BIOGRAPHY
Lives and works in Dhaka
Munem Wasif is an artist, curator, and educator based in Dhaka. His image-based works explore traces of impermanence and insecurity, often blending photographs, moving images, archival documents, and collected objects. His approach, rooted in long-term immersion and repetition, offers layered, sensitive, and sometimes contradictory insights into complex issues such as food sovereignty, labor exploitation, and borders.
His work exhibited at Center Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo, Victoria & Albert Museum, Musee De elysee, Dhaka Art Summit and Sharjah, Singapore, Lyon, Diriyah, Gwangju biennale. He has been a co-curator of Chobi Mela since the festival’s eighth edition in 2015, and has curated three major survey shows for the festival since then: of legendary Bangladeshi photographer Anwar Hossain (Chobi Mela VIII, 2015), Nasir Ali Mamun (Chobi Mela IX, 2017) and Amanul Huq (Chobi Mela XI, 2026). Together with Mahbubur Rahman, he also co-curated 1134 - Lives not Numbers (2014), an exhibition paying tribute to the garment workers who lost their lives in the Rana Plaza factory disaster.
Wasif’s book publications include Kromosho (Nokta, 2025), Belonging (Clémentine de la Feronnière Editions, 2013) and Salt Water Tears (Images Plurielles, 2011); and together with Tanzim Wahab, he has published two editions of Kamra, a Bangla-language anthology of essays on photography. He was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany from 2020-2021. Munem Wasif received Robert Gardener fellowship in 2023 to work on the critical history of indigo in Bengal.