editor's note
Unfolding multi-modernity vis-a-vis a singular category of analysis
Perhaps it is no mystery that having lived in a particular era, around 1950s and -60s in the then East Pakistan to be exact, some artists of different equipments negotiating modernity... Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
newsscape
Unfold, Chragee Art Show Edition 4
Cheragee Art Show 'unfolds' itself annually, brainchild of Jog Art Space which commenced in 2012 with a mission to light the torch of art in a public space – Cheragee Mor, a busy Read
Branding Bangladesh: Bantora Kun, the tiger
Bantora Kun is a mascot representing Bangladesh and since its launch it is making its round in Bangladesh-Japan business circuits. Conceived as an insignia of ambassadorial scope it saw its launch... Read
Amritah Sen's dark anthology
A forest night as goosepimply dark as only forest nights can be would easily summon fear. Whether it is harmless phobias, the very real threat of assaults or the fear of.. Read
writes RITA DATTA
Performance Stage 1
Before we embark on Performance Event Stage 1, organized by Porapara Space for Artists, and showcased at Alliance Française de Chittagong, a collaborator in the event, some tracing of its history... Read
Performing the Shameless
Ali Asgar, a young proponent in the field of performance art that is slowly pushing inroads into Bangladesh mainstream art conventions, seems to have assigned himself a mission to awaken... Read
writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN
Gesture painting in Bangladeshi context
If a certain deshi, or indigenous variant of art centered on the preoccupation with certain types of spatial organization and formation of texture on canvas is to be taken as a... Read
writes TAKIR HOSSAIN
Multiplicity in Santaran's First Karnaphuli Folk Triennale
The conjugation of Folk with Triennale, two words representing two separate realms, has so far seemed impossible. Triennales/biennales are established sites reflective of our modern-day ambition in institution-building, and the 'folk'... Read
obituary
Remembering Subramanyan, the ‘teacher’
K G Subramanyan who passed away at the age of 92 on the 29th of June in Baroda, was a towering figure in the world of Indian Art. One of the several... Read
writes R SIVA KUMAR
Last adieu to the voice of justice
My introduction to the veteran poet Rafiq Azad in mid-2004 was a fortuitous one. I met him for the first time at the office of the preeminent architect and art critic... Read
writes TAKIR HOSSAIN
features
Novera Ahmed and her sculptural legacy
Novera Ahmed is a mysterious name – a modern-day legend part of which is her own creation and the rest heaped on her by mostly perplexed admirers. It is not that... Read
writes SHAKHAWAT TIPU
Novera
Novera is a myth of broken images, of vignettes that blur the edges of fact and artifact, truth and belief, between mystery and mechanism. An image of a self modelled archetype... Read
writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN
NOVERA: AT THE CROSSCURRENTS OF HISTORY
'The fine feeling for form',1 which Karel Vogel saw in Novera Ahmed's early forays while she was studying sculpture under his tutelage at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, remained a... Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
The Dhaka Art Summit : Locating South Asian Art within a Global Framework
The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS 2016) returned this year between February 5 and 8 as a research based platform for Bangladeshi and South Asian art focusing on discourse of exchange. 'Cultural, regional, trans-regional, national... Read
writes KURCHI DASGUPTA
Uneasy Remains
Why keep a record of pain? Wounds on the skin or the psyche, lesions, lacerations, bruises and bumps, assert a kind of presence, a reminder that we exist, feel. Who wouldn't... Read
writes PARSA SANJANA SAJID
Depart's pick from the Samdani Art Award Section
Rafiqul Shuvo's plane of immanenceBetween the fragmentary unveiling of reality through an image or text and the eternally elusive 'totality' of our lived experience there lie experiential nuances from which... Read
Harmonic stasis and dynamic repetition : Understanding the abstract sculptures of Sushen Ghosh
The advent of Modernist abstract art in India occupies a seminal moment concerted around the middle of the 20th century. Between 1960 to 1980 many painters such as V S Gaitonde, Biren De... Read
writes USHMITA SAHU
Voice and Visibility : Women in Contemporary Indian Art
Art mirrors the society it emanates from, and reflects its culture including the status of women. Indian art and aesthetics, cutting across schools and sects, speak of female form as a... Read
