farhana’s tender series of photographs showing a little girl twirling on a lawn near a chair. The child in the lacy frock was photographed in Karachi, days after Benazir Bhutto’s traumatic assassination. 1he chubby little hands holding flowers, the sheltered garden, suggest peace, hope and protection from the terrible realities beyond the garden wall. More than that, it is the absence of context in the photographs – the inability to read into the image ‘Pakistan’, or ‘turmoil’ – that marks the pictures with a terrible poignancy. At the age of three the child is free of culture and has not yet inherited history.