Unfinished, Unbegun
Voice Performance
Moushumi Bhowmik
/ free entry

Moushumi Bhowmik, Listening in the community © Rezina Ahmed Shorna

Fascinated by sonic traces of the past on a land, I follow trails of sound to search for people and places. For many years my work on the voice of Keramat Ali, a Bengali prisoner of war recorded by Wilhelm Doegen at the Halfmoon Camp in Wünsdorf in 1918, was largely confined to the sound archives, textual research, and mediated listening. Then, in March 2024, I went to Bajitpur in the Kishoreganj district of Bangladesh, where, according to Keramat Ali’s prisoner information sheet, he read in the Minor School. Having found the school, I met many people and a vast field opened up before me; I am now in the process of collecting sounds and images which lead in many directions—towards river ports, railways, migrations, wars, Burma, old gramophone records, Mughals on horseback, a blind singer’s lost song…

Unfinished, Unbegun is a work in progress resulting from my residency as part of Dystopia Biennial 2024—an initial study of the material I have gathered so far, as well as new archival work, a second visit to Wünsdorf, meetings with scholars and sound practitioners, and the organisation of a music evening with Bengali singers in Berlin—at least one of them being from Mymensingh, from where Keramat Ali came.