From Bangladesh, thousands of women leave each year, propelled by economic precarity and social abandonment, toward the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia, chasing the fragile promise of a more dignified life. They depart with dreams stitched from sacrifice, their lives tethered to families left behind. Under the global regime of neoliberal extraction, their movement is not liberation but dispossession, an export of feminized labor rendered invisible and unprotected.
Once across the border, many are absorbed into the carceral architecture of modern-day slavery, where captivity is sustained not by iron shackles but by fear, dependency, and erasure. Inside private households, one of the most unregulated and violent labor sites in the world, they are subjected to psychological degradation, starvation, sexual coercion, and relentless dehumanization. When they die, their deaths are written away as “suicides,” a bureaucratic lie masking an industrialized system of abuse. Their absence becomes a statistic; their suffering is deliberately anonymized.
Yet the exodus continues. Poverty, domestic violence, climate displacement, and structural misogyny leave women with no viable horizon of survival within Bangladesh. Patriarchy offers prayer as consolation while foreclosing justice. Predatory brokers, posing as “agents of opportunity,” traffic women into cycles of bondage. When they flee, they return to the same broken structures that pushed them away. Their grief migrates with them; their trauma does not end at repatriation.
‘Unhealed Beneath Grieving Skies’ is a multi-layered counter-archive created with returnee women migrants through the process of sharing. It surfaces the persistent psychic, social, and existential wounds: disjointed identities, stateless belonging, economic disenfranchisement, and acute interior fissures. The work performs both documentation and insurgency, contesting the normalized violence of neoliberal systems and illuminating the gendered infrastructures that exploit, discipline, and annihilate women’s lived realities.
Sumi Anjuman’s artistic trajectory unfolds against Bangladesh’s conservative Islamic social order, where gendered subjugation is naturalized as a cultural norm. Her lived encounters with gender-specific violence have sensitized her to the intimate and historical wounds carried within collective memory. She mobilizes photography as a counter-discursive practice, a form of quiet insurrection that reclaims voice, presence, and epistemic agency for those rendered invisible Her methodology, which she terms “healing through creation,” functions as a multivocal and reparative documentary praxis. Through staged imagery, hand-embroidery, textual inscriptions, moving image, re- photography, and archival intervention, she constructs multilayered visual ecologies that unsettle hegemonic narratives and enable critical re-imagination. Sumi Anjuman is currently based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where she teaches at Counter Foto – A Center for Visual Art. She holds a master’s degree in Photography & Society from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, The Netherlands, and previously completed a three-year diploma in Photography at Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in Dhaka.
