Janna Afifa

Tension in the Motherland

A congested, yet isolated depiction of industrialized, urban sprawl, a common scene from the rooftops of the many apartment buildings in Bangladesh.

“This work ties in conflicts with my mother to my home country using its fractured and industrialised landscape as the method for conveying the subject matter. This picture was taken from the rooftop of a family member’s apartment building, and it captures a moment where I felt a strange sense of utter disconnect from the country I’d been born in, mirror the disconnect and tensions present with my own mother. Since the issue of motherhood and women as maternal figures of the homeland are so closely tied, this lonely depiction of one of the most crowded places on Earth speaks to the ubiquity of my struggles and the threads that regardless of how much I push, ties me back to this land and the family that resides here.”