Photo: Messenger
The art exhibition by Nasrin Jahan Onika titled ‘Home’ has begun at Alliance Française de Dhaka (AFD) in the capital. The inaugural ceremony of the exhibition was held on Friday at 6 pm at AFD’s La Galerie.
Artist Monirul Islam, critic Moinuddin Khaled, and Zareen Mahmud Hosein, Director of Shasha Denims Limited, attended the event as special guests.
Onika has studied under the legendary painter Monirul Islam and volunteered at Studio Kala Kendra. A graduate of the Department of Printmaking at the University of Development Alternative, she celebrates all that is home — habit, routine, tediousness, safety, sanctuary, and also confinement. It is a diary of the unremarkable and ordinariness of her existence and of the spaces that she inhabits. While Onika’s perspective is self-referential, she is looking creatively and critically at the world through herself. The objects are hard to make out, the perspectives are skewed, and there is a strange feeling of incomplete recognition. This must be how we all see when we come into the world, before dimension, definition takes shape, and we begin to use cache memory instead of seeing.
The exhibition will consist of works on paper, canvas, as well as clay pots and wood. This cataloging of the everyday is graphic and lyrical, and while Onika has tried very hard to make the writing on her canvas cryptic (writing upside down and backward in a tiny script), she comes across as clear as day. In her art, there is a long and grand desire to find home and belonging in oneself, in others, and in familiar objects. And there is also an awareness that those everyday things are also quite strange, and if you look at them enough, they lead to unfamiliar doorways and realities. In the vastness between one action and the next, our bodies are voyager ships in infinity, carrying our imaginations, spirits, and visions. And Onika is wise to celebrate habit, routine, and boredom. These are conditions that grant us the peace to be. For we are not here forever, not for so long at all. And while we are here, it helps to feel at home, in our skin, in our rooms, in our world, so we can love it all, with our attention.
The exhibition will be open to all until March 12 and can be visited according to the following schedule: Monday to Saturday from 3 pm to 9 pm.
Messenger/Faria
