The 9th Chobi Mela International Photo Festival：Transition

Chobi Mela,the international festival of photography since its inception in 2000 has been the single biggest photography event in Asia and the first of a regular biennale, one that has become one of the highlights of the Asian calendar. It is organised by Drik Picture Library Ltd. and Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. The Ninth edition of Chobi Mela will be held from February 3rd to February 16th, 2017.

Transition

Imagine being told you have only ten more days. To love, to live, to celebrate, to cherish, to repent, to ponder. Perhaps ten weeks, maybe months. Perhaps you have cancer, or you are on someone』s hit list. Or you have just been sentenced. Perhaps someone thousands of miles away will press a button. Perhaps you are in jail, being tortured. Perhaps death to you is a release, and end to pain, an acceptable price for your belief. Let』s move to happier thoughts. Perhaps you will start a new life. Maybe your first child is about to be born. You have crossed many miles and you near land. You see sunlight after years in solitary confinement. You bathe in rain after months of drought.

Maybe you have a discovery that will transform the way we live. Are you at a fork in your life as an artist? Have you embraced another medium, has someone given new meaning to your work? Is there a new visual language that will help interpret your world?

Perhaps you are seeing, or hearing for the first time. Maybe you are in love.Perhaps years of research have unearthed hidden wonders in the artistic space you walk on? Have you found a sparring partner, who stretches you to the limits of your potential? Is there a new way of seeing? Does your artistic journey, bring new relevance to the work you produce? Are you ready to emerge, as a butterfly from a chrysalis, momentarily waiting for your wings to dry?

Are you a curator whose interpretation has caused the world to look at a body of work anew? Are you on the other side of the fence, seeing what artists within have forgotten to see? Are you prepared to take on the complexities of seeing, when doors are closed, minds are locked? Perhaps space is your forte, and you work with the physicality of a venue, producing site-specific work that is ephemeral in its form, but eternal in its concept. Are you tied down by the shackles that define photography, or are you prepared to take flight, going outside the boundaries, reaching out to the periphery, unearthing the unknown?

Are you the old or the new, or do you not accept such definitions? Does your visual space extend to the non-visual, do you hear, touch, feel through your eyes? Is your photography trapped between the corners of a two dimensional frame, or will new relationships between dimensions be the catapult that releases your art? Do pixels move you? Are you married to grains of silver? Are objects found and unearthed, part of your domain?

Does the white cube encumber you? Do you seek open spaces? In spirit, in mind,in form. Are you able to connect the dots? Are you the artist, the curator, the scientist, the historian, the editor, the journalist, the collector, who will find the magic that will take photography to new heights? Who will tell your story? Share your thoughts, cherish those moments. Who will help you live after you die? Who will hold your hand as you dance naked in the sun, wear bright colours, sing out loud? Are you the storyteller who visualizes a changing planet?

ALEXANDER SUPARTONO

Indonesia

Postcolonial Photo Studio

This series explores the interface of photography and colonial history by examining how photo studio concepts and techniques of the colonial era influence the world of images in a postcolonial age.

Contemporary South and Southeast Asian artists participated and reconfigured mannerisms, patterns and commonplaces of studio tradition in their respective countries.

They merge the colonial past with the postcolonial present by subverting and interrupting the integrity of the (colonial) archive, as well as appropriating the use and truth-value of studio portraiture. Their works propose an expanded postcolonial archive that moves from archiving the past to re-imag(in)ing a postcolonial future.

ROBERT ZHAO RENHUI

Singapore

A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World

This project documents 55 various animals, plants and environments that are manipulated by men but do not appear to be. All living things are constantly changing and evolving, adapting to cope with and respond to the various pressures that they face, such as predators, competition and environmental change.

More recently, the human species has emerged as the single main perpetrator of the various pressures that threaten the survival of other life forms. A Guide to the Flora and Fauna of the World is an attempt to document the ways in which humankind has altered this planet, and continues to do so. The Institute of Critical Zoologists, the first scholarly centre dedicated to zoological dialogue in the social sciences, ecology and the arts, is a long term project by the artist.

KATRIN KOENNING

Germany

Dear Chris (2010-2013)

On 5 August 2010, Chris ended his own life. Husband to Alana, my cousin, he was family. He was 29.

His death came almost exactly a year after he attempted suicide in one of the grand State Forests of his native Queensland, Australia. Something went wrong, or maybe he clung on, back then. After four days in a forest so deep that family and friends all but failed to find him, he walked himself to help.

I』m not sure when exactly his depression first showed face. I never knew him to be any different. Highly intelligent, he was trapped within himself, a cage with no apparent way out. He fought for years; it was a front-row battle that lacked a level playing field. He spoke about it, you know, about the drugs that were supposed to make him feel ok, about his state of mind, about all the doctors. Often though, he』d sit there in silence. He dreamt of being a pilot, of doing other things.

Dear Chris is engaged with the connection between loss, ritual and memory. Rather than following a linear narrative, the project is made of three interchangeable 「chapters」: vernacular pictures from Chris』 childhood album, photographs of some of Chris』 objects kept by Alana, and finally photographs of places of significance to Chris – his story, and ours.

BORIS ELDAGSEN

Germany

How to Disappear Completely: THE POEMS

After 150 years of psychology, the unconscious remains as vague and powerful as the gods it has emancipated itself from.

