ULAB Launches Visual and Digital Masks Exhibit

The Media Studies and Journalism (MSJ) Department of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB) will launch an exhibit entitled "Faces, Masks and Identity of Bangladesh’s New Generation." 

The exhibit features five music videos, 17 face paintings, 30 plaster masks and 54 digital masks produced by students from the courses "Multimedia Production," "Visual Communication," "Video Communication" and "Social Context of Media." 

Inaguration: August 18 (Tuesday)
Time: 6:00 to 8:00 p.m.
Exhibition Dates: August 18-31, 2009
Location: ULAB Campus B Lobby, House 719/A, Road 7/A (Satmasjid Road), Dhanmondi, Dhaka

The exhibit is part of the Department’s Curriculum Integration Program, which was established to facilitate faculty and students from various year levels and study concentrations to work together and learn from each other.  The exhibit theme highlights the Face Negotiation Theory of Communication Scholar Stella Ting-Toomey, which divides cultures into collectivistic and individualistic.  Based one’s culture, he/she constructs a public face and a private face.  For Ting-Toomey, people who belong to individualistic cultures do not have distinct public and private faces but those who come from collectivistic cultures have very distinct public and private faces.  However, Ting-Toomey added that people are not imprisoned by their cultures.  They can always have a self-construal – a mirror of themselves.  They can have identities of their own choosing.

As applied to the exhibit, each student was asked to look inward – how culture shapes their self-construal and the communication of this self-construal.  They were all asked to use their own faces as basis for the construction of the visual and digital masks.  For visual masks, students utilized their faces as the mold of the plaster of Paris.  For digital masks, the students took pictures of themselves and traced these pictures to serve as the masks’ outline.  From there, students made use of visual texts (lines, strokes, shapes, patterns, symbols and colors) to communicate their private and public identities.

To ensure smooth the progress of in the Curriculum Integration Program, two fora were conducted.  The first one was on June 11 with the topic "Meanings and Significance of Masks in Bangladeshi Society."  The second was on June 18 with the topic "Communicating through Visual Texts."  The exhibit, in this sense, is a semester long undertaking.  ULAB’s Media Studies and Journalism Department has study concentrations in Journalism, Digital Production and Mass Communication.  It has 180 students at present.  The exhibit will run until August 31.

For further information, please contact Taufiq Aziz at 01714273436.
 

With Guest Speakers
Mr. Syed Nasim Manzur, Managing Director, Apex Adelchi Footwear