Balancing the Corner
/ হ য ব র ল

Balancing the Corner’ is a photographic series of sculptures made with mundane objects during this pandemic. The work grew with obsession, focus, and intimacy over belongings in an undesired time frame of life, more like a documentation of pandemic days.

​In March 2020, the whole country was seized with the virus and the entire country was in lockdown. Social distancing made sure that everyone was confined within the four walls of their houses. Initially, time slowed down and life became monotonous. In this never seen before time, in all of our lives we changed and adapted to the new normal. Time passed very slowly and in a boring way. Our life stuck in preparing meals, attending online classes, and maintaining the household chores. The habit of meeting friends and relatives was interrupted after the pandemic and cooking-cleaning materials became prominent. People started to grow relationships with the spaces they lived in. The old corners of the same houses became new horizons. Ordinary objects started entering our life. These objects became vibrant and helped us survive this pandemic. ​

I grew up with my cousins. Our family has a tradition of spending quality time together at the dining table after meals. Hot summer noons are unbearable outside. So, my cousins rather choose to fight over socio-political conditions for hours after lunch without leaving the dining room. I loved to be in a group but felt those discussions were long and boring to participate in. While everyone was busy standing their points on topics, I kept trying to compile utensils and balance them. A way to be present and also distant at the same time. However, those sculptures could barely stand for a few minutes and the falling noise used to dismiss the conversations too.

During pandemic, being separated and stuck in a house, I started playing again with mundane objects. That time I photographed those unpreservable sculptures. I recognized it as a way of passing or capturing the unbearable time of disaster while staying distant from the rest of the world.   

This project started initially with my experience of the pandemic and slowly I interviewed other people to collect their experiences and objects. Being stuck at home, I started making sculptures out of these mundane ordinary objects. I have observed these objects from a new perspective, sometimes individually as objects and other times as a whole. I then photographed these objects by creating imbalanced sculptures in a corner of my room. Time has been a very important aspect of this body of work in many ways. The entire process takes a lot of time and is very experimental. Using the objects as a form and balancing them to bring the composition makes me satisfied in many ways.

​I further extended this project by taking it to the streets and public spaces. In order to overcome my boundaries. I formed a team to take interviews with others around them.

These sculptures were created based on the words, picked from the core of the interviews of citizens of Dhaka. Later words became a part of the images (as an ongoing experiment). I started writing the core parts of the interviews on the images and intend to keep the words merging with the image texture or pattern.  So that those are not visible at the first glance or standing far from the images. The audience needs to come closer and find those words carefully. The process reminds/connects with my image-making practice of searching for words from others and figuring out the thoughts of the interviewees, which need to search out from the imbalanced sculptures.