The past has always belonged to the present. Floods, migrations, and homelessness are conditions that return repeatedly to those who stay by the river in Bangladesh, and artists on both sides of the border have captured them with words that bleed; films that are constructed like nightmares, or photographs that make ‘moving on’ difficult. ‘Climate Migrants’, an exhibition of Abir Abdullah, a veteran photographer from Bangladesh, who has shown the human condition in the backdrop of climate change, has for the first time been exhibited in Delhi. In 2015, he had a solo at the Maya Art Space in Kolkata during the Nepal earthquake that year.
Abir’s work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide, including The New York Times, Asia Week, Der Spiegel, The Los Angeles Times, and The Guardian. He won first prize at the South Asian Journalists Association Photo Award (1998). In 2001, he won the Phaidon 55 photography competition. His work has been exhibited around the world, from Mexico and Germany to Iran, China and the USA, as well as in his home country Bangladesh.
The 41 photographs mounted at the Alliance Francaise exhibition in Delhi on Saturday (August 19) recall the recent floods of Delhi and the struggles of ordinary people whose homes and lives were battered by torrential rain and landslides in North India. The exhibition ends on September 2.
The portraits stand out in the way their subjects look at the camera. Or, as they look away. A girl looks on half-puzzled, her eyes aflame, from behind a makeshift polythene tent during the 2007 floods. A woman holding her child walks towards a shelter as Cyclone Mocha (2023) takes hold in an island near the Myanmar border. A cyclone-affected woman in all her brokenness looks out from an unhinged window of her house reduced to rubble. Face averted, another woman stands for the last time at the edge of eroding land near Dhaka, her home for the past 15 years, before she is forced to move on.
“These faces are deadpan, but if you look at their eyes, the eyes are confronting us perhaps asking us ‘what are you doing to help?’They are loaded with silent emotion, or it could also be resilience,” says Abir of the photographs, some of which are from 2007 when he got a commission from the World Press Photo Foundation to produce photographs for a book.
The things the women said have stayed with him. “‘This is our own land and it will go to the river by tomorrow. By tomorrow, we will also become refugees’, said a woman I met,” he recounts. “Pushpa Rani Roy had been shifting house for two days. She was strong, and didn’t show any emotion. She was packing up her entire life in little bundles. She was worried about her cows as well. But suddenly she took a pause, and that was the moment I took the photo of her against the uncertain horizon of water.”
In the photos, Abir includes small details of their daily lives—the hurriedly picked up slipper, a child’s feeding bottle—disrupted by the sudden crises so as to invite the viewer “to go deeper into their lives and feel as if they are part of the families or that it is happening to their families”.
“All memory is individual and unreproducible. What Abir Abdullah has done is to bring alive the crisis he has witnessed first-hand of the people in Bangladesh whose existence has been devastated by famine or floods year after year,” says Ina Puri, the curator of the exhibition, who is also a writer and documentarian.
“Outside of Bangladesh, every county is suffering from different natural disasters. Himachal Pradesh has witnessed huge torrential rain and landslides recently that killed many people. Delhi was under water. Fires burnt down a huge forest in Greece. The wildfires of Maui in Hawaii devastated the whole city with its citizens in perpetual survival mode. Western Canada is burning now,” said the photographer.
His photographs, however, point to a deeper loss—the loss of place, the certainty of home, the uprooting of culture, the burial of memories. And the fact that while there is hope, for some people, there is truly no moving on.