Following an international search, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, is pleased to announce the selection of Munem Wasif as the 2023 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography. The fellowship provides a $50,000 stipend to begin or complete a proposed project followed by the publication of a book.
Based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, Munem Wasif is a photographer, mixed media artist, curator, and teacher. He will use his non-residential fellowship to work on Nil (নীল) (the Sanskrit for “indigo”), a photographic, archival, and mixed-media project he describes as a “layered narrative about the critical history of indigo in Bengal.”
Once used for blue jeans, indigo is one of the oldest textile dyes; the trade of this valuable commodity flourished as far back as medieval times. The history of its production is steeped in exploitation, with links to the transatlantic slave trade. Munem begins his history exploring how “indigo dye fed a thriving British cotton textile industry during the first part of the nineteenth century.” At that time, the British East India Company identified the Bengal region as having an ideal climate for indigo production and offered high interest loans to entice locals to replace their traditional crops—such as rice—with indigo. Farmers received little compensation for their harvests and the promised profits never materialized. Trapped under escalating debt, they mounted a series of widespread protests and strikes in what is known as Bengal’s Indigo Revolt (1859–1860). As a result, the British colonial authorities created an Indigo Commission which was deeply critical of the indigo cultivation system in Bengal and pronounced that the farmers could not be forced to grow indigo.
“The resulting indigo monoculture—and its multilayered consequences—would be the ground zero of this project,” says Munem. “I have been exploring an intricate web of dependence and dissent, self-image and oppression, food, subsistence, and trauma in my home country, Bangladesh. This research is steeped in the conditions set by capitalist exploitation and colonial oppression. Key to my endeavor is the question of how one can link current injustices with past oppressions. To phrase it differently: if one accepts that injustice works in patterns, then I am keen in exposing their mechanisms and to explore the conditions of their realization.”
“Munem’s career has been distinguished by his sympathetic and piercing focus on the dynamics of global exploitation,” said Jane Pickering, William & Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Previous projects include Seeds Shall Set Us Free (2017–2021)—a series of cyanotype prints of rice seeds, juxtaposed with archive documents and photographs from one of the largest community grain banks in the country—and Machine Matter (2017), an examination of the death of the jute industry in Bangladesh.
“His passion and creativity have been constants in his career, but what has also surfaced is his concern for the human condition and the breadth of his creative approach…Never shy of taking on the major topics of the day and addressing the gross inequalities that exist, he has, however, chosen a path that is different from the flag-waving fervor of the activist in the street, choosing instead to seep into the cracks of your mind, penetrating deep beneath the surface. He has learnt the language of powerful whispers,” said Bangladeshi photojournalist Shahidul Alam.
Munem’s work is also characterized by his attention to the voices of the human victims in the industries he documents. In Nil (নীল), he plans to collect testimonies, oral histories, folklore and will re-interpret the local canon such as Nil Dorpon (Indigo Mirror), a Bengali play depicting the farmers’ uprising. “Aesthetically his photographs find a delicate balance between sheer beauty—with rich tonalities using every shade of grey between black and white—and serous inquiry into the ongoing tragedy generated by long-term colonial abuse,” said Ilisa Barbash, Curator of Visual Anthropology at the Peabody Museum. “His attention to both detail and large-scale, focus both on individuals and crowds, draw viewers in and then pack a wallop when they realize what they are actually seeing.”
The sixteenth recipient of the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography, Munem Wasif is a graduate of Pathshala—the South Asian Institute of Photography—and started as a photographer for the Daily Star, a leading English daily in Bangladesh. Wasif’s book publications include 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.
In 2007, Munem Wasif was selected for the World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass in the Netherlands. In 2008, he was awarded Ville de Perpignan Rémi Ochlik in Visa pour l'image in Perpignan, France. Following that, he was awarded the Prix Pictet Commission for his work on the water crisis in the northwest region of Bangladesh. He also won the F25 award from Fabrica in Treviso, a research center on communication, for his long-term project In God We Trust exploring the intersections of culture and the religion Islam in Bangladesh. In 2016, he was awarded the Bengal Practice Grant to produce Kheyal, a short-fiction film based in Old Dhaka. Wasif was also a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany in 2020-2021 and co-curator of upcoming Biennale Für Aktuelle Fotografie, Germany.
Wasif has been exhibited worldwide including Gwangju, Singapore, Sharjah, Lyon Biennials; Chobi Mela & Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka; Photo Kathmandu, Nepal; The Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Vietnam; Parasite, Hong Kong; Art Jameel and Ishara Art Foundation, UAE; Center Pompidou, Palais de Tokyo and the Visa pour l'image festival, France; Whitechapel Gallery, Kettle's Yard and Victoria & Albert Museum, England; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Spain; Musée d'Art et d'Histoire and Fotomuseam Winterthur, Switzerland; and Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Australia.
“Filmmaker Robert Gardner (1925–2014) exercised extraordinary vision when he generously endowed this prestigious fellowship to support emerging and mid-career photographers to document, as he put it, ‘the human condition anywhere in the world,’” said Jane Pickering. “We are grateful to Robert Gardner and his wife, Adele Pressman, as well as the anonymous award committee and nominators, and the extraordinary artists who have participated in this program as artists and as nominees.”
About the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography
Robert Gardner Fellowship Recipients
Media contact: Faith Sutter