In(site) Reading in Fragments the Narrative of a Mutating City

Exhibition view with 'Looking Down for Lost Time' in the foreground.

The Taste of the Real 8, acrylic on canvas, 60x60cm, 2014.

From within the matrices of a city in constant flux, with an ambition of an artist who unequivocally situates himself between the 'perverted present' and the 'nostalgic past' (of that city), Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed has assumed a role of a unique cartographer with a territorial claim to his own habitat – Old Dhaka. In(site), his current exhibition, designed as an enumeration of his achievements of the last twenty or so years, is a site where all the empirically gathered fragments make their appearance to form a nuanced discourse. His oeuvre, one which has so far flowed in a number of trajectories, reads like a series of symbolic gestures made by a witness who represents the collapsing urban spaces of Dhaka, to which the trope 'urban desert' may readily be employed.
The recently done series consisting of collages that echo the urban chaos seen from above, though laid out in big canvases in the manner of 'all-over' paintings, facilitates a navigation of an aesthetic kind – one that makes the onlooker aware of the reality they confront on a daily basis in the desecrated urban outdoors.
Salahuddin meditates the spatiotemporal reality of Dhaka to translate it into his artistic expressions and, in turn, make visible the 'complex' that is a city – where livability has now become a contentious issue. Consequently, he forwards a series of interpretations using forms and elements that best serve his aesthetic goal -- which is to reenact the experience of the real in terms of tactile and visual stimuli – colours, textures, shapes and forms as well as found objects etc.
With these stimuli Salahuddin retrospectively alludes to both the organisational matrix or 'order' and the anomalies of growth around him which undermine the very idea of urban sites as the articulation of the ethos of its inhabitants. Thus, his re-articulation of Dhaka's chaos, the disorderly order, serves as a point of entry into a state of consciousness – often providing us with cues to arrive at a 'position' vis-à-vis the physical reality of the city. As he attempts to echo the actual experience he does so not merely to create an index of the real, rather to find a way to explicate his love-hate relationship with his hometown.

Sheer Chaos 66, acrylic on paper, 180x180cm, 2013.

Taking into consideration the gulf between art and reality, one should be content with a 'witness's account' where the essence of the real is not lost. Through this 'essential element' Salahuddin has managed to stay relevant in the art scene. In his work Dhaka reverberates in myriad different ways without getting bogged down in pathos or dystopia. His vision is that of an alert observer inclined to articulate the situation in an abstract, unpretentious yet visually stimulating language.  
Salahuddin works with the tangible elements of the city which is his birthplace. The gradual defacement of this organic city is responded to by way of throwing into the space called canvas (or wooden board) the elements of his choice – most of which are also fairly tangible. In the current display at the Shilpakala Academy's sprawled out 1st floor, for the first time the artist introduces 'time' as a point of departure from his earlier preoccupations to enter a conceptual domain. Time is represented by physical clocks which are encased in heavy manhole lids. Entitled 'Looking Down for Lost Time,' the artist bring into play the intangible idea of lost opportunities for us to remake Dhaka, as through these lost moments we tend to reassess the existential walks we walk on the tight rope that Dhaka's daily life has now in store for most of the inhabitants.            
To understand the paradoxical relation between life and art one may survey the bird's eye views of urban sites, built as bricolage of newspaper and magazine cutouts, alongside the three dimensional constructions such as the scaled up jilapi where the idea of the real is subject to the aesthetical value. And this seems enough to give rise to the actual artistic acts through which to re-enter the real as a revitalised individual living in the 21st century Dhaka, where a flailing urban utopia assumes the shape of a nondescript assemblage.           
In the final analysis, the purpose of Salahuddin's work is to interrogate the notion of art as a representation of reality as well as to reexamine the life lived in 'transcendental rationalism' (Antonio Negri's formulation) by turning a blind eye towards the hostile, hyperkinetic climate of a highly financialised capital Dhaka has turned into over the years.

The Eternal Ringtone, video in a three minute loop.