1
Samdani Art Book - I
Mustafa Zaman
Ronni Ahmmed
Wahid Zaman
What i have forgotten could fill an ocean, what is not real never lived Shumon Ahmed
79
Rafiqul Shuvo
i have killed phara h i am no ot afraid to die Naeem Mohaiemen
From 1993-98, I worked intermittently on a project to document oral histories of the Bangladeshi liberation war of 1971. That project’s failure led to my transition away from a mode of formal historiography, with emphasis on “closure” and moral absolutism. My recent research has explored rupture points and cracks between and among grand narratives. In the following chapter, I speculatively blueprint the timeline of an assassination, digging out loose shards. People who knew of impending gunfire and stayed silent. A nation trapped as mute witness
or willing conspirator. The slogan comes via Anwar Sadat’s Egyptian murderers, army officers at a parade gone wrong. As those assassins were shot and captured, the leader shouted words in Arabic that became legend in the following Cairo days, “My name is Khalid al-Islambuli. I have killed Pharaoh. I am not afraid to die.” His predictions or hope for a uprising and revolution did not come to pass. It often never does. I sometimes invert the idea of photograph as frozen time, instead deploying sequential images with microshifts, as film strip
or storyboard. Text is a parallel object here, working as a title sequence in a silent film, while the photos function as the Zapruder film used in the Kennedy assassination investigation. Polaroids trapped in resin expand, leaking the image they have been trying to hold. Someone forgot to check expiry dates. This chapter was part of the Frame section of Frieze Art Fair in London, 2010
Shehzad Chowdhury
Naquib Hossain
Bio gr aphi e s
Mustafa Zaman
The preeminent artist of his generation ; Mustafa’s critical engagement with different mediums and across the new media landscape has opened up a new paradigmatic space, to articulate culture/ polity-specific ideas, in the region.Mustafa’s criticism and writing appeared in all major Bengali publications.He is the editor of Depart.He attended Arts Forum Berlin, 2010, in a government exchange program.
Naeem Mohaiemen
A multi-media artist, film maker, an essayist, activist, editor and a prolific op-ed writer based mostly in Dhaka and NYC. He uses text, photo, video and archives to explore histories of the international left, utopia/dystopia slippage, post-partition South Asia, and globally interlinked security panic. Projects include My Mobile Weighs A Ton (militarization); Otondro Prohori, Guarding Who (surveillance); Penn Station Kills Me (monuments); Kazi in Nomansland (amnesia); and Red Ant Motherchod Meet Starfish Nation (military coup). Working between two countries, Mohaiemen sometimes explores the contradictions between Bengalis in marginal migrant status, and majoritarian (and authoritarian) roles in their own country. As part of this work, Muslims or Heretics: My Camera Can Lie was a documentary about the problem of multiple audiences. His essays include Islamic Roots of Hip-Hop (Sound Unbound, MIT Press); Beirut: Illusion of a Silver Porsche (Men of the Global South, Zed Books); Why Mahmud Can’t be a Pilot
(Nobody Passes, Seal Press); Adman Blues Become Artist Liberation (Indian Highway, Serpentine Gallery); Everybody Wants To Be Singapore (La Buena Vida, Carlos Motta, ICA); and the book Collectives in Atomised Time (with Doug Ashford, Idensitat, Spain). Mohaiemen’s exhibition at CUE marks his first solo show in New York.
Rafiqul Shuvo
Naquib Hossain
Rafiqul’s hybrid sculptures and “objects” incorporate a range of strange and unusual materials.
Architect and photographer; he specializes in photographing architectonic structures; used to be a lecturer and design instructor at the Temple University, Philadelphia and at the BRAC University, Dhaka.
Belongs to a young generation of bold and socially engaged artists from Dhaka. His most recent works invasively combines text,painting, video, mixed-media sculpture and traces of absence.
He was part of group exhibitions in the U.S.A, Italy, Pakistan. and Hungary.
Ronni Ahmmed
He is, perhaps, the most important voice to emerge from Bangladeshi art scene in last 15 years. Ronni, a young painter, devices an original conceptual framework–and a stratagem of hybrid languages– to respond to the immature, often violent XXI century realities of a “underdeveloped” world and a “failed state”. His influence is already vividly evident in the works of the peers and among younger artists. Ronni has, also, establish himself as the most important art-critic of the country ; he is a product designer, a short story writer and fronts a band called, Lubricated Goat.
Shehzad Chowdhury
A visual artist, curator, and creative director, Shehzad juggles many rolls to fit the occasion. He has been documenting the changing textures of Dhaka City for the last nine years. He is working on a publication on the urban sprawling of Dhaka. Currently he is in the execution phase of the 4th Longitude/Latitude photographic exhibition which he curates and is director of.
Shumon Ahmed
An emerging artist who mostly uses photograph and text. Recently, he was part of a group show at the Whitechapel Gallery.
Wahid Zaman
A painter and new media maverick. He is the first Bangladeshi artist to win the Grand Prize at the Asian Art Biennial, in 2010. He won the prestigious Berger award twice, the 1st Tone International Miniature award and numerous other honors. Wahid was invited to participated in the Ninth Bharat Bhavan International Biennial of Print-Art; his group shows include: Noma Concourse for UNESCO(ACCU), Tokyo, Sharjah Biennial-8, 15th Japan Asia Africa Latin America cultural exchange art exhibition at Tokyo Metropolitan art Museum (2006),Young Artist Art Exhibition at Chuwa Gallery, Tokyo, Ajac Exhibition “New Art in Japan� at Tokyo (2001, 2006), LACDA International Juried Competition at Los Angeles (2007), Canada International Miniature art show (2000, 2001).
Samdani Art Book - I