writes SUSHMA K BAHL
Sweating Blood : Ana Mendieta's Films
Ana Mendieta was a friend and colleague. She was a brilliant artist. Her vision was as intense as her life – an outspoken, volatile, oftentimes angry woman. I saw Ana perform 'Body... Read
writes DEBORAH FRIZZELL
close look
THE SHAHEED MINAR Controversy
Sixty Four years after its inception controversies around the central Saheed Minar (Language Martyrs Monument) linger on. There is an ongoing debate as to what extent did Novera Ahmed (1939-2015) committed her... Read
writes SHAKHAWAT TIPU
encounter
Syed Jahangir on Novera
Shakhawat Tipu: How did you come to know Novera Ahmed?Syed Jahangir: I met Novera through Hamidur Rahman, who was my friend. I joined the Art College as he was graduating ... Read
Summit as a point of entry into myriad South Asias
Mustafa Zaman: I would like to start this interview by thanking you for the 3rd edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, an intense showcasing of South Asian art. What I found... Read
artist writes
'Monologues' of ordinary people
My recent body of works is framed as 'monologues' of ordinary people who talk about their relationships, and as a testimony to their 'lived reality' reveal themselves in front of my... Read
writes SALMA ABEDIN PRITHI
exposure
Whiter shade of corporeality
Marzia Farhana's series of smallish works entitled White Paintings uses media images as its launch pad only to grow out of them through a process of effacement. By pushing the popular... Read
movie review
Shunte ki pao (Are you listening) : raising hope for independent cinema
A few intrepid souls -victims of a cyclone, people who are relentlessly struggling for their existence, fencing off the atrocities of nature, are the heroes of Are you listening?, Shunte Ki Pao. Kamar Ahmed Simon... Read
writes PALASH BHATTACHARJEE
navigator
Ramiz was not seen before 1757
At a discussion panel around a group show at Bengal Art Precinct (Only connect- Edition three), the conversation turned to the proliferation of text as part of works on the wall... Read
writes NAEEM MOHAIEMEN
Unfolding Amara's tale
Amarar Akhyan, Dilara Begum Jolly's recent exhibition, translates into the tale of the 'placenta' (or the 'undead'), presents a body of work cutting across a plurality of mediums to bring into... Read
writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN
Only Connect: the third edition
The third edition of Only Connect slid soundlessly from white cube to black box, performing its biannual algorithm on the oracular shrine of the Daily Star Precinct's glinting gallery surface, minus... Read
writes SEEMA AMIN
Layered monologue and the game of throne
Time, Coincidence and History, in the main, is a space for crystallizing the vestiges of colonial and postcolonial history covering in its broad sweep the legacies of social-political conflicts, religious parochialism... Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
Planes of emergence Interpenetrated
Digitally-inclined Wakilur Rahman made his initial forays into image generation quite a few years ago placing his bet squarely on twin ethos – self-referentiality and relationality, forces that may seem incompatible at... Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
The 'plural' art practices of contemporary Santiniketan
There has always been a kind of healthy 'tug and pull' relationship between the students and teachers at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan, and at the Faculty of Fine Arts, M S University... Read
writes SANDHYA BORDEWEKAR
Daagi (a convict) unchained…
Daagi Art Garage's exhibition Weapon Can't Kill ! is symptomatic of a strain, a snatch of an orchestrated riff that echoes off a familiar soundboard resonating across the globe, never out of... Read
writes SHARMILLIE RAHMAN
Live by fire
In A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits, the critic Laura Cumming sketches out the domain where self-portraits oscillate between the self and its public existence. 'Having to create a definitive... Read
writes PARSA SANJANA SAJID
Re-covering the aesthetics of the land
If one was to have an emerging landscape in the aftermath of a receding flood in their visual equivalents that is the approximate locus where one could situate Gulshan Hossain's recent... Read
Of surface, materiality and the rhetoric of 'quietness'
Informal is a site of remembrance – though not addressed to social-historical memory. What it recalls are some specific features of reality and art – the latter is tapped as part of an... Read
writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
