The archaeology of relationships

Artworks by Kazi Sayed (left) and Sarkar Nahid Niazi.

Gunnysacks ravaged by time and discarded as waste, roughly sewn together and heavily splashed with paint, construct a fiercely lyrical vision of beauty and decay in Kazi Sayed's paintings. He enjoys experimenting with surface and has shown an obsessive interest in texture and slow-moving form.
Sayed's canvas, dense and loaded with images and materials associated with his childhood, complements in an interesting way to the painting of discarded wooden boxes and charred wood planks by Sarkar Nahid Niazi (Nipu), his wife. The viewer of the current show, at Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, will get to see the creations of this couple together (though their works have been seen separately often) for the first time in Dhaka.
Kazi Sayed grew up in the city's Shyambazar area, where spices, onions, and vegetables have been traded for ages and where scores of godowns, skirting the area, provide storage facilities for traders. Supplies for this wholesale market have always come here from different parts of the country in yellow ochre jute gunnysacks.
The hullabaloo that is so distinctive a feature of the market, especially the noise of its porters loading and unloading large jute sacks, inhabits the canvas of Kazi Sayed's subconscious.
Sayed's family has been in the bakery business for a long time. It is a trade, which consumes loads of potato, sugar, and flour that are dispatched and delivered in large jute sacks of different shapes and sizes, often worn-out by time and inevitably therefore in repaired and roughly stitched condition.
While collecting and preserving lacerated jute gunnysacks or burlaps discarded as waste from godowns or food factories found in the area and making them the stuff of his artwork has become Sayed's passion, Nipu was engrossed in the colour and cadence of wooden boxes and planks. Amazingly, they have found their language of expression in these seemingly banal, discarded objects and have transformed them into works of art.
The scent wafting from the bakery, the sight of workers kneading dough, the sense of touch activated in contact with the sacks, the sounds of this area of godowns and wholesale markets, and images of discarded boxes have all been condensed and captured in the images or symbolism of Sayed and Nipu's canvas. They have, indeed, become the leitmotif of their works.
For them the medium is the message. Their concern with creating images of worn-out wooden boxes or breaking the surface, building up layers and allowing the paint underneath the burlap patches to peep through give their painting a dimension that is sculptural.
For an artist, memories and imagination are the fountainhead of images and symbols. Not surprisingly, for Sayed and Nipu, they form the bedrock of their work. The vitality and vigour of the remembered scenes of the past make the language and idiom of their unique canvas.
Both Sayed and Nipu are against interpretation, and more or less everything except the space of their canvas and the territory covered by the artwork. They are for creating a mood whereby the viewer will be overwhelmed by the infinite play between the signifier and the signified.
The layering of sacks on sacks gives Sayed's canvas a three-dimensional sweep. His collage method also recalls the notion that one of the basic poles of language, as identified by the linguist Roman Jakobson, is metonymy.
In metonymy one thing represents another; the part stands for the whole. In dreams, as well, an element might stand for something else through what Freud said “displacement”. The worn-out sacks and burlaps in Sayed's case evoke childhood memories and the unique ambience of Shyambazar. As if informed by the philosophy of the Art Informel movement -- the school of abstract art of post-war Europe -- his canvas rejects conventional ideas of composition and turn to new materials for inspiration.
The broken wooden boxes in Shyambazar and the nearby Katpatti, market used for selling all sorts of wooden planks or boxes, began to fascinate Nipu while she was dating Kazi Sayed and looking for subjects for classroom studies.
Nipu's images of wooden planks, scrapped wooden shutters or boxes with their delicate shapes and interrelationships evoke feelings of desolation and testify to the ravages wrought by time. Her obsession with composition and their relationship with each other engender interpretations on the complexity of human relationships, especially of conjugal life.
Sayed's recent work expresses a predilection for bright hues, unfamiliar dreamlike shapes and forms. Nipu seems engrossed in interpreting the grain of wood planks, their inner texture and mystery.
Intimate, delicate, and poignant, the works of the couple seem to be located at the intersection of beauty and decay.

Ziaul Karim is a curator and art critic.