Freedom Under

Artist Statement

“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy. From the moment I was conceived I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum; to have my whole circle of action, thought and feeling rigidly circumscribed by my inescapable feminity. Yes, my consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, bar room regulars--to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording--all is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always in danger of assault and battery. My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yet, God, I want to talk to everybody I can as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night...” ― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath The lives of women in my country have always been entangled in a system of observation. As I grew up, beginning with my mother -I witnessed their quiet performances: existing under constant surveillance, maintaining beauty not as expression but as expectation. Under that, the definition of femininity, shaped by dominance, remains here elusive and distorted. Balancing these everyday burdens becomes a ritual, an act of endurance. Some remain untethered, but many—like my mother—carry invisible chains, generations deep. Freedom Under IV: The Veil of Observance reflects that half-conscious state that descends after sunset, when the sky feels both sheltering and suffocating. I moved from a tiny populated town of Bangladesh to the United States, hence, so called modern world is not very different. Time passes, time passes—yet the gaze remains. Surveillance evolves, but it never disappears. The eyes only multiply. The so-called progressive spaces fail too, not through words, but through silence. They speak of liberation in public, yet protect abusers within their own walls. When women speak, the cost is often their livelihood, their safety, or their dignity. Ironically remembering watching the President of the United States on television, complimenting the Italian Prime Minister on her beauty during a global summit—a moment that revealed how deep the gaze runs, in the most polished rooms of power. Women, and all marginalized identities, become a test that humanity keeps failing— the theist and the atheist, the left and the right each one claiming progress, yet still bound by the same gaze. Freedom Under V explores this broken promise of liberation- how freedom itself fractures under watchful scrutiny. Freedom Under is where I worked with photographs and paints, memorizing this quiet persistence of control- how the lives of half the population are still shaped under watchful eyes. The gaze has evolved, perhaps grown more subtle, but it has never disappeared. Freedom Under explores the tension between visibility and freedom — how being seen all the time can feel both empowering and imprisoning. I was collaging the record of looking and being looked at, a space that asks two questions: Who holds the gaze, and who gets to break it? — Freedom Under Prithwee A, 2026