Mashruk Ahmed

Biography:

Mashruk Ahmed is a visual Storyteller, educator, and Printmaker. The epic journey for exploring knowledge of contemporary visual culture led him to study towards an Arts degree in the department of documentary photography at Counter Foto - A Center for Visual Arts.

During his study program, the classes in Art History and Visual Anthology inspired him towards a long-term research-based art project on "The Role of Bangladeshi Women Freedom Fighters in the 1971 Liberation War". After completing his academic study, he was attracted to the historical photographic printing process. Nowadays, he has been experimenting with the Alternative Chlorophyll print process and Cyanotype, where he is exploring sustainable Art and nature.

As a storyteller, Mashruk's work presents how people bear witness to and narrate experiences of violence, love and loss, displacement, and forced migration through visual media.

His couple projects were exhibited nationally and internationally in different photo festivals. In 2018, he was awarded The Andrei Stenin International Press Photo Award.
 

Morning and Mourning

Medium – Digital Photograph
Time – (2022 - Ongoing)

Morning makes everything around you and inside you so calm that you can almost smell the soft holiness in the air. Mourning begins with death and absoluteness of all pure things commence in the morning. My mother believes morning is the purest time of the day when you can hear your loneliness in every beat of your heart.

Morning and Mourning is a story of acceptance of grief. The night my father died, I was sitting beside him when he breathed his last breath. The morning after as I watched the sunrise holding his ice-cold hands in mine I felt my soul was converging into an abyss. I felt guilty for something that was out of my control as if something I did led to this tragedy. I was walking through time in a feverish state. His presence ceased to matter as I could feel his soulless body under my breath. Grieving a loved one is different than watching their soul fade away. It makes us question if life on this earth ever mattered at all. Grief and love are so intertwined into one another. The absence seeps in through the walls. Silence echoes into itself molding every planned moment of the future as a ridiculous mistaken optimism.

My father's death has left our family utterly scattered and unresolved. After living for 40 years with her beloved, my mother seeks patience to escape the longing. She prays for his sins to be forgiven and a good life to be granted to him in the afterlife. She spends her mornings praying for his peace. My father's coat in the absence of his warmth smells of rue. His presence was a habit of choice, a choice she made many moons ago after falling in love with him enough to marry him.

My mother mourns for her beloved with no hesitation or constriction. She cries for him like an infant does for their mother. She feels rudderless and lost without him. She longs for her beloved as every lover does, a longing with muted uproar and obscure grief. His absence pains her in the most mundane sense that a human is capable of feeling. She prayed for patience and repentance. She prayed with tears because she thought tears were only fruitful in front of God. The question of giving up on the permanence of her loved one shall remain unanswered until her love shall remain. It lives and breathes as a human does. The lack of his presence affects her more than his presence ever did.

After I lost my father I got closer to photography, to my medium of art as if it was going me salvation from this pain. My mother, however, got absorbed by her faith in the Almighty. My father’s demise affected the whole equilibrium of the family as nature must have intended. Slowly it will return to a new equilibrium as the acceptance of grief seeps in. After losing one of the family members, somehow death brings the others closer, making the world seem more temporary and dynamic. Death takes something and gives something back as if it is the embodiment of the ocean.