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 to the edge of what is locally called 'turio', sublime in literal translation, these acrylic on magazine pages strike a high octave note of disquietitude and alienation, psychological strata she has scarcely delved in previously. Additionally, with these works she effectuates a withdrawal from what is pictorial/visual for the first time.
Beauty, as the saying goes, limits the scope of an image. Since an object is circumscribed by the socially acceptable taste-buds in order to be considered beautiful.
Working against the grain of the socially accepted definition of beauty sometimes involves the act of subjugating the image to the process. In Marzia's case the process involves a gradual dispossession of the image or the visible. By holding the elements in abeyance – pictures of Marilyn Monroe and fashion models in this particular case, the artist extends her deconstructive zeal to the theme of the displaced body/existence. It is accomplished by way of collapsing the image into its barely recognisable fragments – body parts that are placed in relation to the blankness of the white-paint-covered tactile spaces and are summoned to voice the human condition in the age of statism, terrorism and corporatization.
This creation of the 'recessed space' against 'meaning atomism', the latter a claim to complete elucidation of any representation in linguistic or other mental modes, serves as a window to glimpse at the incomplete, as such untranslatable, pantomime. The ear-picking hand, the leftover lip, and even the praying hands – they all seem like interconnected metonyms constantly driving the viewer into the reconstruction of the edifice of meaning that had collapsed while we were busy playing our respective role in the virtuality of progress.
Born in 1985, Marzia studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka and completed her MA Fine Art from Central St Martins in 2014, where she was awarded a prize for Innovation in Fine Art. Her works have been featured at a number of group exhibitions including 15th Berger Young Painter Arts Competition Exhibition, Dhaka (2010); Young Dhaka, Zainul Gallery, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, Dhaka (2011); Only God Can Judge Me (OGCJM), Dhaka (2012). She is one of the participant artists in Missing One Dhaka Art Summit 2016, curated by Nada Raza.
- DEPART DESK
Photo courtesy: Artist