“Because Khuku broke the oil bottle,you scold her.But you old Khokaswho broke India and split it in two,what about that?”– Annada Shankar Ray, Khuku o Khoka (trans. mine)Annada Shankar Ray wrote this in the cold weeks of 1947, when a child’s broken oil bottle suddenly began to sound like a rehearsal for a broken subcontinent. In the Pakistan period, the rhyme was banned in East Pakistan; only after Bangladesh did it return to circulation, like a small contraband truth that outlived the border that tried to silence it.I have carried this quatrain for years like a small sharp stone in a pocket. It is not heavy, but it bruises if you forget it is there. A child breaks an oil bottle. The household responds with its dependable theatre of outrage: the spill is visible, the punishment immediate, the lesson staged. Then the poem turns toward the elders, the map-men, the drawing-room surgeons of history, and asks a question so plain it feels insolent: you broke a country and called it governance. Who scolded you?Partition, in our region, never finished happening. It did not end; it settled into habit: in the cartographer’s desk, the checkpoint, the textbook, the suspicious glance, the paperwork that trails your name like a shadow that must be fed. The border is not only a line. It is a pedagogy.It is precisely this pedagogy that Chobi Mela XI confronts. Founded in 2000 in Dhaka by Shahidul Alam through Drik Picture Library and Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Chobi Mela is one of South Asia’s longest-running international photography festivals, conceived not merely as an exhibition platform but as a civic space where images argue with power. Its 11th edition, held from January 16 to 31, 2026 across five venues in Dhaka, brought together nine exhibitions alongside workshops, talks, lectures, and portfolio reviews under the thematic prefix “RE:” an insistence on returning, repairing, reframing what history claims to have settled.In that climate, the exhibition Rights of Passage (curated by Tanvi Mishra) feels less like a curated display and more like a necessary question asked out loud. The title plays with “rites of passage,” those ceremonial thresholds that promise belonging, baptism, initiation, and adulthood. But here the rite has been contaminated by the right. Who has the right to pass? Who must perform a ritual of proving? Who is required to produce documents the way the devout produce prayers?Installation view of ‘Ghostwriter’ by Sheida Soleimani, displayed as part of the exhibition Rights of Passage curated by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Md Fazla Rabbi FatiqThe exhibition insists on looking at borders from below. Not from the state’s balcony, not from the drone’s eye, not from the map’s smug geometry, but from the perspective of the person who walks, waits, hides, swims, negotiates, bargains, trembles, turns back, tries again, or decides to stay and build a life beside the fence. From below, the moral story flips. The migrant no longer looks like the natural criminal of the narrative. The nation-state begins to look like the constant transgressor, expanding its control while remaining oddly immune to accountability.This “below” view is not romantic. It does not turn the border into a heroic obstacle course for strong souls. It sees the border as a machine that sorts bodies into categories of worth. It sees how punishment is distributed. It sees how legality is staged.I remember listening to the panel discussion Archiving Otherwise during Chobi Mela XI, where a recorded conversation between Sneha Ragavan and Maryam Rahman moved, almost unexpectedly, toward children. Maryam, speaking about her aunt Lala Rukh, described how the instinct after her aunt’s death was to make a children’s book. Not as simplification, not as sentiment, but as a form of transmission that refuses the dead language of monuments. Children should know their art heroes and activism heroes, she said, and the sentence felt both tender and insurgent. She spoke of how Lala Rukh could listen to children with a seriousness that most adults have forgotten how to perform. How she would look at a child’s drawing and take the time to see it, to describe it back, to make the child feel heard.That word, heard, matters. Because archives are not neutral cupboards. They are listening devices. They decide whose voice counts as history and whose voice becomes noise. And borders, too, are listening devices. They listen for accents. They listen for names. They listen for the wrong kind of belonging.If you want a compact theory toolkit to carry through Rights of Passage, you do not need a suitcase of academic citations. You need a few pocket-sized ideas, sharp enough to cut through the festival haze.First: The archive is both shelter and weapon. It preserves, but it also polices. It can protect the vulnerable, but it can also be used to hunt them. There is a fever of collecting, a hunger to keep, and a simultaneous hunger to control what is kept.Second: Bureaucracy is a border that travels. A physical line can be crossed, but the paperwork follows you. The stamp becomes a portable