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1st Issue

editor's note

Setting the course for a new art magazine

Let’s begin with Spinoza’s contemplative question: what is the body capable of? If psychoanalysis regards the body as ‘a development union or aggregate of partial objects, organs, orifices, each with  Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN
newsscape

Looking through the lens starkly: Naib Uddin’s 'Amar Bangla'

Doyen Mustafa Monwar, on a slightly emotional register, proclaims, “Photographer Naib Uddin Ahmad’s documentation of our liberation war is the greatest achievement of his life.” In 1971, Naib, inspired by Bangabandhu’s  Read

Noazesh Ahmed passes away

Dr Noazesh Ahmed, renowned genetic scientist, photographer and a horticultural writer, passed away on November 24, 2009 following a massive cardiac arrest. He was born in Manikganj on February 1, 1935. His portraitures of  Read

The ascent of photography: Drik’s 20 year journey

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Drik organized an exhibition of photography that began on September 6, 2009 and lasted till the 13th of the same month. While Drik Gallery, a component of the Drik Picture Agency, Read

features

Roopban revisited: A Freudian unpacking of the tales of the mother-wife

Three Bengali folktales of the mother-wife, known commonly as Roopban, Noor Banu and Malanchamala, have been popular in Bangladesh for a number of past centuries. The tale of Malanchamala, which is the earliest of the three, was published in 1896-1902 in a  Read

writes SYED JAMIL AHMED

NOTHING’S A BLANK CANVAS, ANYHOW

Runa Islam unspools generously open work onto walls and screens and surfaces– which is never to be confused with blank pages. Here there are no empty signifiers that can become    Read

writes NAEEM MOHAIEMEN

QUAMRUL'S FRONTIER : INHERITANCE AND MODERNITY REMAPPED

The domain of experience is often perceived as independent of the task of enquiry. The fact that the two intersect in all successful creative action bears down on all cultural  Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN

Art, ritual and the continuation of rural lore

According to most scholars, the earliest evidence of painting from this deltaic region dates back to not more than three thousand years. In the absence of any specimen from the  Read

writes NISAR HOSSAIN

Reclaiming art history as a repository of local knowledge

Adiscussion on the history of art in Bangladesh is yet to lead to a worthwhile discourse on regional art. A sheer lack of regional art history in this country has  Read

writes SHAWON AKAND

Can there be an Art History in the South?

There is no way that we can assume a pre-colonial art arena in the subcontinent1 without an extensive framework of value judgment or hierarchy of its own. But the invasion of the local epistemology by the Western categories and concepts – which  Read

writes MANOSH CHOWDHURY
archeology

Man the artist

The development of civilization is not a gradual growth. On his path of experience man comes to sudden altitudes that startle his imagination with a wider view of things, claiming  Read

writes RABINDRANATH TAGORE
core - relations

The aesthetics of protest and the new geo-reality

It was Matanga, the Bodhisatta from the chandal family (lowest cast in the brahmanic hierarchy) who first resorted to performances with socio-spiritual implications to hammer home the point he thought    Read

artist writes

SHISHIR BHATTACHARJEE

I could draw a flower, an impressive, sentimental face, an ideal figure and also could use beautiful colours.We know, the Hero is always made by us, in a sense  .  Read

exposure

Intrepid visions: Kazi Monir's take on nature

Kazi Monir began his life as a hawker on Dhaka footpaths and then went on to become a painter of extraordinary visions. His work-surfaces have always been torn out of discarded calendars or cropped from found art-card pieces which he impassionedly treated  Read

imprint

Artifice of Time: Atiqul’s ordering of the archaic

Md. Atiqul Islam… is he a narodnic martyr type, a Luddite? One wonders after scrutinizing his slightly derivative, semi-interesting sculptures of muffled protest and perfectly calibrated proportion.Atiqul’s gentle rage  Read

writes EBADUR RAHMAN
encounter

Mind over matter

 I would like to begin with a question for Dhali Al Mamoon. Your large installation piece where a series of hands moves mechanistically reminds one of the assembly line. Though Read

singled out

Art busting art

In the middle-class eye popular art has always been suspect for what has often been claimed as its unsophisticated, unsavory content. Aside from the denigration aimed at it, the dilemma  Read

movie review

Avant-Garden Flower Child

Consider the following statement: 'Oh let my camera record the desperation of the small countries. Oh how I hate you, the big nations, you always think that you are the Read

book review

Appraising “Niranjan”

The Orientals, “Indians”, dark skinned-third-world-mother-worshippers  have a typical tendency to  ‘[r]educing prosaic to mystic,’– Pico Iyer recently  reminded me of this old accusation  of Jan Morris while reviewing William   Read

navigator

Raghu Rai on India: the theatre of the ‘real’!

Scripted by Raghu Rai, the recent show at the Bengal Shilpalaya was a loquacious take on Indian lives and people demolishing many a narrowed-down perception of a populace to inaugurate Read

writes MUSTAFA ZAMAN

Stop-n-shop school of aesthetic martial arts

It is a commonly noted and media-worn erratum of the recent Dhakaites’ reception of Nirmalendu Goon that it unfolds under the heading of “poet’s artwork”! Goon, an iconic relic from  Read

writes EBADUR RAHMAN

Bikash Bhattacharya: the realist reframed

Looking through time, society and the immediate environ to be in the swirl of things, which defines ordinary life– the mundane realities, where the extraordinary remains camouflaged and rarely gets Read

writes SOUGATA CHATTOPADHYAY

Eternal euphoria: Shahabuddin’s leap across time

The word leap seems to problamatize Shahabuddin’s recent yields. Amidst the effusion of brown, black and Indian red and the constituency of human hope and robust– almost inhuman– passion around  Read

writes SHAHMAN MOISHAN

Memory of trees and tranquility: Shamim’s take on nature

Those who believe that emptying the canvas of all traces of reality, or references for that matter, is a liberating experience unmatched by any other spiritual leap possible in life,  Read

Kantha Kahani: whither conceptual framework!

Fahmida Enam Kakoli’s fourth solo exhibition Kantha Kahani has adopted certain original components of our popular culture as the launching ground for her art work. Kakoli’s kantha-inspired collages are, in Read

writes SHAHMAN MOISHAN

Violated visages

Inexplicable as it seems whether "painter" Rabindranath Tagore started making art to convey his mental disquiet or the state of enlightenment, we may still resort to his oeuvre to contextualize Read

writes S M SAIFUL ISLAM

Reality plumbed and unloaded

As an exemplum of the modernist “dissent art” Atia Islam Anne’s work is about raising a voice of concern/alarm through personification of the tragic conditions brought on by misrule, abuse  Read

subject / predicate

Lalon, (con)textualized

Farhad Mazhar: Fakir Lalon spoke and sang in Bangla language but to call him a “Bangalee” is highly problematic, if not wrong. Yes he is from Bangladesh and Bangla was  Read

panorama

Porapara site-specific art camp

The organizers of the Porapara Site-Specific Art Camp 2009, exemplify their recently concluded programme as a search for options for a total of 25 participants to discover their ‘true selves’ through the  Read

Returning to Raku: sculptural innovations at a Britto-organized workshop

Britto Arts Trust, an artists-led nonprofit organization located in Dhaka, in collaboration with the Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, organized a workshop to introduce Raku,  Read

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