Discoursing on Six Bangladeshi Artists

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State of EmergencyDISCOURSING ON SIX BANGLADESHI ARTISTS

Ebadur Rahman

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STATE OF EMERGENCY

IT WAS THE early ’70s when Henry Kissinger referred to Bangladesh as an “international basket case,” which in turn was misunder-stood by Bengali hacks and was mistranslated as “a bottomless basket” — shorthand for a black hole of international aid and a land of disaster visibly ridden with dark, smelly, lazy and corrupt Wogs waiting for Yankee goodies to be dumped on them.

As Walter Benjamin notes, the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not an exception but the rule. The trope of bot-

tomless basket-ness highlighted the constant state of emergency that had been a part of Bangladeshi DNA and, at the same time, a wound and a trauma that birthed a national self-consciousness.

From what Benjamin calls the “homog-enous, empty time” of Western history, the modern Bengali Muslim identity was C-sectioned, and the trauma of bottomless basket-ness was an important ingredient of that empty, homogenous time, without which contemporary Bangladesh’s history and

Our inability to produce a coherent historical narrative seems to be located in the inward-looking, traumatic complexity that also de-stabilizes the ideals of the “Bengal School of Arts” that was fomented and midwifed by Ernest Francisco Fenollosa’s most prominent

Okakura had been to Bengal at least twice by 1905, and had written The Ideals of the East (1904) in which he postulated — on the eve of Sino-Russian war — a previously unheard of Pan-Asianism. Around the same time, the exchanges between Bengali artists and the

in 1896 — translated into Abanindranath Tagore’s trademark wash technique and a new way of invoking Bengali reality that became a makeshift template and a launching point for Indian artists of the later generations,

Ramkinkar Baij, K.G. Subramanyan and, in a more diffused way, S.H. Raza, M.F. Husain and Francis Newton Souza, among others. It was a crucial time throughout the empire, and in this remote corner of Bengal there were

great enunciations of practical, artistic and ideological imperatives to set out an anti-colonial and anti-imperial project.

These relations were clearly formulated as a resistance, which is also evident in the contact and contamination that Rabindranath Tagore initiated through his incessant travels to the West and in his effort to bring in foreign scholars like Leonard Knight Elmhirst, Stella Kramrisch or Sylvia Levy. Tagore’s brother Gaganendranath exhibited his typically native Cubist works at a Bauhaus show at the Indian Society of Oriental Art in Calcutta, in 1922, at which both Kandinsky and Klee were on display among 250 other artists. Kandinsky’s watercolors attracted reverent reviews.

Contemporary art in Bangladesh locates its lineage in this alternative vernacular mod-ernism that has never been part of the great modernistic project; Bangladeshi artists take sustenance and construct meaning from a euro-eccentric art history.

The following discourse looks at six con-temporary artists from Bangladesh: Monirul Islam, Naeem Mohaiemen, Ruhul Amin Kajol, Munem Wasif, Atiqul Islam and Shumon Ahmed.

Monirul Islam is a veteran printmaker of 30 years whose latest solo exhibition — “Of Rupture and Continuity” at Bengal Foundation in 2011 — makes use of innova-tive techniques and unusual local materials: wood shavings, crushed temple brick dust,

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN, United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1), 2012. Video, 70 mins. Courtesy the artist. Opposite: SHUMON AHMED, Land of the Free, 2009. Photo montage on digital print, 49 x 76 cm. Courtesy Chobi Mela VI, Goethe Institute Dhaka, 2011.


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is part of human essence, but then our essence is against philosophy. Philosophy stages truth,

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cal rigor. Salt Water Tears

MUNEM WASIF, In God We Trust, 2009. Digital pigment print, 46 x 31 cm. Courtesy Visa pour l’Image 2010, Perpignan (FR).

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-Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie

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Have Killed Pharaoh

The Young Man Was

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that progress across emotional space; he at-

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of global security.


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laden reportage of Bangladeshi “miserabilia,” was not activated within a political vacuum; it inaugurated a refusal of neo-Oriental poli-tics and eschewed dominant ways of thinking about an emerging reality that should not be processed in idealized, settled, schematic and totalized codes and industrial conventions. In God We Trust (2009), Munem utilized the languages of both documentary and photo reportage. It is best understood within the framework of a broader documentarian impulse that bears witness and responds to a complex, low-intensity war situation fac-ing Islam. On the contrary, his foci oscillate from empirical accuracy to storytelling of events as they were encountered by active subjects. He distrusts language and seems deeply ambivalent about the veracity of what it describes. Unlike some of his colleagues, he is uncomfortable with the current market demand for depoliticizing the documentary in favor of a pictorial tendency in the service of consumption.

Atiqul Islam’s mutable sculptures seem to

Long’s work and with Land Art in general. His sculptural appropriations of traditional systems of reckoning can be seen as refrac-tions/representations of the desire to subdue and master the staging of the ideological pa-rameters that brutally curtail the disposition

of nature. Modernist sculpture, the label with which Atiqul dialogically and shyly engages, asserts an inherent lack of roots that, in the hands of a modernist like Brancusi, makes claims to being self-referential and culturally

Western counterparts, refuses to experience the more recent phenomenon of self-refer-ential forms, reverting to regressive antidotes of folksy simplicity and rural archaism within

Shumon Ahmed has been an iconic non-presence in the Bengali art scene. Neither a

auspices of the strong documentary photogra-phy conventions of Bangladesh, for Shumon,

-ity”; the camera is a prosthetic eye to process and to cope with a world of hostile and weird images. These images appear almost as care-fully staged studies of the tensions and power

among whom he grew up but feels increas-ingly alienated. His photographic tableaux The Land of the Free (2009) documents the daily life of a former Guantanemo Bay inmate from Dhaka. It initiates an open-ended and anti-documentary narrative that forms a mass of information without lineage or hierarchy; he short-circuits our understanding of the war on terror and our understanding of sanity and

masculinity through the lens of the uncon-scious libidinal economy; such a reading is not a simple de-sublimation, a reduction and unpacking of an ideological formation to its lower economic or libidinal cause. The aim of such an approach is the inherent de-centering of the status of a certain reality, which brings to light its un-thought, its disavowed presup-positions and consequences, which offers a praxis of change and redemption by revising the power’s grand narrative by proposing at least two things: on one hand that historical moments should be pluralistic micro-narra-tives plotted as confrontations rather than transition; and on the other hand that such confrontations with power are signaled by a functional change in the system of signs.

Ebadur Rahman is an independent curator, writer and

NAEEM MOHAIEMEN, Kazi in Nomansland, 2009. Stamps, 9 x 6 x 2 cm. Courtesy Green Cardamom, London.


Documents

Discoursing on Six Bangladeshi Artists