Bangladeshi photographer, journalist and activist Shahidul Alam was in Sydney for the opening of his exhibition, Crossfire and took time out to talk with me about how the project came about and the ongoing impact it is having in his country and beyond.
Alam has a long history of addressing subjects that are contentious. In 1996 he was stabbed eight times for exposing the government’s use of the military to round up opposition activists before a rigged election. “The whole country was completely up in arms about this. So Drik, the agency that I run, was used as a platform for the protest therefore I as the director of the agency became the target,” said Alam.
“As a journalist one has to be near the edge. One has to feel the heat and you can take one step too far back, which makes you safer, but also makes you ineffective. So it is that edge that you constantly need to find. The trick is in knowing where it is and not stepping too far, which is a fine balance, but that’s part of what we are about.”
Undeterred by his earlier experience, in 2010 Alam and his team at Drik launched Crossfire, a controversial project that exposed the actions of the Bangladesh government’s enforcement agency, the Rapid Action Battalion, who were basically given license to capture and execute their own people without due process. The photographs in Crossfire capture the locations where people have been killed, or from where they have disappeared.
“It was a national concern and we were horrified by what was happening,” Alam said. “We did this project because we had to. We thought seriously about what the modalities might be at an aesthetic level and also at a strategic level. We worked very hard at the audience engagement in terms of how we handled the media, how the news was taken out.”
On the eve of the exhibition’s opening in Bangladesh in 2010 the government wielded its power and tried to shut down the show. The police closed the gallery unaware that Alam was inside conducting a live stream interview via Skype with Reporters Sans Frontières. “We’d prearranged the interview so while the police surrounded the gallery I was inside going live to the world,” he said clearly delighted at the foresight he and his team had in taking the story to the world before the government could put a lid on it.
“Our project had such incredible resonance that people formed human chains in the streets demanding that the government open the show. This groundswell empowered the court to rule in our favor. In countries like ours where the government is so strong, to go against the government is very difficult, but because of the actions of the people the judiciary felt empowered and were able to take a position.”
On first viewing the photographs in Crossfire are intentionally ambiguous as Alam explained. “We withheld captions because we did not want to provide a simplistic reading of the image. We wanted the audience to work at understanding, finding why these pictures were there, because if you look at it,” he said pointing to a photograph “it is just a paddy field so how do you connect it with Crossfire? So you have to then at a cerebral level engage with that image, rather than simply be given a message. So there is a lot more information there than there would usually be”.
He continued. “Behind each image there is a whole case history so when you go to the Google Earth Map you will find the exact location of each event, the case histories behind it and you can unravel the piece to a much greater level. As the viewer you are not just a passive recipient, you need to engage with it. We took this approach because we felt that this is a story that couldn’t be dealt with at a superficial level, one needed to go beneath the surface and to imagine the screaming”.
Since its launch in 2010 Crossfire has been exhibited throughout Bangladesh in villages and towns, often hung in the market squares to become the talking point of the community. It has also toured the world taking on a life of its own. Alam said, “The ultimate goal is for it to change what it began to address, the killings. They haven’t stopped, but they have gone down and the government now is on its back foot”.
Alison Stieven-Taylor
EXHIBITION
Crossfire
Until 23 June 2013
The Muse Gallery
TAFE Ultimo
Harris Street
Ultimo Sydney
Australia
