Reyad Abedin

Biography

Reyad Abedin is a visual artist, born and raised in Bangladesh and currently living in Upstate New York. His practice works across photography, moving image, archival materials, alternative photographic processes, screens and the Internet. His methods move between documentary observation, personal narratives, self-portraiture, and material engagement with photographic and moving-image processes. His practice engages themes including Bengal’s postcolonial history, memory, social-historical trauma, space, identity, migration and diasporic culture.

His ongoing project, “Silence After Freedom,” examines the fraught legacies of the 1947 Partition of Bengal and India and what remains in private life after independence and nation-making. His project “Alien,” developed in Syracuse, explores how identity is perceived and experienced in a new cultural environment, reflecting broader questions of migration, visibility and diasporic belonging. His newer works, “I Wonder What Your Life Is Like” and “Do You Like How I Say Your Name,” emerged from a meditative process of remaining emotionally open when the world continuously demands urgency and fear, engaging personal space, memory and his relationship with family through the screen.

Abedin earned an M.F.A. in art photography from Syracuse University. His work has been exhibited at ICP Museum, New York; Light Work, New York; Microscope Gallery, New York; the Warehouse Gallery, New York; Museumsquartier, Osnabrück, Germany; Al Hamriyah Studio, Sharjah; and the Asian Art Biennial at the Bangladesh National Art Gallery.

Education

• M.F.A., Syracuse University