The story of Dhaka City Exhibition in the UK (2005-2010)

Online Event – Wednesday, 4 June 2025

The story of Dhaka City Exhibition in the UK (2005-2010)

A presentation by Dr M Ahmedullah

Exhibition researcher, photographer and curator

In June 2025, it will be twenty years since I first delivered my 'Dhaka City Exhibition in the UK' (4-14 June 2005) at the Mile End Art Pavilion. Hundreds of people visited the exhibition, perhaps several thousand over the nine days, including seventeen school class visits where I provided guided tour, showed video footage of Dhaka and ran a Q&A session. Just ten days before, on 24 May 2005, the exhibition was officially launched at the City Hall during the reception given by Ken Livingstone to the Bangladesh Cricket team. Then, over the next five years, I took the exhibition on tours to several places, including Luton Central Library, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, Camden Bangladesh Mela and Swiss Cottage Gallery. I received encouragement and support from many people, organisations and institutions in developing and delivering the exhibition.

In this talk, I will share the challenges and obstacles I faced and the processes and steps I took in London and Bangladesh in developing and delivering the exhibition and its impacts on me and some of the visitors who came to see the exhibition based on their written feedback. I will present a contextualised story of the exhibition and take you through twenty unique pictures of Dhaka City taken during 2004-2025, which inspired me and kept me focused on the project.

I came to London from Bangladesh in 1973 with my family when I was ten. For quite a while, I missed Bangladesh very, very much. I didn't want to stay in the UK, constantly dreaming of going back to my village to run around, swim, climb trees and do many other things. It wasn't until well into my first year of secondary school that I began to settle down and enjoy life in the UK – perhaps due to making new friends and developing fresh interests. Life in the UK started to look more and more exciting. Even then, my childhood memories of Bangladesh were powerful, ever-present and vivid, and I massively missed my country.

I was born in what is now the Narsingdi District of Bangladesh, but until 1984, Narsingdi wasn't a district but a sub-district and part of the Dacca (Dhaka) district. My village in Narsingdi was only about twenty-five miles from Dhaka City. My mother's family lived in Rampura and my father's stepfamily and step-siblings lived in Postagola, both in Dhka City.

My paternal grandfather was married twice and had two families, one in the village in Narsingdi where I was born and another in Postagola. So, my childhood revolved mainly around living in the village and making short visits to Dhaka City to spend time with Dhaka relatives. As someone who was born in what was then Dhaka District and frequently visited Dhaka City, I always considered myself to be a Dhakaya.

Over the years, life in the context of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s in London became very challenging for me as a Bangladeshi. The negativity associated with Bangladesh, our lack of knowledge about our country and history, where we stood in the hierarchy of respect and status in the UK (decided by others) and how people treated us when they heard someone was a Bangladeshi was not very pleasant. These decimated many of us psychologically and emotionally. The general negativity associated with Bangladesh affected how people treated or valued us and, as a consequence, our lack of self-respect and self-confidence.

I visited Bangladesh many times in the 1980s and 1990s from London, staying in Dhaka City. I also visited my village and places like Chittagong, Khulna, Sylhet and Jessore. The people I got to know or re-acquainted with nearly all were my relatives, and I didn't have a chance to make any friends in Dhaka City. Even though I made many short visits to Dhaka City, I hardly knew the city and the people who lived there, except some members of our extended family.

However, one day in the late 1990s, I found a book on Dhaka in a second-hand bookshop in London's Leicester Square called 'Dhaka: A Study in Urban History and Development, 1840-1921' by Dr Sharif Uddin Ahmed. Reading the book gave me new insights into Dhaka's geography and history, and that ignited an interest in me to learn more about our capital city's past to understand its present. This was how the idea of my project - Dhaka City Exhibition in the UK - originated.

For a more detailed story, please join me on Zoom.

Event Venue

Online