'Crossfire', a photography exhibition by Shahidul Alam (photojournalist and principal of Pathshala) is inaugurated on 22 March 2010 by celebrated Indian human rights activist and writer Mahasweta Devi. Hundreds of extrajudicial killings in Bangladesh have been linked to the R.A.B., an anticrime group formed six years ago this month. Little has been done to stop the executions. They have been dubbed “crossfire” killings — after the manner in which the police say the victims died: during an exchange of gunfire. Instead of a literal document of the killings, Mr. Alam created a series of large images that are evocative of the places where the victims were murdered or discovered — a still-life film noir in Technicolor. With the help of researchers, he examined cases to point out inconsistent details in the official accounts. The exhibition is curated by Jorge Villacorta, a Peruvian critic and curator who met Mr. Alam as part of a network of artists and writers participating in the programs of the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development. The exhibition will be open between 22-31 March 2010, between 3 - 8pm, everyday at the Drik gallery in Dhaka.

IMPACT Foundation Bangladesh (IFB) is a Charitable Trust and a non-governmental organization working in the country as a part of global IMPACT movement. The mandate of this organization, like other national IMPACT Foundations, is to achieve sustainable and affordable change in the immemorial pattern of disability through efforts to prevent avoidable disablement. Besides the common mandate, the organization is always searching to find-out the reasons behind disability and trying to intervene in new areas of development to prevent avoidable disablement. Impact Masudul Haque Health Centre, the first project of Impact Foundation Bangladesh, runs a 20 bed fully equipped hospital and the Sir John Wilson prosthetic center for the disabled in the remote Southwestern Chuadanga district. A large number of people become physically handicapped every year due to road accident, and congenital anomalies like Club foot and hare lip. Impact’s Chuadanga Center is the only place for their treatment in the entire south western region of the country. Inspired by the success and confidence gained in Chuadanga, Impact started a similar center in adjacent Meherpur district in 2004 to reach to many more thousands waiting for Impact’s help. Launched 10 years ago, JIBON TARI, the 1st floating hospital for civilian population is the icon project of Impact in Bangladesh. It ensures access of the rural un-served and marginalized men, women and children to modern health care facilities to prevent and cure disability. Passionate and dedicated workers of Impact, their friends and well-wishers, and professionals from within and outside Bangladesh have joined hands to make a difference in the lives of the less fortunate. Do you want to join them too?

Do we see their world? It’s an intriguing question and it echoes the thoughts of bright young people who took part in this photo project to hold up a lens to their lives so that we too, can see what they see and how they see it. So how do they see their world ? From a distance, lives of young people in rural Bangladesh can seem normal, peaceful … until we zoom in – through their lenses – and take a look up close. Beyond the beauty of nature, the simple pleasures of village life, the lime-green paddy fields, and beyond the giggling girls, there is another image that we turn away from. In that image there is a family where two wives live side-by-side but never speak; a man beating his wife with unspeakable violence; a girl married at too tender an age, forced out of school where she had taken so much pride and joy in learning and now in despair. Girls sexually assaulted; small boys smothered in the dust of a filthy workshop, when they should be at school, because some adult said it was time they earned a living. These are of the images of unseen tragedy. Every now and then we catch a glimpse of this world in an odd article in a newspaper, but we will not know, we will not understand and we will not be able to bring about change if we do not open our eyes first and see their world. UNICEF undertook this project because we believe that it will help open our eyes to the reality lived by those young people. Our project for the Empowerment of Adolescents, funded by the European Union and implemented under the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs, has provided this platform. As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, our first commitment is to give an avenue to young people so they can show us and tell us about their lives, about their hopes and fears. For UNICEF, an imperative provision of the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the article 12 on child participation: ‘States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child.’. In partnership with Pathshala, the South Asian Institute of Photography, UNICEF offered the opportunity to thirty young people living far from the big cities to express themselves in an original manner. Not through words but through images. Not through long speeches but through a language that needs no translation – the power of an image. This exhibition is the result of this commitment. It is a simple invitation to open our eyes and indeed begin to see their world. Carel de Rooy UNICEF Representative

Shima, 8 sells flowers amidst fume, smoke, congestions and shrill screeches of the vehicles on city streets. Little does it matter to her of the beauty she sells for a living, its nothing but a commodity. Here, perhaps, the beauty lies in struggle.

Free Market economy takes people to strange places, paves ways to exile. Parting from togetherness, the essence of clay and the shade of the banyan trees to uncertain distant land that awaits prevailing unequal rights, racism and identity crisis. Coping with the distance and the unwanted stares of the natives, the evicted surmount the irresistible desire of getting back.

From Insight To Action

One Lokman Music, has always been an expression of unfathomable emotions, whether from the proletariat of their struggles, whether from the blacks of their blues. Lokman, his family comes from an undermined context, where being a musician is literally lavishness, yet it provides bread and butter when the music is taken out to the public gatherings for amusement.

NRK The porcelain tea set “Tid” claimed to be a Porsgrunds Porselansfabrik production in Norway won a Norwegian design award, applicable for produced goods in Norway solely. The owner is multimillionaire A. Brynestad, who personally grossed 2.5 million Euros in 2002, also an owner of 50 companies in 6 countries. Alls well, including the profit since 1996, but 50 employees were sacked from the company without any significant reason. An investigation reveals that the triumphant cup was outsourced in Bangladesh for production where workers are prone to exploitation in terms of wages, environment and treatment. Whereas the cup is sold in Europe at ten times higher the price than the production cost.