wall.Third: Classification is never innocent. Indexing, naming, cataloguing, assigning coordinates, these are often rehearsals for control. But the same apparatus can be hijacked and turned against its owner.Fourth: Images do not simply show. They recruit. A photograph can be evidence, propaganda, prayer, threat. A low-resolution image can become both wound and portal.Fifth: Neoliberal time manufactures “differences,” a neoliberal differential that hardens into hierarchy. Borderlands become economic machines. Certain lives become exportable, disposable. Certain regions become waiting rooms with no clocks.With this toolkit, the exhibition’s two-floor rhythm begins to make sense. Upstairs, the room of possibility, not optimistic in a naive way, but attentive to movement, collaboration, kinship, chance. Downstairs, the room of impossibility, where movement either becomes a trap or becomes imaginable only through fiction, glitch, index, and memorial.You enter and meet uncertainty immediately.Sheida Soleimani’s work opens like a story told in a living room where the adults keep lowering their voices. Her visual world is staged, constructed, almost toy-like at first glance, and that is precisely why it unsettles. In one scene, a bright yellow mailbox sits under a sky of scattered papers. Letters spill out. Birdseed is strewn like a minor disaster. A small parakeet perches on the mailbox as if it owns the place. Above it, the shadow of an airplane cuts across the composition, enormous and mute, the way geopolitical decisions are enormous and mute when they pass over ordinary lives.Soleimani’s parents fled Iran after the revolution. This is the inheritance of exile as a domestic atmosphere. The border here is not only a checkpoint. It is bedtime. It is the lullaby that carries a country like a phantom limb. It is the child who learns the vocabulary of danger before learning multiplication.Her images carry multiple narratives inside them, like cabinets with hidden compartments. A chessboard appears, a hand poised mid-move, and suddenly the crossing is not a moral story but a game structured by chance and risk. Not everyone crosses because they are brave. Many cross because they are cornered. Many do not cross because they have calculated the cost and decided that survival requires staying.Soleimani’s collaboration with her parents matters. They draw from memory. They reconstruct geography like people reconstruct a lost home: not with accuracy, but with longing. They hide identities for obvious reasons. The work refuses the idea of one definitive truth. It offers multiplicity, not as a fashionable aesthetic, but because exile itself is plural. It is made of competing versions of the same story told across years.And then there are the birds. Not decorative. Not symbolic in the predictable way of “bird equals freedom.” The birds are bodies that move across human borders and still get hurt by human design. They collide with glass buildings. They are disrupted by war, construction, and light pollution. A flyway is a kind of border, too, except it is written into the air rather than paper. Soleimani’s birds insist on a non-human perspective that humbles our border fantasies. We build walls. The sky refuses.If Soleimani’s work is the inherited border, the border as a story-world, Felipe Romero Beltrán’s work is the lived border as daily life. He photographs along the US–Mexico border, focusing on people who have tried to cross and could not, and on those who chose to stay and build lives beside the line. His portraits are collaborative, quiet, stripped of melodrama. He is careful with language. “These are the ones who stayed” is too simple. Many stayed by choice. Many refused the American dream. Many decided that the dream had become a debt trap disguised as salvation.His work is divided into bodies, breaches, and endings. But “body” here is not only the body of a person. It is the body of the borderland itself, a social organism shaped by attempted passage. He does something interesting: he does not fetishise the river. He does not need to show the border constantly to prove it is there. He photographs the “just before,” the atmosphere of trying, the kinship networks that form around uncertainty.He also reveals his research, his collage process, his visual notes, vernacular images, and references that never become final photographs. This matters because borders are layered. They are made of rumours and routes, smugglers and soldiers, documentary images and private images. By showing the process, Romero Beltrán reminds us that the border is not nature. It is design. And once you accept it as design, you can begin imagining redesign, refusal, sabotage, or at least re-seeing.Installation view of Bravo by Felipe Romero Beltrán, displayed as part of the exhibition Rights of Passage curated by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Tanvi MishraThen you meet a corner that feels like a pulse, a place where the exhibition’s logic becomes historical and communal. In Our Own Backyard, assembled by Asia Art Archive, brings the archives of Sheba Chhachhi and Lala Rukh into dialogue. Here, the border