Rajat Dey
Scissors & Glue
Scissors & Glue is Kolkata-based photographer Rajat Dey's take on the family album and the moments that have come to define his family, which emigrated to India from Bangladesh during the 1964 riots. Edited from photos, collages, and scanned documents, the work shows the compartments of a family through everyday happenings.
Farhana Satu
Water/Life
I belong from the south-western region of Bangladesh, a low-lying coastal area, the place where the largest mangrove forest in the world, Sundarban exists. As climate change is having an immediate impact on the everyday lives of the people throughout the country, extreme rainfall over Bangladesh’s coastal region is increasing, while silt-heavy runoff from glaciers in the Himalayan Mountains upstream is leading to more flood and riverbank erosion. Environmental Advocates say this creeping salinity is having a huge impact on the environment around Bagerhat district, including a decline in crop yields like seasonal vegetables and stunting coconut and betel plants. Climate experts predict that by 2050, rising sea levels will submerge some 17 percent of Bangladesh’s land, and 25 percent land of Bagerhat district will be submerged. Yet people are persistently combating this crisis and fighting to exist.
The Forest Listens, Their Spirits Cry is a visual elegy of the declining ecological rituals and oral traditions formed within a sacred communal flame of the Filipino indigenous queer and women shamans (‘Babaylan’), who have been vilified as witches for centuries of colonization, as a resistance and reclamation of their spirit, identity, home, and justice to form the final vanguard of environmental protection in the last remaining forests in the Philippines.
The Forest Listens, Their Spirits Cry
Gab Mejia
Rita Khin
Love Lin Liz
I call her little lizard but she calls me my wife monkey, said Lin. Lin and Liz are two young women in love who are hiding from their parents because their love is forbidden. As they cannot be together, they choose to spend time as much as they can. They build a sanctuary for their own. Here they can be who they are, without judgment, without hate.
Eléonore Sok
Seeds and Sap
This series reflects on the standardized images of the female body and the pressure of norms in Cambodian society. Inspired by the universe of the contemporary dancers New Cambodian Artists, "Seeds and Sap" explores the themes of fragmented identity, in-betweenness, and disturbing strangeness. A fantasy where the awkward can cohabit with the beautiful, the vulnerable with the prosaic, and where the inner world of young women echoes the outside world of nature.
JL Javier
Exit Wounds
In Exit Wounds, I attempt to speak about the violence that my father wreaked on me and our family, and about the ways I've come to know myself as the son of a policeman.
Mithila Jariwala
Noise
This work focuses on issues of mental health and individual day to day resistance. Today, mental health is one of the most pressing issues, and how those with mental illnesses are constantly resisting and how these acts of resistance are absent but so implicit. It also portrays how with time we grow through it and learn to manage and respond to these issues better. Noise is no longer an expression of chaos and conflict I felt and experienced. I started perceiving the noise differently. The noise led me to have a loud imagination. I started observing my body. I witnessed my body responding as an act of resistance. I started documenting this response. But this is beyond just my conflict and response. It made visible the small and everyday acts of resistance of people around me or people at large. I continue to document my body, other people, things, places, where I see resistance. It also reinforced the idea that the act of imagination in itself is an act of resistance.
Vidushi Gupta
Oscillation
Is it real or am I imagining it? I was in denial during the initial years of my treatment while struggling with symptoms of a mental disorder. Oscillation is an ongoing body of work that reflects on the emotional and physical distress of people suffering from mental illnesses. After four years of being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder with overlapping symptoms of bipolar disorder, I am ready to visually narrate my experiences and struggles that not only represent me but something that could help some audiences to relate and incentivize awareness among others. I am attempting to create visuals that metaphorically describe my journey. The project intends to bring out the challenges faced while functioning and the social stigma that comes with it.
Kirthana Devdas
The lost glove is happy
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I sometimes dream I can swim through the air. Sometimes I grab onto a lamp post or a roof to steady myself.
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The lost glove is happy is a journey of escape, exploration, and self-discovery, slipping in and out of the real world and an imagined one.
Hui Hsien Ng
Being With Water
Being With Water explores the interconnectedness between our interior worlds and the elemental. It features unique silver gelatin prints made using materials such as water and sunlight. Suggestive of landscapes, dusk, and dawn, the prints visually allude to renewal and transformation, beginnings and endings, hope and loss.
the only thing that keeps us afloat
Curation
Aji Susanto Anom
Anne Murayama
Design and Production
Anne Murayama
Foreword and Editing
Hui Hsien Ng
Poem
Vicky Lemaire
Special Thanks
Angkor Photo Festival & Workshops
Jessica Lim
Publishing and Distribution
ephemere.
1-17-9 Honcho, Koganei City
Tokyo, Japan 184-0004
First Edition, May 2024
Printed in Tokyo, Japan