STEREO
2001-2022
Archival Pigment Print, Series of 37
Kromosho, Project 88, Mumbai, 2021
Wasif photographed and composed “Belonging 2001-2013” over a decade-long engagement. The black and white series portrays the city as the sole protagonist, where the public and the private overlap in a theatrical cadence. Fragmentary at first, depicting encounters that often seem contingent, the images slowly morph into a coherent whole infused with care and compassion. Single frames come to encapsulate a multiplicity of coexisting lives and ephemeral intimate moments. Wasif singles them out from within the vast historic landscape of the city.
In “Stereo”, Wasif shifts his lens to the architecture of inanimate objects as encountered within the cityscape. Verging almost to the point of abstraction, these colored sets of diptychs and triptychs discuss various forms of uniformization. They are typified through the influence of mobile screens, the dependence on mechanized living via an overstuffed refrigerator, and an increasingly standardized understanding of time through a digital clock, precise to the seconds, hung in the otherwise multi-layered streets of Old Dhaka.
The deliberate juxtaposition of the latest photographs in the exhibition alongside the earlier black & white work places the viewer into the hybridized realities of Puran Dhaka, and one is left in a space with a complex impression of contemporary life.
Composed across two decades, the bodies of work it displays rediscover various vantage points through which they have been portrayed while laying bare the city’s multiple idiosyncrasies. They range from ordinary lives on the streets and characters in memory to objects and things as elusive as fragrances.
The deliberate juxtaposition of the latest photographs in the exhibition alongside the earlier black & white work places the viewer into the hybridized realities of Puran Dhaka, and one is left in a space with a complex impression of contemporary life.