is not only national. It is also the porous boundary between workshop and street, between the so-called private and the so-called political.Photographs, posters, screen prints, manuals, and documentation of gatherings. The work shows how the women’s movement in South Asia during the 1980s and 1990s was built through both urgency and craft. Screen printing as fast production, as distributed knowledge, as a method of multiplying dissent. Posters were made the night before a protest because time was a luxury the movement did not have. Protest songs carried in bodies, often not recorded, often disappearing unless someone decides that sound is also history.And the images insist on joy. Women resting. Dancing. Singing. Nursing children. This is not decoration. Joy becomes a political force because it becomes stamina. A movement that cannot hold joy will burn out in grief. The archive here refuses to archive only confrontation. It archives communion.This is where Maryam Rahman’s point about children returns like a refrain. Children are not footnotes to history. The stories children read, the figures they meet in books, the images that become their first ideas about justice, these are not secondary. They are formative. A movement that ignores children is outsourcing its future to the very forces it claims to resist.Upstairs, then, possibility is not the fantasy of free movement. It is a movement that happens despite the regime. It is collaboration across time. It is a refusal to reduce border experience into a single moral tale.And yet, upstairs does not pretend that movement equals liberation. It prepares you for the downstairs.Descending, you feel the exhibition darken. The air becomes heavier. The walls seem to hold more silence. This is not merely an architectural shift. It is a moral shift. Here, the border is less a line to cross and more a system that enters your life and refuses to leave.Sumi Anjuman’s Unhealed Beneath Grieving Skies grounds the exhibition in Bangladesh with a clarity that hurts. Her work is about migrant women, about labour, about the machinery that pushes people out and then washes its hands of their fate. The state appears not as an abstract villain, but as bureaucracy, contracts, processes, that quiet violence which leaves no visible blood and therefore escapes accountability.Anjuman insists that the story is not simply “women suffer abroad.” The story is a structure. The structure forces movement through economic pressure, then exposes those bodies to exploitation, then buries the evidence under paperwork, delay, and indifference. In the installation, text in Bangla loops around the photographs like a persistent witness. Grief becomes documentation. Families become reluctant archivists because the state is an unreliable narrator.Installation view of ‘Unhealed Beneath Grieving Skies’ by Sumi Anjuman, displayed as part of the exhibition Rights of Passage curated by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Md Fazla Rabbi FatiqHere, the ‘Neoliberal Differential’ border lens becomes especially sharp. The border is not only geographical. It is economic. It is about who is rendered disposable under neoliberal arrangements. It is about how certain bodies are turned into remittance machines, celebrated when they send money, forgotten when they return as trauma, injury, or death. A border is also a wage.Then comes Hoda Afshar’s Remain, portraits of men detained offshore by Australia in Papua New Guinea. Exile here is doubled. They flee one regime only to be met by another that calls itself administrative. The island, which in tourist language means paradise, becomes a cage. The border relocates itself into policy, into offshore detention, into a geography designed to keep suffering out of sight.Afshar’s portraits do not perform victimhood. They feel like weather systems. Smoke, powder, blur, grain. The men are photographed against a black backdrop, a makeshift studio built collaboratively, and that detail matters. The output, the final image, is not the whole work. The process is part of the ethics. Each person chooses an element, a natural material, a sign linked to their story. Soil, water, a bird, a gesture. The portrait becomes a negotiation of visibility inside a system designed to erase.One man speaks of soil as crucial to Kurdish culture, and yet he has been stateless his whole life. It is a sentence that reveals the cruelty of the modern world: you can love land and be denied land. You can be rooted and still be declared illegal. The portrait becomes a paradox made visible.Installation view of ‘Remain’ by Hoda Afshar, displayed as part of the exhibition Rights of Passage curated by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Md Fazla Rabbi FatiqYou move, and the exhibition begins to speak about mediation, about images as borders.Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work with low-resolution images circulating from Palestine, images degraded by compression, by distance, by the world’s inability or unwillingness to look clearly. They run these images through generative processes to create avatars, glitching bodies, faces scarred by pixels, distortions that are not aesthetic accidents but evidence of circulation itself.This is not technology as spectacle. It is a statement about how oppression is mediated. The oppressed are often allowed to exist only as distorted signals. And the distortion becomes an alibi for the comfortable: we could not see, we did not know, it was unclear. Abbas and Abou-Rahme turn the alibi inside out. The glitch becomes testimony. The scar becomes the trace of a world that receives suffering through screens and still claims ignorance.Their work suggests a kind of fictional crossing. If physical movement is blocked, if people cannot meet their own people across occupation, then imagination becomes a passage. Not a substitute for liberation, but a refusal to let the border be the final editor of intimacy.Installation view of ‘At those terrifying frontiers where the existence and disappearance of people fade into each other’ (centre) by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Remain by Hoda Afshar, displayed as part of the exhibition Rights of Passage curated by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Tanvi MishraAnd then, as if to remind you that control always arrives with classification, you meet Moonis Ahmad Shah’s Gul-e-Curfew, an index of strange and inconsistent phantoms from everywhere. Shah takes hundreds of images of Kashmiri flowers and uses software to generate new ecologies. He gives them names, coordinates, species labels, lifespans, and anatomical details. Some lifespans are “unknown.” Some are terrifyingly brief. The language of science, the language of the archive, the language of colonial administration, is used like a mirror held up to the colonial impulse itself.Indexing, naming, and categorising are not innocent acts. They are often rehearsals for control. Empires catalogue land to possess it. States document bodies to manage them. Borders demand documentation because documentation creates a hierarchy of legitimacy.Shah hijacks that apparatus. His phantoms sprout in conflict zones. Gaza. Kashmir. Factory districts. Sites where curfew and beauty coexist, where the title itself becomes a cold poem: flower-curfew. Petal and punishment in one breath. He refuses the exceptionalism that says only one tragedy is singular, only one violence counts as historic. He draws lines between struggles, insisting that the colonial logic repeats itself with different uniforms.Installation view of ‘Gul-e-Curfew: an index of the strange and inconsistent phantoms from everywhere’ by Moonis Ahmad Shah, displayed as part of the exhibition Rights of Passage curated by Tanvi Mishra for Chobi Mela XI, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Photo: Md Fazla Rabbi FatiqDownstairs, impossibility is not only despair. It is a diagnosis. It shows how movement is trapped, how return is blocked, how the border becomes portable, how the archive becomes both weapon and refuge, how the image becomes both evidence and wound.After moving through both floors, the prefix RE begins to feel less like a theme and more like a method. Re as in reconfigure how we see borders. Re as in reassign blame. Re as in re-hear voices excluded from official history. Re as in refuse the state’s monopoly over memory.This is what Rights of Passage accomplishes. It does not treat borders as natural facts. It treats them as systems that can be examined, narrated, and resisted. It asks you to shift your gaze from above to below. It asks you to notice how the border behaves like a moral machine, producing criminals out of the vulnerable while excusing the violence of institutions.And it keeps returning to the question of children, not as sentiment, but as method. The child forces a different ethics. A child asks the question adults spend their lives avoiding. Why is it wrong when I break a bottle, but not wrong when you break a country?Annada Shankar Ray wrote Khuku o Khoka as an indictment of Partition’s hypocrisy, but it continues to speak because hypocrisy has not retired. It has simply modernised. It has become bureaucratic. It has become televised. It has become algorithmic. It has become a border guard inside the mind.What does a festival like Chobi Mela do in such a time? It offers a different kind of passage. Not across a fence, but across a story. Across a stereotype. Across the state’s insistence that you must see your neighbour as a threat. It offers, through images and archives and staged scenes and phantom flowers and glitching bodies, a cultural confluence where everyday people are allowed to reappear, not as suspects, but as witnesses.And perhaps that is the deepest rite here. Not the rite that makes you belong to a nation, but the rite that returns your capacity to listen. To listen to the voices that history tried to erase. To listen to a child’s question without rushing to silence it. To listen, finally, from below.Because the oil bottle will always break. That is what bottles do. The real question is who gets punished for the spill, and who gets to keep breaking countries and calling it order.Naseef Faruque Amin is a writer, screenwriter and creative professional.