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ShareProminent artists from Bangladesh are showing their works in Mumbai. Ramya Sarma reports
Political borders mean little in the world of art, except as a theme for creative expression.
Today, in a world where time is everything and getting the job done is more important than how it is done, art can still evoke emotion, move its viewer enough to forget where it came from and pose questions about what it really means.
The work of prominent painters from Bangladesh presents just these kinds of questions. But there are answers as well.
Dialog...Beyond and Within is a group show featuring prominent artists such as Javed Jalil, Farida Zaman, Golam Faruque Bebul, Murshida Arzu Alpana, Mohammed Eunus and others, brought to one forum by Creative Art and Craft, Kolkata, Art Club Bangladesh, Dhaka and Point of View Art Gallery, Mumbai. The artists have a universal, global ethos -- a search for perfection as a mode of expression,
imbuing creator and audience with a shared vision of their coexistence.
According to Jalil, "I believe in the fact that we are coming to a union of the world and universality in the case ofexpressing human emotions, with their struggles and everything else. We are heading for a discovery of our individual uniqueness as we live and unite our humanity in the cause for greater existence." This, regardless of country, colour and geographical boundaries. Jalil believes that "We must be able to venture into any race and everything on earth to rejoice in our diversity."
About art in his home country --Eunus calls it a creative expression of collective memory. As he explains, "The modern art of Bangladesh took the form of a social movement, inspired by the need for resistance to a negation of 'artistic' extravagance.
A parallel movement of combining figurative or non- figurative representations of
social or environmental sensitivities, with pictorial elements of fancy or metaphor, became a major trend of more contemporary artistic expression under a globalising influence."
How would that creativity be different in Bangladesh? Jalil says, "Our culture has preconceived insecurities that give a shelter to our wildness in a very subtle, colourful way."
His Windows of Freedom depicts a woman with her back turned to the viewer, "the strength and vigour of her voluptuous earthliness flowing through her outflung arms to the windows." It expresses "a freedom that only gives away its veils to imagination: the very moment of inner exposure when defences disappear."
Eunus' works are perhaps influenced by the time he spent in Japan. Since then, "I have made many experimental variations with structural patterns, marked by secondary effects of pictorial dressing."
The thematic strain, however, "has remained a free-style geometric mysticism of visual meditation." Wild Symphony is his way of playing with "untouched natural beauty. The wildflowers, the trees, the animals are free and lively," untouched by humans.
Dialog...Beyond and Within, Point of View Art Gallery, Wodehouse Road,till April 8
