editor's note
Art, substance and the reading gaze
Turn your style into substance, says an advertisement on TV – a pronouncement aimed at our insatiable 'selves' Read
newsscape
Qayyum Chowdhury : Illustrating with style
An eminent painter, a graphic designer, a teacher, a master– all these epithets veritably belong to Qayyum Chowdhury. From 9th March to 4th April 2015 Read
writes SYEDA BHUMIKA MAHMUD
Husain, Kolkata and unskeined time
‘Re-creating Husain's Kolkata', the unique workshop recently hosted by CIMA and Indian Art Collectors as a part of CIMA awards show, had been, at its simplest, an attempt to make sense of the way in which signification, always unfixed and tremulous Read
writes ANURADHA GHOSH
The body intrigue and other forms of artistic-ideatic encryptions
Samdani Art Foundation upped their ante yet again by introducing Samdani Seminars, which fetched established names in arts from around the world to the fledgling turf of the Dhaka scene to help the young artists of this terrain to taste what is Read
The odyssey of a method-driven artist
Alamgir Huque, an accomplished artist, was a familiar figure in Bangladesh art circuit of the '80s. In that period he excelled both in painting and printmaking, especially in the latter Read
writes TAKIR HOSSAIN
Bathing in the glory of 'social practice' at Cheragee
Cheragee More, a small area, played host to the third edition of the Cheragee Art Show where works created in situ remained open to public viewing for two consecutive days, between December 12th and 13th, 2014 Read
WALK ON THE LINE: A multi-disciplinary event and a community space
Kolkata, of late, is coming up with art-initiatives with different motivations and in various scales Read
writes SOMA BHOWMIK
Visiting art curator Susanne Altmann’s take on transgressive art from Eastern Europe
Susanne Altmann visited Dhaka as part her curatorial project to liaise with artist-performers for her upcoming project which spans the region from Iran to Bangladesh Read
Features
A checkerboard of plurality: the Chobi Mela VIII expo
We have arrived at a hyper-capitalist age, if you will, free market bringing exponentially into its service free dissemination of fast-tracked digitized information/visual imagery Read
writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN
New Media Art and documentary cinema
Clouds (2012) is an experimental, interactive, tech-art documentary made by James George and Jonathan Minard. The documentary is about thirty new media artists, curators, designers and critics Read
writes MAHMUDUL HOSSAIN
Moments from IAF 2015
Since 2008 the India Art Fair (IAF) has made an appearance on the South Asian art calendar with alacrity. This year was no exception Read
writes KURCHI DASGUPTA
Allegories of the present: Eternal Wars and Cabaret Crusades
What kind of truths do allegories contain? In allegorical stories, such as Aesop's Fables, people, animals, things, and events represent broader ideas and messages Read
writes DEBORAH FRIZZELL
overview
Report from Nepal
The world knows of the earthquakes that hit Nepal on April 25. And the ones that followed. By now we have lived through more than 350 aftershocks, each of which would be an earthquake in itself but we know better. And suffer silently Read
encounter
Coursing through questions of identity and culture
I came upon Sudhir Chakraborty's writings in the nineteen nineties when I was a student at the Institute of Fine Arts (now Faculty of Fine Arts), Dhaka University Read
SHAWON AKAND in conversation with SUDHIR CHAKRABORTY
Discoursing in Dhaka: AICA president and international art critic MAREK BARTELIK reflects on New York, new art world and more...
Art is very generational… so in a way I was very much attuned to my generation of artists. It all started in the mid-1980s for me Read
MAREK BARTELIK in conversation with AMIRUL RAJIV and MUSTAFA ZAMAN
exposure
Urban savages: Moon Rahman's masked strangers
'At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites.' Read
reading room
Art Now, the giants' nest : Indexing artists who matter most in the ever-expanding topography of contemporary art
In the expanding horizon of production, global appreciation and marketing, the overlapping fields of exhibition-making and myth-making have now become the essential tools to fortify and sustain the link between the esoteric world of art and the public sphere Read
writes GOLAM MORTUJA
'Creating the opposite dream’: Syed Jamil Ahmed's singular contribution to the politics of performance in South and Southeast Asia
Invoking the entire diapason of the theoretical octave within his enviable range, multidisciplinary scholar and legendary theatre director Syed Jamil Ahmed's monograph on eight Buddhist performances in South and Southeast Asia constitutes a performance itself of no vacuous virtuosity Read
writes SEEMA AMIN
navigator
Viewing without prejudice: ‘Only Connect’ as a site of multivocality
Every exhibition, if staged with an intention to spark thoughts around issues of aesthetic or social import, by virtue of its very construction, becomes a thinking space Read
Recourse to the reproducible : The Dhaka Print Club Show
The question of authenticity has followed the history of the print media like its shadowy other. With reproducibility, its primary function and often purpose, 'multiples' in their capacity to often outweigh the concept of the original Read
writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN
Presence/Absence
unfolds in ceaseless waves of possibilities and contradictions. Audacity of the arts is such that it attempts to rein in this untamable realty, and instead of stopping at that also aspires to transcend it. To try and apprehend the vagaries of reality Read
writes SAJJAD SHARIF
Uncertain ends / serrated edges in Farzana Ahmed Urmi's ‘Known Unknown’
Farzana Ahmed Urmi's Known Unknown distributes the self into manifold sexually and spiritually ambiguous selves Read
writes GOLAM MORTUJA
Of sacred signs and places: Shadi Ahmed's itinerary of faith
Pilgrim's Journey' is how Professor Manzoorul Islam describes the exhibition which the artist framed as an homage to the pr piety, this exhibition by esence of Sufi Islam in Bangladesh Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
An examination of souls caught in limbo
Nafiuzzaman Nafi, a young painter who empties both the contents of the mind and the traces of the real world on one platter, serving his language resting comfortably between the sacred and the profane, is a fresh new detractor of academic realism Read
Natural and urbane beauty
‘Abstract Serenity’ is not serene all throughout, though it is primed with a passive, innocuous form of transmission born of the urban thirst for 'abstract wildernesses' Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
Archeology of war memories
The upheavals in art which took place in a quick succession throughout the twentieth century simply have no parallel in any other times Read
writes SANJOY CHAKRABORTY with DEPART DESK
Romancing an enchanted land
'Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.' The Chekov quote, in Vinita Karim's catalogue preface from different exhibitions may persuade one to think that the artist has vouched for the 'particular' Read
panorama
‘Art Walk’ in Old Dhaka courtesy of 1mile2
Between the physically assertive particular (in a given space) and the conceptually framed lexicon (of art and collective imaginings) there flow dialogues (in)forming artistic activities congealing into languages of expression Read
Postmedium in Bangladesh context : Black & White at Santaran
Rosalind Krauss, in A Voyage in the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition (2000) 'used the term “post-medium” to describe the decline of the Greenbergian concept of medium-specificity Read
