rokeya sultana hubble shots of interior space
Stepping into Rokeya Sultana’s show titled ‘Dreams of the Elusive’ (the English translation no match for the more sinuous Bengali title of Odhorar Shopnokotha) which ran at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts from May 6-20, I could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that I had entered an exhibition of the Hubble telescope’s deep space shots
Here were the same colours and forms : dream-blue galaxies, solar flare orange, slow unfolding expressionist sunbursts, indigo fire. There was a persistent sensation of cosmic drift and float, of falling through time and space, crescent moons in corners, lemon yellow, maroon, russet and green slowly flooding and coalescing through space-time. Almost a quarter of the works here were titled (perhaps redundantly) ‘Water’, ‘Air’ and ‘Earth’. Questioned in a previous Jamini issue (November 2004) whether in this series she had ‘abandoned narration,’ Rokeya had replied in all seriousness, artlessly, in an age where such pronouncements tend to be greeted with mordant skepticism: ‘This…is a philosophical journey to search for primordial stuff; it goes beyond the surface to the essence of materiality…trying to understand the harmony of nature.’ Heady words, huge claims, but to me, standing in the tranquil, nested hollow of the art gallery, the words seemed to ring true, seemed to resonate.
It was on the second, and slower, tour of the exhibition that the mind recovered, the eye tautened. A string of canvases titled ‘Relations’, mostly with a feminine pair. Sinuous, umbilical lines previously mere slivers—emerged, contours (passages of time really) delineated with glittery cosmic dust. These were not Hubble shots of deep outer space, but of our interiors as representations of Nature: wisps, cloud forms, playful figments, but also flesh-and-blood, erotically charged. Scarlet desire, a blood-red stain, engulfed and flooded the couple in the middle of the canvas titled ‘Relation-3’. Dreams, desire, coupling, ripe-breasted women at home—indeed part of in this primordial, ancient matter. Human relations set against the cosmic plane, falling through space (not hurtling, but with clasped palms as an aspect of falling into grace in ‘Relation-9’), human poses that were fragments of time linked to vast timelessness, rounded thighs against ebbing tides over sand-dunes and Bengal’s deltaic chars to convey Nature’s amplitude.
Rokeya Sultana is a zealous technician, somebody who mastered printmaking early on, and now is considered second to none in Dhaka in working with tempera. It is a medium that one felt was right for what she wanted to express, since its tonality is cooler than oil, whose richer, warmer tonal range might have seduced her into faux-philosophic banalities. Rokeya’s technical accomplishment lies largely in acknowledging the bounds of tempera’s natural register, enhancing the ‘fresh’ look of her large canvas. Her painting should be seen from medium distance, not at close quarters, where unity of line and texture can best be savoured. Even in paintings that are not her best work, as in ‘Narikel Jinjira’ where sensation is subordinated to the merely picturesque by mica-speckling the waters lapping at overdetermined green shores, a hint of immanence remains.
It is this quality in these, her later works, in her reach for the transcendent, that sets her apart from other Bangladesh’s artists.
Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star
Stepping into Rokeya Sultana’s show titled ‘Dreams of the Elusive’ (the English translation no match for the more sinuous Bengali title of Odhorar Shopnokotha) which ran at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts from May 6-20, I could be forgiven for momentarily thinking that I had entered an exhibition of the Hubble telescope’s deep space…