Safia Azim

With a Masters in Psychology from the University of Dhaka Bangladesh I became a Lecturer in the early 90s and at the same time, as a member of the feminist group, Naripokkho, became its principal investigator in research on violence against women. Initially we looked into the mechanisms of state interventions that informed the women's movement on its activism against violence. The research later evolved into developing a methodology and conducting a household survey in partnership with ICDDR,B and WHO, which later on became an impetus for the Government of Bangladesh to conduct its own national survey. Having suffered serious burn-out from this long drawn out research, I decided to drop academia altogether and pursue a lifelong attraction for the visual arts. Earlier I had designed tradional clothing for a small business and had also undertaken small landscaping projects. Opportunity came in the form of taking charge of album-related artwork and the production of visual material for a music label, Ektaar, set up by my husband. That was my key introduction to the world of digital media, from shooting to editing both photos and videos, as well as working on computer generated illustrations and graphics, playing with words and language in order to sell and put our artists and their music on the map. These new skills were acquired on-the-job as I sat with professionals and directed them each step of the way till I was satisfied with the final output. Once I got my own digital SLR, there was no turning back, because I took to it, as they say, like a duck to water. For the last eight years I have been documenting the decorative regime of traffic art and have had a couple of publications in journals related to literary and culture studies.