Dhaka Live Art Biennale 2017 Dlab Dhaka Live Art Biennale

ON Feb five, 2018, a half man, half bull riding a black-and-white equus caballus fabricated a chiliad entrance into the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Academy of Dhaka, Bangladesh's premier fine-arts institution. Wearing curved horns fastened to a woven rope net that covered his torso, the imposing beast sat on his steed, which was draped with a red caparison, and surveyed the surface area. Although a foreign sight for pedestrians, the balderdash-man cutting a familiar figure for members of the art community, who know him every bit a recurring graphic symbol in the piece of work of artist Mahbubur Rahman. Pointedly, he led the charge that evening into an institution where performance art is yet non on the curriculum. The event was office of Rahman'southward curatorial projection "ShohorNama," the Dhaka edition of the six-city Asian art festival Topography of Mirror Cities.

That same day, creative person Yasmin Jahan Nupur performed as part of the fourth edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, a biennial of exhibitions and symposia focusing on art from Southern asia. In Enej (Dance), 2016, Nupur confined herself to minimal gestures, moving her hands slowly up, down, and sideways to frame her face up. Her dance starkly contrasted with that of the Santal customs, who presented a traditional routine propelled by energetic jumps and kicks. Together, they evoked the history of the fight to create Bangladesh around a shared linguistic identity, a nationalism that has increasingly excluded ethnic groups similar the Santals.

Although it was only coincidence that Rahman and Nupur showed works on the same 24-hour interval, their parallel appearances affirmed People's republic of bangladesh's identify within the growing constellation of performance-art communities throughout S Asia. These artists represent a history of the scene, which has flourished in no small part because of an artist-led movement that has supported and nurtured this medium as a creative form of political protest.

Rahman has been at the forefront of new media and functioning fine art in Bangladesh since completing his MFA in painting and drawing at the Academy of Dhaka in 1993. Although his utilise of materials has always been wide-ranging, his subject thing has remained consistent with his want to draw attending to marginalized figures, and to uncover the roots of their oppression. In Rahman's practice, the artist is cast equally a denizen who strives to highlight the problems of the lodge in which he lives. This has meant that his performances often take on urgent issues in People's republic of bangladesh, such as the tearing persecution of minorities since the liberation war of 1971, governmental abuse, and environmental deposition. Rahman's bull-human belongs to his ongoing Transformation project, 2004–, for which the artist appears on beaches, in galleries, or around the urban center, usually enacting the suffering of this mutant creature. The figure is taken from Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq's 1982 play Nuruldiner Sara Jibon (The Entire Life of Nurul Din), about an indigo farmer who leads a rebellion against the British. The Transformation performances protestation the subjugation of the underclass, drawing from histories of hardship—whether the colonial menstruum in which the play takes place, the time of the war machine occupation during which the play was written, or even the current period of democracy, which has not lived upwardly to its promises.

These artists represent a history of performance art in Bangladesh every bit a creative class of political protest.

Rahman has been a disquisitional player in the evolution of Bangladeshi performance, as a maker but too as a curator and teacher with the Britto Arts Trust, an artist-run arrangement he cofounded in 2002 with Shishir Bhattacharjee, Tayeba Begum Lipi, Salahuddin Khan Srabon, Imran Hossain Piplu, and Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty. Artist-led workshops organized past Britto likewise as by other alternative spaces take long been the only means by which Bangladeshi artists can report and learn performance. In 2004, Rahman conducted a workshop with French creative person Awena Cozannet about the city of Chittagong; among the twenty participants was Nupur. Inspired past discussions near the use of the body equally fabric, she changed the course of her exercise. "When I performed, I felt I could connect with the audience with my actions and gestures," recalled Nupur in an interview in 2017. She has since used it as a tool of protest and dissent with which to confront ritual traditions, and to explore the body itself.

Over the years, Britto's workshops and the adoption of this model by other artist groups spawned festivals and creative person-organized events, including Porapara Space for Artists'International Performance Art Festival, Back ART Foundation'due south Dhaka Alive Art Biennale, and Jog Culling Fine art Space'southward public fine art festival at Cheragi Pahar. In 2017 the Bengal Foundation hosted "ephemeral: perennial," an exhibition of operation fine art, curated by Rahman and Bengal'southward Tanzim Wahab, which focused less on live presentations and more on the importance of documentation and its widespread lack. The effect provided an opportunity for the functioning community to interruption and consider the necessity of the annal as a style of preserving its own history as the stride of activity quickens and a new generation of artists enters the field—an archive that will help that customs claim its rightful place in histories of art, now and in the future.

Zeenat Nagree is a writer based in Bombay.

connorscriful2000.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/201804/zeenat-nagree-on-performance-art-in-bangladesh-74663

Share this post