Madrasa In a context so diverse in terms of financial standards, thousands of deprived children enroll in Madrassa education, because of sustainability issues, discipline, routines. The administration expects them to be the spiritual leaders of the society, purveyors of God’s teachings. Centre for Sustainable Development insists that they are not outcasts, but groomed with religious orientation, a culture of the forefathers.

Pathshala, a hive of photojournalists since originating in 1998, has produced numerous voices capable of speaking through visuals. Devoid of oppositions, oppression, threats and even thugs against the institution, it always trounced over, expressing its intrinsic philosophy, partly being society’s fourth estate. Teachers and students have independent voices motivated through the rediscovery of one’s own society, sharing a common view on learning and experimenting.

Our daughter, Our friend The ‘anomalies’ begin with attitude, gestures and psyche. Difficulties with surroundings, wondering about identity and being prone to exploitation are seemingly the next phases. Identities bare witness of creator’s craftsmanship somewhere beyond the firmament, nevertheless it becomes redundant before the preconceived social codes. Unable to cope with social conditioning, these people clinch to Hijra communities, adopt their norm and try to redefine a way of living, evolve their own folklore from the struggle, incoherence. Adoration, intimacy, physique, emotions, solitude and craving for polarity are inexplicable hence everything becomes taboo, unresolved. Apparently existing between valor and maternity, these people entertain, dangling someone else’s kid into cradle, pray, hope for the society to discern the reality and accept.

Chobi Mela was conceived in a nation far removed from the established capitals of photography. Bangladeshi photographers did not feature in the classical books on the medium. Images of Bangladesh seen worldwide were images produced largely by white western photographers. There had been no festival of photography in Asia. Several issues were being tackled. The ignorance about non-western photographic practice (this was true even within Bangladesh, where photographers knew about Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but were unaware of important work being done in neighbouring countries); the non-recognition of photography as a valid profession and an art form; the limited options that Bangladeshi and regional photographers had to seeing photography. There was another significant but very localised goal. In a nation where the majority of people cannot read or write, photography provided one of the few means through which the average person could be reached. Chobi Mela IV took place when the nation was at the brink of civil war. The presentation by Robert Pledge at the Goethe Institut was interrupted by the news that curfew had been declared and the military were out in the streets. Typical of Chobi Mela, Robert continued with his presentation, and the audience stayed on. We found safe routes for the visitors to get home on that dark night. Chobi Mela V starts in January 2009. A landslide victory of an elected government marks the beginning of what one hopes is a move towards democracy. The theme Freedom, could not have been more apt. "Madiba", the retrospective on Nelson Mandela is a quintessential expression of freedom. "Buena Memoria," Marcelo Brodsky's work on the disappearances in Argentina, "A People War" from Nepal and "Bangladesh 1971" all show collective struggles to overcome regimes of oppression. Naeem Mohaiemen's installation, being built as I write this, talks of more contemporary struggles, where nations deal with increasing militarisation propped up by the very forces that harp on democratic values. For amidst all the rhetoric about freedom and democracy, powerful nations in far away lands, find it far more expedient to deal with pliant dictators than responsible governments answerable to their own public. Over sixty exhibitions, thirty-five participating nations, well over a thousand images, and over fifty visiting artists from Asia alone, are impressive statistics, but the emphasis on figures is misleading. The dozen or so workshops, the week-long sessions of presentations, debates, lectures and discussions, the portfolio reviews and the all night party, will perhaps be what the visitors remember the most. More significant is the bridge across continents through the live broadcast of these entire sessions. Especially the video conference between three outstanding individuals, Mahasweta Devi, Noam Chomsky and Stuart Hall, as they provide their take on 'Freedom'. The mobile exhibitions, now a trademark of the festival, where a mini Chobi Mela on ten rickshaw vans, plying the streets of Dhaka, will move the festival away from galleries to the more public spaces of football fields and open air markets. For in both the majority and minority worlds, across cultures and across nations, the class divide continues to be the biggest bridge to cross. Shahidul Alam Festival Director

Ever since earthen pots lost its value as household utensils, the struggling potters focused on aesthetics. Fancy showpieces replacing the crockery revived their lost market. These people possess the unique talent of bringing clay into flamboyant artistry. Changing the profession of ancestors would be the last thing that they would do.

Md. Shahjan Miya, an iftar seller at Chawk Bazar believes that he would be liable to God for the food he produces for the fasting people. Since the East Pakistan regime, from his childhood, Md. Shahjahan carried out this tradition of making Iftar alike neighbors around him. He wonders, who would keep up his work yet again he smiles in assurance that his sons would suffice.

Hockey Bangladesh Hockey Federation celebrates the 6th Global Youth Hockey Marathon event on May 13 and 14, 2006 with the slogan sports for everybody. Hockey being one of the oldest sports in world civilization gained popularity in the Indian subcontinent right after the British Army helped spreading it in the 19th century. In Bangladesh, spreading like wildfire, hockey enchanted people all over the country with its swiftness and sportive qualities.