My great-grandfather was a fireman—he maintained the wood-fired boilers and the ‘limelights’ on the stage at a theatre (this early form of lighting, whilst very useful, could be extremely hazardous, employing, as it did, a core of limestone heated to incandescence by a burning mixture of oxygen and hydrogen, both functions requiring constant individual attention).…

Merely reiterating the greatness of the greatest work of Louis Kahn was not the intention of the authors. Their mission was to turn the discussion and debate around the event and use it as a tool to question the recent history and development of  Dhaka City Time and time again history has shown that city…

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…

Noazesh Ahmed has been pursuing photography as an art form for a long time now. The earliest of his photographs on display in his solo exhibition, ‘Quest for Harmony’, held from July 11 to July 24, 2005 at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts  (Bengal Shilpalaya), is a black and white piece titled, ‘Struggle’, produced…

At a youthful fifty-and-a-little Nazlee Laila Mansur belongs to the middle generation of our artistic community, and that means she is due for a regorous examination of her track record Nazlee Laila Mansur’s June 2005 show at the Bengal Gallery—her fifth solo since her first in 2000—afforded us an opportunity to carry out the exercise,…

Jyotirindra Nath Tagore, one of Rabindranath’s older brothers, was the first to receive wide acclaim abroad for his artistic works when a folio of twenty-five pencil sketches by him was  published in London in 1915 The Tagore family of Bengal had no dearth of genius or talent, particularly in the field of art and literature.…

For a proper perspective on early photography in Dhaka, it is necessary to provide a brief history of photography in the Indian subcontinent during the British colonial era. In January 1840, less than two years after the appearance of commercial photography in Europe, photographic equipment and supplies were being sold in Calcutta and Bombay. The…

It was a triumphant moment for Indian Cinema when Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair’s ode to ‘Punjabiyat,’ was honored with the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival in 2001. She is the true inheritor of Ray’s cinematic mantle, said an exuberant Indian film critic.  Within a few hours of the award’s announcement, three hundred…

Boshier is a senior British artist who has lived and worked in the United States for many years and drawn his subject-matter from American culture since the 1960s. A survey of his career is followed by an appreciation of recent anti-war drawings and exhibitions What I admire about Derek Boshier (b. 1937 Portsmouth) as a…

Michelle Nikou (born in Adelaide in 1967) grew up in small-town rural South Australia—in Yankalilla, on the Fleurieu Peninsula. She gained a Bachelor of Arts in 1989 from the South Australian Art School and a Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts from the university of south Australia in 1990. Nikou’s work began to gain attention after…