Three weeks before Bangladesh's first nationally touted free elections since 2008, the Dhaka international photography festival Chobi Mela has opened across downtown venues, asking what it means to try to rebuild a society from its ruins.

The festival lands at a perilous moment for the country's cultural life. Mob violence targeting arts and media groups in December drew condemnation from the United Nations and from secular cultural organisations. Munem Wasif, the photographer-curator who co-organises Chobi Mela, has already shifted the festival's dates three times under political pressure. Still, he felt that "we can't just sit at home and hide."

"We have to address the time we are in, across the region," Wasif says. "There is a sense of collapse of order but also of solidarity—a sense that certain things need to be changed."

With co-curator Sarker Protick, Wasif has assembled a programme of themed and solo exhibitions by international and Bangladeshi artists that unfolds the very idea of "revolution", examining how history repeats itself even as a society seeks to reform its present.

The backdrop is the so-called Monsoon Revolution of summer 2024, the most dramatic in a string of youth-driven uprisings that have toppled governments from Colombo to Kathmandu over four years—and, in Bangladesh's case, one fraught with disappointment. Until 2024, artists worked under former prime minister Sheikh Hasina's authoritarian government, which monopolised access to funding and foreign collaboration. Many arts institutions became propaganda machines; Hasina's cultural officials "just wanted to please the national leader," one Bangladeshi artist told the Financial Times last year. In the post-revolutionary insecurity, artists are now experimenting with an uncertain independence, and Chobi Mela has let them engage foreign artists on their own terms.

Among them is the Pakistani multimedia artist Bani Abidi, who shows a 2021 series of photographs satirising male political authority—The reassuring hand gestures of big men, small men, all men—and will lead a workshop on her practice. Abidi wants to draw out the underlying similarities in how "Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have dealt with our dictatorships and social structures over the decades." Such dialogues, she argues, are necessary "to innovate a South Asian imaginary" that is "not focused on the nation state" yet "deeply rooted in a detailed understanding of locality."

The festival also stitches together moments of solidarity across geography. The exhibition But a Wound that Fights, titled after the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, presents war and displacement as "a portal, opening new territory," in Wasif's words—"a point of resistance." It refuses national siloes, placing Bangladeshi indigenous artist Mong Mong Shay, whose digital and oil works deploy the human body to unsettling effect, beside Myriam Boulos, whose unflinching photographs depict violence visited on the people of Lebanon.

A second exhibition, If the Land Could Speak, treats ecology as a symbol of oppression. It traces land-grabbing from Mexico to the slums of Karachi and the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, where a million indigenous people live under military occupation in dense jungle. The show asks viewers to connect the dwindling olive groves of Palestine with the Sundarbans, the vast mangrove swamp divided between Bangladesh and India at the mouth of the Ganges. There, according to Bangladeshi photographer Mrittika Gain, villagers must "wage an endless war, floating above the saline waters." Her photographs document lives on the front lines of climate change, hung alongside work from similar contexts worldwide.

Gain, who belongs to Bangladesh's minority Hindu community, describes her current predicament as feeling "more free but less secure"—a condition she shares, in different ways, with artists across the global South who have gathered in Dhaka this week. What binds them, Abidi suggests, is "a gentler tone of love for ordinary people and their choices, vulnerability and resistance."

Chobi Mela's wager is that granular, local authenticity can serve universal artistic concerns. "Now that the West has shown us its uglier side," Abidi says, "we are all just clambering back to our own histories to figure out what the fuck is going on."

With the festival running into an election that will test whether the Monsoon Revolution's promise holds, Dhaka's photographers and their regional peers are likely to keep pressing that question long after the exhibitions close.