Being a reservoir of our past experiences, it stores urges and feelings we rationally have no access to.

Nevertheless, images have the power to open these doors, trigger emotions and unlock memories. The unconscious reveals itself in transition.

Using archetypes, dreams and symbolic acts, Boris Eldagsen』s work investigates the unconscious, by speaking its language. It attempts to communicate with the viewer on this unusual level.

His visual poetry takes you somewhere between the sublime and the uncanny, where the attributes of photography, painting, theatre and film melt into one.

STANLEY GREENE

USA

Open Wound

Chechen resistance to Russian domination dates back to the 17th century, when the Islamic conversion of Caucasian tribes advanced into southern Russian territories. Unlike Orthodoxy, Islamic societies had aspirations for an egalitarian society where each aoul, or village community, was self-governed by the elders.

Eighteenth century wars with Turkey and Persia ultimately drew a large Russian presence into the mountainous, fiercely independent Caucasus region, marking the start of a bitter struggle that lasted into the second half of the 19th century.

In 1944, Stalin accused the Chechen people of collaboration with the Nazis, and exiled them to central Asia and Siberia. Over the following decade, Soviet citizens of numerous ethnic backgrounds came to live in Chechnya, starting a process of integration. It was only in 1957, under Nikita Khrushchev, that the Chechens themselves slowly began to migrate back to their homeland.

With the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991, Chechnya』s goal to become an independent Islamic state received surprisingly little reaction from the Kremlin. The reply finally came in late 1994, as Boris Yeltsin began to hint at an armed solution to the situation. In December 1994, during a military build-up in Chechnya, Pavel Grachev, Russia』s Defence Minister, boasted that he would need only hours and one division of storm troopers to take the Chechen capital, Grozny. The attack began days later, on New Year』s Eve.

BRUNO BOUDJELAL

France- Algeria

Algeria, Scrapbooks

Between 1993 and 2003, Bruno Boudjelal kept diaries about his repeated journeys to Algeria. Somewhere between travel diaries and personal diaries, the booklets are, simultaneously, an individual』s experience and Algeria』s present reality.

The aim of the work is not to show, nor to demonstrate. Neither is it to describe, to prove anything, to simplify a complicated situation, or to pretend to understand everything and to bring back perfect images. The aim is, above all, to take photographs in one of the countries where this is most difficult, almost impossible.

The aim is to say plainly, clearly and with modesty how the life of an individual can cross the path of history. How an ordinary life, an act of identification, thoughts on photography, can create the need to take pictures in Algeria, beyond factual anecdotes.

Algeria: a black hole and the symbol of the French guilty conscience. Algeria: a country of massacres, of missing persons, of devious policies and victimised people.

Algeria: the country of Boudjelal』s origins, which he visited rather late in his life, only when his father went back to his birth country.

YOSHIKATSU FUJII

Japan

Red String

"Today, our divorce was finalized." The text message from my mother was written simply, though she usually sends many pictures and symbols with her messages. I remember that I didn t feel any particular emotion, except that the time had come. Because my parents continued to live apart in the same house for a long time, their relationship gently came to an end over the years. It was no wonder that a draft blowing between the two could completely break the family at any time.

In Japan, legend has it that a man and woman who are predestined to meet have been tied at the little finger by an invisible red string since birth. The red string tying my parents together came undone, broke, or perhaps was never even tied to begin with. If the two had never met, I would never have been born into this world. If anything, you might say that there is an unbreakable red string of fate between parent and child.

I found myself thinking about the relationship between my parents and I. I couldn t help feeling extremely anxious about it. I was driven to visit my parents house many times. My family will probably never be all together again. But there is proof inside of each of us that we once lived together. To ensure the red string that ties my family together does not come undone, I want to reel it in and tie it tight.

NASIR ALI MAMUN

Bangladesh

『The Poet with The Camera

Photographs of Nasir Ali Mamun/Photoseum (1972-1982)

I was ignited by the gravity and dreams of photography as an unhappy child who began life in struggle in the 1960s. Despite devouring photographs in newspapers, it was an insecure journey towards becoming an image-maker, with no training. I borrowed a camera for two hours in 1966, and exposed a few frames of my elder brother. The first click felt like pressing planet earth.

A fan of great personalities since childhood despite being a reclusive teenager, in 1972, I inaugurated portrait photography in Bangladesh. It was just after the liberation war. Most of our creative photographers were rooted in nature. Portraits were less important and relatively less known.

Everywhere was burning in the 1970s; it was a time of high oil prices and food crisis. Even after the Vietnam War, conflict was elsewhere. People were going hungry. In 1969, man landed on the moon. Astronauts took portraits of earth. It was an exciting yet unsettling time for human civilisation. I wanted to travel to a new frontier.

The new direction for portrait photography was ignored. Most people didn』t realize the power of portrait photography. I wanted them to inhabit the essence of portraiture, its directness. It was difficult to prepare famous people to sit in front of my poor camera. I said: 「From now on, the studio comes to your doorstep. I』ll take your images and make you a superstar!」 Gradually, it worked.

I do not press the camera shutter, the hard-disk of my heart exposes moments to produce photographs which are invaluable for people, history and time.