Land of the Undefined Territory is a series of black and white photographs by Munem Wasif (b. 1983, Dhaka) depicting a barren landscape, which could be lunar, Earthly, or entirely imaginative. In some images, men appear with wheelbarrows and other simple tools. This is the border territory between Bangladesh and India, which still remains somewhat unregulated. At first sight the photographs seem identical, but upon closer examination one begins to recognize the different curves and bends of the roads, and varying sizes of the rocks that litter the barren landscape.
The land that Wasif chose to photograph bears witness to multiple events that marked the modern history of South Asia: from colonization, to the Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, as well as ongoing land disputes. Despite its contentiousness, the land bears no traces of national identity, but carries the mark of laboring as it is an active and self-organized rock-mining site. Land of the Undefined Territory grew out of a workshop organized by Britto Arts Trust (a GB11 fellow) and India’s Shelter Promotion Council, which was conducted along the borders of the two countries.
Wasif’s work is a continuous investigation into complex political and social issues and human conditions. In the series In God We Trust (2009–13) photography, video, and voice interviews interweave to explore how religion, identity, and opinions around them overlap with and overlook one another. His practice continuously navigates the terrains of both contemporary art and documentary photography: apart from participating in exhibitions such as Dhaka Art Summit (2016), Wasif is one of the curators of Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography. He also teaches at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute (another GB11 fellow), which conducts classes without walls and encourages its students to question beyond the confines of the discipline of photography. MW
self-presentation:
My dream kept changing, from becoming a pilot to a cricket player and then a photographer. But none of these choices made my father happy. I studied photography at Pathshala (a photography school), a life-changing experience, which made me aware of stories, gave me a photographic voice to photograph the dying jute and tea industries and their afflicted workers, excluded people, lands disrupted from environmental change, salt water, and a nostalgic city of love, Old Dhaka. Staring with a traditional documentary language, these projects dealt with multiple questions and investigations, pushing me to experiment beyond documentary practice by borrowing from a familiar language.
