Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh 21 January – 11 April 2010 The Whitechapel Gallery presents the first major survey of historic and contemporary photography from the subcontinent. This landmark exhibition explores culture and modernity through the lens of photographers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with over 400 works by 82 artists. Images on show range from the earliest days of photography in 1860 to the present day. Seminal works from the most important collections of historic photography, including the renowned Alkazi Collection in Delhi, the Drik Archive in Dhaka, the Abhishek Poddar Collection in Bangalore, and the...

During three years of political and ethnic crisis in East-Timor, 150 000 people were forced to avoid their villages, and more than 5000 houses were razed. The government is not able to commence reconstruction efforts before ethnic and security problems are resolved. The resumption of political and security efforts on the island has only been possible until recently (as of May 2009), by relocating police and military forces in districts under the control of looters and bandits. Populations attempt to rebuild their lives in abandoned villages. They work on foundations for the circulation of people and information: roads, schools, and barracks are still under construction. The...

In the South Philippines, on Mindanao Island, some 200 000 civilians are living in IDP’s camp, because of interethnic violence. Nowadays, the Philippines must contain clashes between Muslim communities of the south and their Catholic neighbours. In a recent engagement, on August 18 2008, 16 Catholics were killed in this region as a response to the local government’s efforts to stop an autonomist movement in Mindanao. Munem Wassif exposes the daily life in the refugee camps of the Mindanao region. Many of the refugees were victims of the August 18 attack, and their lives are marked by fears of new violence. Adding to this perpetual state of fear are dangerous life conditions and...

The lack of drinking water in Bangladesh. In Southwest Bangladesh, in the Satkhira district, water is invading lands only to bring destruction. Beause it’s saturated with salt. Munem Wasif crosses those desolated lands, testifying the damages of global warming.

The Piyain river flows in the valley bringing water from the mighty Himalayas. On one river bank, ten thousand labourers work relentlessly- in fact 2,500 of them are women, and nearly 1,500 children. « Dhaka houses that look like palaces, where rich men live, are made from the same stones we sieve from the river. But in this day of hardship, we hardly have money for a bowl of rice," says Kulsum Begum, 52. The Piyain brings with it several million tons of stone boulders. The workers who earn less than two dollars a day, meet 90 percent of the stones required to supply the growing demand for the booming construction industry of the country.

Puran Dhaka, or Old Dhaka, was a rather unlikely subject. For it existed all around me. I live here. It was almost trying to find the unseen within the everyday. Old Dhaka had made me appreciate properly cooked greasy food, the sleaziest of slang, and it is where I had come to rediscover the same small town pulse of holding on to things than letting go. My own childhood years in Comilla, a small district town surrounded by mostly rural settings and steep with customs and old world lifestyle, had made me not just appreciate but rather feel at home with relations which emboldened from the duration of time spent and bordered on tradition more than trend. But through the frames, my Old Dhaka...

The Rohingya refugees are a Muslim ethnic minority who live in the Northern State of Arakan or Rakhine State near the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. In 1978, a total of 167,000 Rohingya refugees entered Bangladesh, following 'Operation Nagamin Sit Sin Yay' (Dragon King) of the Myanmar Army, which resulted in widespread killings, rape and destruction of mosques and further religious persecution. [Figure Source: SAFHR: South Asian Forum for Human Rights] After international pressure, the Government of Myanmar allowed most of the Rohingyas who had fled to Bangladesh to return but during 1991-92, a new wave of over a quarter of a million Rohingyas fled to Bangladesh. Forced out of Burma, they...

Jute is the golden fibre of Bangladesh, and our national asset. When it wasn’t sure to maintain production at a satisfactory level, all the factories in the Karnaphuli Jute Mill LTD Khulna, the FKC and the Kaum and Peoples' Jute Mill LTD closed. This situation is due to several factors, such as the status of workers, the crisis of raw jute, the extreme financial crisis, the lack of production, and insufficient electricity. There was a time when jute was the backbone of Bangladeshi agriculture. But the radiant history of this golden fibre has been wiped out brutally from the lives of millions of people. A total of 3645 varieties of jute including Tossa, Bagi, Deshi Naillya and others...

In the last 10 years, farmers like Hatem Ali have had to disassemble and move their tin-and-bamboo houses five times to escape the encroaching waters of the huge Brahmaputra River in Kurigram. This river is swollen out of all proportion by severe monsoon that scientists attribute to global warming and melting ice in the Himalayas.. Bangladesh with a population of 140 million people crammed into an area slightly smaller than the state of Illinois is a target of the most vulnerable to global warming. Some must live with the memory of losing grip on their child when he is swept away by tidal waves at angry awakening of Sidr; Some may still view their lost crops swaying in the fields and today...

Estate — maybe just a word, and yet words have their own tales. Picturesque plush green fields, healthy livestock grazing, and that grand mansion, are all etched in popular history. Yet, there are tales of lives which have remained shaded, in fact shadowed, under clouds that caress either the fertile fields, or for that matter the flowing hills of Tea Estates of Assam in India, or Sylhet and Hobiganj in Bangladesh. They are the tales of cornered lives, chronic poverty and chained hope. This is the tale of ‘Tainted Tea’. prawling green hills, petit women in colourful saris, picking tea leaves and throwing them into the tukri on their back — the image we are shown. A picture perfect tale...