At first glance, they are just independent letters hanging in the air but as the winter sun shines on ‘Amity’, Promotesh Das Phulak’s installation begins to lend warmth. With letters made of iron bars and the bars loaded with the highly inflammable Shola flower, Phulak’s project stands for the unmoving, unfaltering iron will to achieve peace and harmony, and the Shola flowers, quick to catch fire and converting into ashes within seconds, represent how the means to achieve peace, like building war technology, etc is only a spark away from turning into a disaster.
On the adjacent wall is a multimedia installation ‘War of Images’ by Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury which uses, among other things, a series of the covers of the Time magazine, placed one next to the other in a non-linear pattern, all of them veiled by a translucent sheet. An intriguing wordplay that, along with signifying that no matter what the victors of the wars of the past promulgate, history can never be linear, time can never be linearly arranged. It also stresses on how the war and history, owing to the way it is put before an audience, will always be miles away from the truth
Akar Prakar, in its six-month-long season of showcasing avant-garde Bangladeshi art, has put up a group show, “A Finger on the Pulse” which showcases eight artworks, focussing on the idea of war hysteria and its aftermath. Curated by artist Tanzim Wahab, the show, besides Phulak and Chowdhury, includes works of noted Bangladeshi artists such as Dilara Begum Jolly, Mahbubur Rahman, Imran Hossain Piplu, Anisuzamman Sohel, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, Mazia Farhana and Abir Shome.
In the middle of walls with paintings portraying the brutality that war brings with itself, stands a house, nay, a home, redolent with a child’s innocence and creativity. Marzia Farhana’s “Equilibrium” project was influenced by SM Sultan’s ideology that the kid that draws his village and the beautiful flowers and trees can’t hurt anybody. The project, done in collaboration with school kids around 10-12 years of age, making them build their own house, came out as a huge surprise for Marzia. “When the kids started to make what they wanted, they made objects of their dreams. When they started to build and decorate the main house, it became their dream space. It surprised me how playfully nine kids started to visualise and in that process created their own personal spaces full of joy, freedom and possibilities. Thus, the freedom of making and doing helped them to reinvent the living spaces and establishing the relationship with empathy and care.”
Imran Hossain Piplu’s “Spring In Grey Time”
With the violent metallic texture of a gun replaced by images of flowers, leaves and birds which signify spring-time, and a smooth branch of tree leaving the barrel of the gun, instead of the bullet, Imran Hossain Piplu’s ‘Spring in Grey Time’ awaits bliss and happiness in the shadowed times, depicting how all of it is present inside each one of usWhen asked if it’s hope or satire that’s been depicted through this artwork, Imran says, “This work is a poetic intervention of recreating a dialogue between the nature and man-made destruction. The symbolic bird still tries to carry the message of peace with juxtaposition with soldiers and their weaponry. This juxtaposition is my utopian imagination to propose hope in a violent time. It is an imagined reality to change the course of action.”
Evocative needle work
Dilara Begum Jolly, in her project “War after War”, uses evocative needle work as she takes the viewer through printed images of a house that’s been left vacant and unattended after the war. “This body of work is tracing the memories and locations of torture in the liberation war of Bangladesh of 1971. The dots of printed photographs symbolises the silent, painful process of living with the memory even if the time changes. Needling is also a stereotyped role of a woman in an ordinary house which might connect collective memories of women in the subcontinent,” observes Jolly.
Describing the title, Wahab says, “It refers to the artist’s sense of immediacy to talk about the social upheavals of a certain time and to invent the language of expressing urgent concerns. Finger on the pulse hints at the immediate response and an ephemeral intervention into a time and space.” Wahab feels curating a group show is always challenging even if there is a consistency of forms or mediums. “Each artist comes with a unique expression, aspiration or language and one needs to find a connection or differences to make them conversing next to each other. My intention was to make works creating constant dialogues between the walls so that it constructs a collective narrative to talk about a time.”
Edited excerpts from a conversation with Wahab:
Tanzim Wahab
On Partition and liberation war influencing art in Bangladesh
War and Partition definitely brought back the question of identity; both personal rootedness and national identity. The earlier generation of artists were visionary to design a new nation after being the colony of British. The nation continued to look for stability; either it was democratic stability or cultural development. This exhibition depicts intergenerational practice between the artists of different times to explore the overlap of concerns and also differences of struggle where local problems slowly connect to wider global problems. While Dilara Begum Jolly’s needle works on photographic prints talk about the torture and violence of 1971’s liberation war, Mizanur Rahman Sakib’s installation and collages of Time Magazine covers moves to the global political iconography of power and capitalism.
On the choice of artists
Contemporary art often engages beyond art forms and mediums as many artists make spontaneous choices of a medium to respond to their time. I wanted to share that practice too where audience will find a range of languages and expressions as a form of spontaneous choice than a formalistic intervention. This show tries to take attention on the social landscape of Bangladesh through the response of artists of the different generations. There are many two-dimensional works including drawing, photographic prints and collages of collected documents but all these works interplay with the idea of multiple dimensions with juxtaposition of objects. There are many text-based works too which are trying to see text as a visual form along with its meaning.
On narratives of war and peace finding space under one roof
There is no single narrative of a time and artists always engage with a time from multiple angles. This is a plural narrative of a country where you will often see different points of departure. I think it is also same for our global contexts and new world-order where you will often see juxtaposition of war and peace, fear and hope, poetics and politics. This is the new reality where artists are living in.
( “A Finger on the Pulse” is on display at Akar Prakar Gallery, Defence Colony, New Delhi, till January 19)
