(October 1 - 30, 2026)

A series of newly commissioned moving image works from Bangladesh inspired by the themes of Midnight’s Third Child.

Five works, made over the same few months, a set of overlapping pressures: on the body, on the home, on the ground itself, on what can still be recorded once the official version has moved on.

The shadow of July 2024, sometimes named and sometimes not. Anusha Alamgir's film on the Korail fire reads the burnt settlement partly through the power vacuum that opened after the fall of the Awami League. Sounak Das describes himself and his wife as 'stranded' by that same rupture, stuck in a studio of 30.78 square metres while the paperwork of belonging refuses to be resolved. Sajib Sen's piece carries a recitation spoken in the voice of someone shot in the street and left in the morgue while a curfew settles over the city. The uprising is not exactly the subject of any of these works rather the climate in which they were made.

Confinement runs through them too. Sounak's studio, Sajib's 'cage', and Tahmina Hafiz Lisa's account (made with Mahadi Masud) of gender as a set of walls built so slowly we mistook them for nature. In each case the enclosure is partly architectural and partly something done to the mind. Sounak and Sajib both reach for the machine to make the point, training algorithms on surveillance footage and layering the image with the camera's own watching eye, as if the only honest way to film a person now were to film the thing already filming them.

Then there is the ground. Shohrab Jahan goes into the Sundarbans and lets a villager do the talking, treating the mangrove as an archive in its own right, full of proverbs and weather and loss, rather than as scenery. Anusha's Korail is the city's other edge, flammable and overcrowded, rebuilt overnight by whoever moves into the gap. Both are places being changed and remade.

And the body keeps returning. Tahmina's is living and gendered, scrutinised for the gap between how it looks and what it feels. Sajib's is dead, counted in every state ledger except the one that tallies the bodies. Between them sit Sounak and his wife, two people trying to build something like a home inside a room that was only ever meant to hold them for a while.

The programme is held together by a habit of attention. Each artist is trying to keep hold of something in the middle of disappearing: a settlement, a life in limbo, a forest, a self, a body in the road.

Korail: After the Fire

Anusha Alamgir
2026, 16 mins

A short documentary archiving the aftermath of a major fire in Korail, Dhaka's largest informal settlement. On-site footage records the destruction alongside interviews with first responders, residents, and reactions from the community. The work sets out the cause and spread of the fire and the building and spatial conditions that made it worse: congested layout, flammable structures, narrow access routes and asks who is rebuilding, and how, in the power vacuum that followed the July 2024 uprising.

Cage Beyond the Reality

Sajib Sen
2026, 2.42 mins

In contemporary reality, we have become trapped within new forms of captivity shaped by surveillance over individual identity at various levels, emerging media narratives, and the calculated mechanisms of social media algorithms. In this condition, even the meaning and nature of captivity are constantly shifting from moment to moment. Due to structured manipulation, individuals are gradually losing their own thoughts, ideas, imagination, and sense of individuality, becoming increasingly blurred within society and the state. This process of fading ultimately brings forward a profound crisis of identity. Driven by the needs of an invisible force, systematic manipulation and controlled usage are transforming human beings into discarded remnants washed ashore by artificial intelligence—where human existence itself risks becoming reduced to a byproduct of technological control.

30.78m2

Sounak Das
2026, 3.43 mins

An experimental single-channel moving image work drawn from the artist's ongoing research, 'leaving home to find home'. It excavates the intimate architecture of migrant waiting inside a small studio shared by the artist and his wife, two people stranded after July 2024 and caught between structural violence and the promise of freedom. Through performance, poetic narration, and a machine-learning algorithm trained on surveillance footage, it sets the psychological interior of displacement against the technocratic gaze that classifies migrants as alien. Drawing on Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, it asks whether a home can be built in transition, or whether belonging is only ever performed. A slow, meditative score runs throughout. Designed for both gallery exhibition and online presentation.

The Measure of Distance

Tahmina Hafiz Lisa and Mahadi Masudi
2026, 6 mins

An animated work exploring gender identities built up over thousands of years through society, religion, and culture until the constructed came to feel natural, the way a repeated lie becomes truth. The piece narrows a broad subject to one focus, the gap between visible physical structure and inner emotional feeling and its expression, treating body, emotion, and expression as things held in common across place and time. Mixed media, using manipulated photography, recorded video, and 2D animation.

Golkanon’s Conversation

Shohrab Jahan
2026, 13 mins

A video piece on coexistence in the Sundarbans, one of the world's largest mangrove ecosystems, shaped by the delta of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna. It looks at how forests, people, and histories intersect, and questions human-centred narratives and dominant ideas of development. Combining photography, moving image, sound, and a cartographic viewpoint, it draws on local stories, proverbs, and ecological observation to treat the landscape as a space of memory and change. The work centres on a specific village, with resident(s) narrating their experience of living through environmental and social transformation. Open-ended and responsive to the site, with the final form emerging on location.