Amid the endless ruins and renewals of our time, worlds crumble and quietly reassemble, compelling us to confront what is unfinished and unresolved. In moments like this, the desire to begin again turns into an aching, insistent need.
The prefix “Re” means again, anew, or otherwise. A repetition, a reversal, a reopening. It assumes an existing order of things. It is a rupture between past and present: breath after silence, memory after disappearance, seed after ash, a world yet to come.
This year, Chobi Mela (re)connects photographers, filmmakers, artists, storytellers, and collectives across geographies under the theme of Re. These trace forms of expression in lands marked by loss and violence, in bodies that resist, in rituals that have survived erasure. They also intend to initiate a dialogue between various mediums, practices and cultures.
Conflict has a way of causing fissures in media practices. Historical atrocities are visually and aesthetically exploited, to justify new violence and spectacle. Grotesque surveillance regimes are the norm. Photography, with its roots in imperial contexts, can create a gap between the seen and unseen, the remembered and forgotten—bearing witness while also erasing. Images, paradoxically, can both undo and sustain this status quo. Re stems from an urge to reopen these difficult questions, to reflect on and critically rethink the image-making process today.
These works seek continuity, not closure. They return to land as a living archive, to rivers as witnesses, to dreams, scars and whispers, to protest. They move from the Nile to Beirut, from olive trees that outlive apartheid to the mother awaiting the return of her forcefully-disappeared son in Dhaka, from WhatsApp screenshots smuggled out of Gaza to nomadic classrooms in Karachi. These stories are witnesses of the passage of time, they are lullabies for the disappeared, rituals for the ones who stayed behind, prayers made of pixels and dust.
Across these works, we see the image not only as a response, but as an interruption that troubles dominant narratives and archives, and demands something different. To remember is to refuse erasure. To tell a story is to preserve dignity. And to bear witness is to carry forward the hope of those made unseen. In a world of impasse, “Re” dares to begin again.
Amid the endless ruins and renewals of our time, worlds crumble and quietly reassemble, compelling us to confront what is unfinished and unresolved. In moments like this, the desire to begin again turns into an aching, insistent need.
The prefix “Re” means again, anew, or otherwise. A repetition, a reversal, a reopening. It assumes an existing order of things. It is a rupture between past and present: breath after silence, memory after disappearance, seed after ash, a world yet to come.
This year, Chobi Mela (re)connects photographers, filmmakers, artists, storytellers, and collectives across geographies under the theme of Re. These trace forms of expression in lands marked by loss and violence, in bodies that resist, in rituals that have survived erasure. They also intend to initiate a dialogue between various mediums, practices and cultures.
Conflict has a way of causing fissures in media practices. Historical atrocities are visually and aesthetically exploited, to justify new violence and spectacle. Grotesque surveillance regimes are the norm. Photography, with its roots in imperial contexts, can create a gap between the seen and unseen, the remembered and forgotten—bearing witness while also erasing. Images, paradoxically, can both undo and sustain this status quo. Re stems from an urge to reopen these difficult questions, to reflect on and critically rethink the image-making process today.
These works seek continuity, not closure. They return to land as a living archive, to rivers as witnesses, to dreams, scars and whispers, to protest. They move from the Nile to Beirut, from olive trees that outlive apartheid to the mother awaiting the return of her forcefully-disappeared son in Dhaka, from WhatsApp screenshots smuggled out of Gaza to nomadic classrooms in Karachi. These stories are witnesses of the passage of time, they are lullabies for the disappeared, rituals for the ones who stayed behind, prayers made of pixels and dust.
Across these works, we see the image not only as a response, but as an interruption that troubles dominant narratives and archives, and demands something different. To remember is to refuse erasure. To tell a story is to preserve dignity. And to bear witness is to carry forward the hope of those made unseen. In a world of impasse, “Re” dares to begin again.