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20th issue

editor’s note

Between the performative the abortive

'Dekhloom aar akloom', or replicating in drawing what is right in front of the eyes, may lead to sterile artistic ends. Abanindranath Tagore's caution against the futility of making verisimilitude a... Read

features

Globalism in the wake of conceptual art

The art history and art theory of the 20th century was dominated by a methodology that equates the pictorial with the linguistic. In the most extreme manifestations, the idea of the Read

writes ADNAN MADANI

Thoughts on cultural heterogeneity

In the relational diagram of modernity, as in that of the pre-modern epochs, crosspollination is a phenomenon which, as one of the major constituents of cultural regeneration and evolvement, has been Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN

Navigating the abstract: At the interstice of science and philosophy

In recent years abstract art has seen a worldwide resurgence. This interest is not only limited to a reassessment of its historical value, but extends to present-day abstract art practice. Is Read

writes USHMITA SAHU
archeology

Motifs of aura and actuality in Kazi Nazrul Islam: passages from modernity

Depart reprints here two separate articles on poet Kazi Nazrul Islam by SALIMULLAH KHAN, the public intellectual, scholar and faculty at the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, Dhaka. The rationale behind Read

Reading Nazrul Islam after Walter Benjamin: A critique of fascism in colonial Bengal

'Early in his life, Kazi Nazrul Islam, the most notable Muslim poet of modern Bengal, edited and published a weekly Bengali journal named Dhumketu, the Comet. The name was symbolical of Read

writes SALIMULLAH KHAN
depart file

Identifying with identity: Beyond the choice between cherry and jamon

A few weeks ago I was invited for breakfast at the house of an artist couple. At the table along with other delicacies and seasonal delights, they served a bowl full Read

writes QUDDUS MIRZA
overview

Doris Salcedo: igniting silence

The retrospective exhibition of the Colombian artist is entitled simply, Doris Salcedo. Organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (June 26-October 12 Read

writes DEBORAH FRIZZELL
foreshortened

Trajectories: 19th-20th century printmaking from India and Pakistan

The history of mechanical reproduction in South Asia is interwoven into the originative narrative found in every scholarly work on modern South Asian artistic practices, from Partha Mitter's Much Maligned Monsters  Read

writes WOODMAN TAYLOR

Firoz Mahmud's instrumentalization of shifting metaphors

The paradigms of the 'Global Contemporary' present a dominant narrative that has looked to the post cold war era of artistic production situated in the framework of a 'flat' world. In Read

writes MEENAKSHI THIRUKODE
singled out

womb as wound: Dilara Begum Jolly’s Amorar Akkhyan

The sites of remembrance are always a source of emotional trauma, and Dalim Bhaban in Chittagong, in particular, notorious as it was for being a makeshift torture house for the collaborators Read

encounter

Graffiti and other varieties of rebellion: Ronni Ahmmed and Imran Ferdous in discussion

Grafitti is a kind of violation of the law, a social disturbance of sorts. Say, you draw or put down something on a clean wall or on a constructed edifice which Read

artist writes

A painting – beyond a surface, beyond a narration and more…

How far can physicality be the pivot of a work of art? Are there any other possibilities of two or three dimensional surface and space for painting? Are there any necessities  Read

navigator

Subject-object nexus in Mahbubur Rahman's recent works

Between the embodied, corporeal mortality and the disembodied deaths we die on a daily basis in our automated subjective response in complicity with the codes released by the Capital Order rests Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN

Of Hybridity and Holarchy in Gods and Beasts : Disjunctures and Continuities in the Mythos of Ronni

Resisting what appears at first to be a momentous digression from past trans/fixations, a certain nostalgia for the mnemonically memorable absurdist waiting for his millennial Godot, Ronni Ahmmed, may well have  Read

writes SEEMA AMIN and MUSTAFA ZAMAN

Trace Material

A photograph captures as much as it reduces. Much like a breath exhaled, photographs are a reminder of one that doesn't exist anymore, that moment it was taken. With life, there's Read

writes PARSA SANJANA SAJID

End Run

Nabil Rahman's first solo exhibition, It Hung Over Us Like an Anvil, at Longitude Latitude 6 was a meditation on endings. A significant number of pieces, mixed media collations of found objects  Read

writes PARSA SANJANA SAJID

Engage/disengage to initiate sensory ruptures: Farzana and Palash's overlapping geographies

Farzana Rahman Bobby and Palash Baran Biswas are printmakers attached to their respective ecologies built around aesthetic variables of their own choices, those that they repeatedly arrive at through the application  Read

writes GOLAM MORTUJA

The lightening should have struck me : Arindam Chatterjee's spectral vision

The moment one steps inside the gallery, Arindam Chatterjee's works at a glance appear to be suggesting a bleak dark world where spectres of death and decimation dance across the canvases Read

writes SOUMIK NANDY MAJUMDAR
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