Lucknow: City of IllusionEd. Rosie Llewellyn-Jones With a preface by E. Alkazi The Alkazi Collection of Photography: New York, London, New Delhi Pub: Prestel, Municch, Berlin, London, New York 2006 A city’s memories are etched onto the only truly permanent component of urban living: its buildings and monuments. These visual and practical reminders of checkered…
A take on Dhaka’s most recent exhibitions – French photographer’s against-the-grain perspective on the beauty of unkempt city, the celebration of the traditional metal-casting art of Dhamrai and the diametrically different styles of two women artists, Rokeya Sultana and Laila Sharmeen dhaka deconstructed Bruno Ruhf’s eye is set on things that are all too familiar…
Entitled ‘One Day in the Life of Sufia Kamal,’ Proshanta Karmakar Buddha put together the graphic record of his childhood idol in the exhibition held at Gallery Chitrak recently Sufia Kamal was a poet, writer, feminist, social activist and freedom fighter. To present her various facets through photography is a superb idea. When Sufia Kamal…
Farida Zaman, perhaps our best known woman artist has had an important show in Dhaka. Syed Manzoorul Islam has been to this significant event Even before she was exposed to the narrative tradition pursued by the Baroda school of artists in India (where she went for an MFA degree in early 1980s), Farida Zaman had…
Bangladeshi artist Mahmudul Haque, who recently mounted a show at Karachi’s Chawkhandi gallery, is a printmaker and painter of extraordinary textural sensitivity It is one of the mysteries of art that from millions of possibilities, the artist selects a particular combination to evolve his signature iconography. What is it that makes an artist give certain…
The Sydney Biennale—the mega art-event that takes place in the bright, shiny and fairly happy antipodean city of Sydney, Australia—has become a permanent, if not one of the more glamorous, fixtures on the art circuit of the world. The 15th version of the extravaganza took place between 8th June and 27th August this year and…
Pankha literarily means a wing; in day-to-day parlance it also stands for a portable fan, made from palmyra. But the term Pankha was in circulation in British Bengal conveying a special sense for a large swinging fan, fixed to the ceiling, connected by two symmetrical ropes and pulled by an operator during the hot and…
This is an age of diasporas. Populations wash around the earth, leaving bodies in crevasses, dreams in rockpools. No wonder that ‘identity’ has become a shibboleth of postcolonial discourse. But identity with what? Where and when has anything been truly self-same? Artists in exile–if exile it is–may be wiser than ideologues, and imagination may save…
It all started quite by an accident. In 1981, while visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, USA, where the India Festival was being held, I came across some remarkable vintage photographs of British and Princely Indian states on display. As I stood transfixed in front of a photograph of an Indian potentate…
‘What of the photograph made out of nothing? What about painting with light? Is it photography? Surely if we can paint with light we can paint with dreams, create the morning mist or the afternoon glow. Will it be a fake? Hardly. Whatever else may be false in this tenuous existence of ours, imagination is…
