“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.” ― Oscar Wilde
About the Artist
Mohammad Rakibul Hasan is a Bangladesh-based documentary photographer, filmmaker, visual artist, and art educator. His work explores human rights, social development, politics, the environment, and spirituality. Hasan was nominated for many international awards and won hundreds of photographic competitions worldwide, including the Lucie Award, Human Rights Press Award, and Allard Prize. He is a consultant photographer and filmmaker for the WHO, UN Women, Oxfam, Red Cross, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, ActionAid, WaterAid, and many other international non-profit organisations. The °CLAIR Galerie, Switzerland, represents his artworks. Besides being a Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Fellow, Rakibul Hasan is also a former TEDx speaker.
The red roses are my favourite flower. I am a contemplative entity. I know that as I realised, René Descartes must not have told a lie. Life has a zigzag path, and all life forms have to walk through various alleys, streets, and avenues, especially those who are sentient beings. The autonomous self cannot always control emotions, and it can erupt fiercely with imbalances of dopamine, serotonin, or other hormones. I am not an Ironman nor Superhuman, nor do I have any superpowers. It was more than a half-decade ago, and life was interrupted by reality rejection. I was diagnosed with a depressive disorder.
I walked through many doors of the hospitals to visit the second Gods – the doctors. My mind assumed that the broken pieces of my heart would be fixed just as kintsugi. I struggled with derealisation and sometimes felt as if somebody had drugged me with LSD. I waited day and night to join those broken alleys. I was scared, and the task was arduous.
I couldn’t go anywhere alone. Sometimes, I felt distracted, disoriented, and petrified as the thanatophobia abducted me and took my joy away. It was too hard to handle the pressure from the capitalist society, social injustice, and the toxic minds around me. I told my closest souls, and no one responded positively. I have no further complaints to make.
Every second half of the day always started with a mood swing and vertigo – I kept thinking it might have been the last day of my life. I was then looking for a higher purpose in life. There might be no actual purpose, but as long as I have consciousness, whether I am a simulated hologram like in the movie Matrix, I feel it is better to live this life.
I started helping myself overcome the malicious demon of the dark time of my life.
It is an autobiographical tableau, an odyssey of a stoppage of my life where I battled with depression.
I recreated the mental and emotional states during a particular period. I photographed myself and appropriated them with the assistance of technology.