Onika's solo art exhibition explores the essence of home

The intimate solo art exhibition "Home" by the promising artist Nasrin Jahan Onika has recently unfolded at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Dhaka in Dhanmondi. The inauguration, graced by internationally acclaimed artist Monirul Islam, distinguished art critic Moinuddin Khaled, and art connoisseur and Shasha Denims Limited Director Zareen Mahmud Hosein as special guests, took place on March 1 with great fervour.

Onika has studied under legendary painter Monirul Islam and volunteered at the Kala Kendra studio. 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 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, take shape and we begin to use cache memory instead of seeing.

The exhibition consists of works on paper, canvas, as well as clay pots and wood. This cataloguing of every day is graphic and lyrical, and while Onika has tried very hard to make the writing on her canvas cryptic (writing upside down and backwards in a tiny script), she comes across as clear as day. In her art, there is a long-standing 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. 

The artist 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 is open to all from 3pm to 9pm, till March 12.