Salma Abedin Prithi is a Bangladeshi photographer exploring human vulnerability, resilience, and psychological experience. Her work Mundane focuses on social and domestic violence, capturing staged moments that reveal emotional intensity, endurance, and mental strength. Through careful enactment, the photographs trace the psychological expressions of people during moments of distress, offering insight into fear, anxiety, and collective trauma. Prithi’s images investigate the interplay between intimacy, dependency, and power, highlighting gestures that convey both control and loss. Her approach merges realism with performative storytelling, creating a visual language that is sensitive, experimental, and emotionally resonant. She emphasizes dignity, individuality, and the sovereignty of each subject, aiming to give voice to those affected by social violence while encouraging reflection on collective memory and shared experiences. Her work is not only a documentation of events but also a meditation on human resilience, memory, and the psyche in moments of crisis. Mundane invites viewers to engage deeply with the psychological and emotional dimensions of everyday social realities.
Salma Abedin Prithi
Mundane
Social violence in Bangladesh has become a frequent presence, shaping fear and unease in the everyday lives of community members. In this work, I bring these moments into an intimate interior setting, placing the scenes of violence within familiar domestic space. This allows our collective memories to meet these events, and invites us to consider the unseen psychological reality of the victims or their families. The images are not direct representations of real incidents, but imagined reenactments that trace the emotional truth of those moments.
The people in the photographs are community members who lent their their bodies, gestures, and emotions to embody these experiences. My intention is to create a space where communities can speak about violence and its psychological weight—our collective trauma, our endurance, and our attempts to continue.
The work does not seek to normalize violence. Instead, it supports the position of the victims, showing their resilience, vulnerability, and inner strength. Mundane focuses on the mental image beyond the visible, recognizing that the body often carries gestures shaped by training, safety, silence, or fear—gestures that sometimes break open in crisis.
As an artist working within socially engaged practice, I explore visual language that can speak to sensitive political realities while navigating censorship and surveillance. Mundane is an attempt to create a shared space of reflection, where silence can become expression, and where the individuality and dignity of each victim is remembered. It asks how we, as a society, absorb and respond to moments of violence that enter our everyday life.