Between October and December 2004, Dhaka staged a series of impressive art exhibitions. From the inventive and manically playful work of Tayeba Begum Lipi to the cool meditative serenity of Iftikhar Uddin Ahmed’s creations to the intense Freudian images of Ranjit Das, rendered in glowing sensuous colours, and the myths and legends and rituals of…
Sudhir Patwardhan: The Complicit Observer by Ranjit Hoskote, Publisher by Sakshi Gallery, Pages: 207, Price: Rs. 2000. And did the Countenance Divine Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded hereAmong these dark Satanic mills? 200 years ago, Blake—a greatly eccentric interpreter of cosmic intention—wrote those lines as a call to arms against…
Figure: The Popular and the Political in Pakistan. by Farida Batool. Lahore: ASR Publications, 2004. Rs. 690 Farida Batool’s Figure: the Political and the Popular in Bangladesh is an important book. Written in a country where religion and politics have been mixed regularly to sustain male power, and where taboos have been imposed on creativity…
A Saga of Man and Nature: The Art of Zainul Abedin, 12 December-January 7 at Bengal Gallery, the National Museum, and Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh We are quick to turn our luminaries into icons, preferably bedecked with high-sounding sobriquets, and then pretend that we need do nothing more than go through certain adulatory rituals on…
When I was asked to write an article about Asian women artists working in London I could initially only think of one other Bangladeshi artist apart from myself. There are probably others scattered over the sprawling capital but if one thinks in terms of a cohesive movement with Asian women artists engaging in discourse about…
The Nepali painter Chandra Man Maskey was admitted to the Calcutta Government School of Art in 1918. With him the concept of art in Nepal started changing. He brought in western techniques of painting to Nepal more comprehensively than the artists who had got a chance to visit Europe in the second half of the…
The question and quest of identity are resolved in some unusual or unpredictable ways, often upsetting one’s notion about ethnicity and foreign influences. One example is the painted vehicle in Pakistan. Who could have thought that buses and trucks manufactured in UK and imported to Pakistan would one day be recognized as the sign/emblem of…
Is art for the masses or for those with more refined tastes? The question, so often asked and so often unanswerable, has probably been around as long as art itself, which is to say a long, long time. The romantic and socialist ideal of creating art that lies within the grasp of the majority is…
Egyptian-French-American artist Ghada Mohamed Amer is now 41 years old. Born in Cairo, she ‘grew up in the politically charged period that followed the Six-day War,’ In 1974, at the age of eleven, Amer’s father, a diplomat, moved to France with his wife (an agronomic engineer) and four daughters, four years after the death of…
African culture is rich in performance ritual. There is ethnic dance that comes with cultural costume, codes of conduct and meaning. There are dance and performance traditions linked to jazz, hip hop, kwaito—traditional music genres practiced and upheld by black folk, not only in Africa but in the west as well. The virulence of apartheid…
