Munem Wasif in conversation with Tanzim Wahab

Name: Crossing #2 – (The Sun)
Start: 2022-07-22T19:00:00+02:00
End: 2022-07-22T21:00:00+02:00
Location: Stadtgalerie Museumspavillon, in the Mirabellgarten, 5020 Salzburg

Crossing #2 - (The Sun)

22 July 2022 / 7–9 pm CEST

Stadtgalerie Museumspavillon, in the Mirabellgarten, 5020 Salzburg

Credits:
(1) Sarker Protick
(2) Tanzim Wahab Portrait

Seeds Shall Set Us Free

Artist Munem Wasif in conversation with Tanzim Wahab (director of Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography, Dhaka).

In this shared conversation, artist Munem Wasif and curator Tanzim Wahab will discuss Wasif’s mixed-media work Seeds Shall Set Us Free (2019/22), and the ways the artist seeks to reimagine an indigenous "ecosophical" mode of agriculture. The destruction of the agricultural balance marks today's layers of a land-grab through the introduction of plantation farming and cash crops ("market fruits"). Wasif questions the notion of land and its cultivation, tied to a specific political and geographic context, which eventually could be anywhere. In his work, the grain becomes a living entity in its own right, a companion species to humanity, having names, deities and spirits around which farming is organised.

The event is in English language, you can find the documentation video here: https://youtu.be/KrjVGZ-ff9A

Munem Wasif (Bangladesh) is an artist, curator and educator. His work examines the concepts of "documents"' and "archives" and their corresponding influence on politically and geographically complex issues. He has been a co-curator of Chobi Mela since the festival’s eighth edition and has curated three major survey shows for the festival: legendary Bangladeshi photographer Anwar Hossain (2015), Nasir Ali Mamun (2017) and Rashid Talukder (2019). In 2020/21, Wasif was a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His works have been shown in institutions worldwide, including the Centre Pompidou, Whitechapel Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur and the Chobi Mela Photo Festival.

Tanzim Wahab is a curator, researcher and lecturer. He is the director of Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography. He has headed several curatorial research projects and exhibitions including Breaking Ground – featuring works of the modernist forerunners of Bengal, (Dis) Place – an exhibition about displacement; looking at the possibility of a post-historical space and function as a symbolic “act of discharge” (with Hadrien Diez) and currently co-editing Primary Documents – The Museum of Modern Arts’ (MoMA) publication series on international art. Wahab, alongside Munem Wasif, has published two editions of Kamra – a comprehensive publication in Bengali, setting ideas and debates of photographic history and theories. He has also been a fellow of several programs, including Art for Social Change, United States, and Art Think South Asia (ATSA), India, among others.