You may have noticed that I haven’t been very active here on this blog lately. I was super enthusiastic about getting this three-letter domain and writing regularly on this blog. However, as they say, life happened. And I’m about to tell you all about it.
Between work and study, this semester at the university, we were tasked with what can only be described as something we never thought we’d do. We needed to come up with some ideas or concepts and then make masks as well as paint on the wall to get the message across to the audience.
Yup, sounds like just another day in the Department of Media Studies and Journalism at University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh.
Thankfully, though, we did manage to finish up all of the projects by the time we were supposed to exhibit what we’d done at Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in an exhibition titled “Fakers, Haters & Stalkers — The Urgency of Social Media Literacy.”
At the core, this was aimed at spreading awareness among the audience that what you do on social media affects people in real life, and not everything that you see or read on social media reflects the reality. We wanted to showcase how people are bullied online, how people’s hatreds destroy others, and how there are tons of people online who are just fake.
The exhibition in under 5 minutes
I’ve combined some clips that I shot at the exhibition with my Xiaomi Yi 2 action camera (thus the poor low-light performance). This does not include all of the projects that were exhibiting but does include most of what was worth a look.
For reference, our mask-making project is at 01:52 mark in the video and our wall art photo (meaning we took a photo of the wall that we painted with our concept) is at 03:34 mark.
As you can see, I myself was quite surprised at some of the concepts and performances that they presented at the exhibition. I hope at least some people learned something from all of our efforts.
Going through the tedious task of making the mask, painting the masks, finding a wall, obtaining permission to paint it, coming up with a design, outlining the wall, and then finally painting the wall required weeks of efforts although, admittedly, most of it was done by my fellow group members. 😀
In the end, it was an interesting experience to go through all of what I previously thought only a Fine Arts student would have to go through. But it did give me an interesting experience in terms of communicating with the mass audience.
What a cool project! I love the awareness it brings to social media bullying and preying on innocent people, especially. You all should be really proud of those projects!
Thanks! It was tough getting there, but we all hope that it helped bring some sense to at least some of the people in the society.
there was another art project at the exhibition. it was a black booth made of long black clothe and black paper. it was totally dark because of the UV light they used. May i know why you havent added that project in your video? everyone loved it a lot.
Actually, I remember that black booth at the corner, but I didn’t have a chance to visit it myself because I was constantly being called back to my own project by the group members. Plus, the booth was too dark for the camera to capture anything usable. As a result, like some other projects shown at the exhibition, that did not go into the final video. Hope that answers your question. Thanks for your comment!