Nasrin Jahan Onika’s art exhibition ‘Home’ at Alliance Française de Dhaka
Nasrin Jahan Onika’s art exhibition titled ‘Home’ is
going to be held at the Alliance Française de Dhaka from March 01 to March 12, 2024.
The inaugural ceremony of the exhibition will be held
on Friday, March 01 at 6:00pm at La Galerie of Alliance Française de Dhaka.
Onika has studied under legendary painter Monirul
Islam and volunteered at studio Kala Kendra. A graduate of the Department of
Printmaking at 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 escryptic
(writing upside down and backwards in a tiny script), she comes across clear as
day.
In her art there is a long in 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 till March 12.
Visiting Hours: Monday to Saturday from 3:00pm to 9:00pm.
