Exhibitions of Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed

Present Exhibition

11 Gates to Visual Basis

Materiality and visuality are two interconnected qualities that Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed has been employing to the advantage of the very structure of his mixed media works. When the painter first resorted to 'found objects' to re-inscribe his abstract idiom a decade or so ago, he attached plastic pots and plates onto his canvas. He co-opted the materials that matched with his topographical propositions, which were like bird's eye views of Dhaka's heterotopic geography.

In the current installation titled '11 Gates to Visual Basics', where the artist employs mangled tin sheets from discarded drums and trays used in road construction, a new strategy emerges. Here the material and process come together to complement each other and the artwork as an object of contemplation is displaced to let the co-opted objects – tin sheets and found objects – release a bundle of emotions and thoughts.

Though the architecture of all eleven pieces resides in a field of ambiguity, from their very existence catastrophes and their effects on the human psyche can easily be deciphered.

Catastrophes have an uncanny power to linger on people engaged in world-making from within the social/mental sphere. However, Salahuddin's emplotment of a visual language developed with the scraps of metal sheet not only works like a vassal for memory but also serves as a conduit that leads one to the actual world – both man-made and natural.

In fact, the installation gives rise to a tangle of effects – it takes the viewers closer to the consequences that await all human constructions. And also hints at the human survival instinct linked to the idea of building. The artist forms an alliance with objects with the minimum of intervention. The markings and painted areas – they let the objects retain their original character.

If art is a form of mediation, 11 Gates to Visual Basics almost bridges the gap between the man-made and the natural. Salahuddin's new creation unpeels some of the most relevant narratives of urban disaster as well as civilisational implications. They recent fires in Old Dhaka factories, though are only hinted at, the works clearly demonstrate how the man-made is flimsy and ephemeral, as opposed to the natural.

On the question of time, this exhibition also threads the past with the future by letting us know that things must go through mutations – that is the eternal natural cycle the work acknowledges.

Past Exhibitions and Related Documents

Plotting a continuity - Curator's note

Jibananda Das, in some of his most memorable latter day poems, came close to describing the state of life in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in terms of interruptions in the flow of everyday happenings. With both pictorial accuracy and a sense of ambiguity, he set his gaze to the fallout zones of urban life. A poet whose meditation on lived experience often took a near-metaphysical turn, at times had his mind set on reading signs of aporia. His eyes were seeking out micro-level reality to refer back to a larger social truth. Accordingly, the hydrant in the poem 'Raat' or Night, in a typical Jibabanadian way, suddenly erupted and water gushes from it to the relief of a thirsty leper -- an imagery the poet evoked perhaps not only to decry the sorry state of the dejected, but to gaze at where things 'fall apart' and 'center cannot hold'. Artist Salahuddin Ahmed set for himself a somewhat identical task when he began to respond to the collapsing buildings and the catastrophic urbanization that has confounded the inhabitants of the city of Dhaka since the late 1990s. The outcome is a series that lends the idea of the 'fallout' a set of pictorial traits that rest beyond the region of the disaster.

The best way to remember the fact is by fiction. And in Salahuddin's creations or fictions there are agglomeration of broken forms and rapidly developed brushworks. The disaffiliation from the actual horror and an established representational techne, which might have given it a taste of the horrific, cast the images into a world of their own.

'The unremitting banality and the inconceivable terror' Susuan Sontag once saw in many disaster imagery in her country's cinemas, did not confound Salahuddin. His works are like a series of afterthoughts, or after-images to be precise, through which to retain a sense of equilibrium between the real and the memory of it. They somehow address the endless succession of 'designer environments' mediated by modern technology through the instability that lurks behind them. On every occasion, the mental trace has jettisoned the 'spectral' to bring into view a soul-scene-cipher type of imagery.

There are behind the scene activities that the images also carry a trace of. Salahuddin spurted on to his paper the struggle to align the two opposing concerns -- one that that of the formal quality and the other of the actual impact of the events (Rana Plaza disaster in this occasion).

Straddling a line between the real and the constructed, the artist, in this show entitle 'Fallout', is bent on plotting a continuity (of life and art) through the means of abstraction, thereby expanding on the scope of the aesthic engineering fed by the self-generating principle of creativity which is the essence of human life.

--Mustafa Zaman

Fragmented Unity, AFD, 2018

2018-02-09
Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed's “Fragmented Unity” at AFD

Noted artist Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed's 29th solo art exhibition, titled “Fragmented Unity” is currently on at the La Galerie of the Alliance Française de Dhaka. ..... https://www.thedailystar.net/arts-entertainment/exhibition/kazi-salahuddin-ahmeds-fragmented-unity-afd-1531873

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