MD Minhajul Abedin

Md Minhajul Abedin is a Visual Artist from Bangladesh. He uses photography, archives, and text to explore complex social issues and historical events. His work delves into South Asian Colonial History, place, identity, self-portraiture, and Anthropocene. Abedin’s work encourages viewers to engage with pressing socio-political events by drawing on personal and collective memories.

His ongoing project, ‘In Search of a Lost Tune,’ explores the histories of Bengal and the Indian Partition through photography as a tool for constructing historical memory. He examines how memory and violence are inscribed in place, and how visual practice can reimagine what official narratives have left unsaid. His other project, titled ‘Alien,’ which he is developing in upstate NY, examines how identity is shaped, read, and negotiated in a foreign land, and how traces of the self, visible or unseen, reflect broader questions of migration, visibility, and becoming. It began as a response to his own dislocation, using self-portraiture made within interior spaces to question how identity is performed and perceived. This project also aims to study the brown gaze and diaspora identity.

After completing his bachelor’s degree in fashion merchandising, Abedin studied in a one-year Professional Photography program in Bangladesh, where he studied photojournalism and social documentary photography. In 2023, he moved to the USA to start his MFA degree in Photography at Syracuse University. In his MFA program, he is focusing on developing his knowledge of Photographic history, theory and critical analysis of the medium. Learning research methodologies to work with information in developing documentary work. He aims to work in editorial, social documentary, and teaching after he graduates.

Abedin’s work has earned recognition, including the ICP Museum, Sharjah Art Foundation, Asian Art Biennale, Felix Scholler Emerging Photo Award, Sony WPO Student Grant, and Ian Parry Scholarship, and has been published in a book edited by David Campny and in the Sunday Times, The Daily Star, Canvas Revel, The Business Standard, Aramco World magazine, etc.