'Art writing from below: Transversality in the country of mistranslation'

Date: 8 February 2018, 3.00pm
Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy

Conceiving it as a site for raising and debating issues, Depart magazine’s editor Mustafa Zaman will offer the raison d’etre behind the art quarterly published from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose principal aim is providing critical reinforcement to the burgeoning art scene of the country. Zaman will look at the state of art criticism in Bangladesh while simultaneously examine some of the crucial critical interventions as activities from below. Often subject to mistranslation in the artistic circuit, what some writings set in motion is a social/collective reaction, while others pass without notice. Thus the coincidence of art as a critical praxis and art writing as critique remains even more misunderstood.

Born in 1968 Mustafa Zaman received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1989 from the Institute of Fine Arts (now, Faculty of Fine Arts), University of Dhaka. In the late 1990s Zaman started contributing art reviews to Observer Magazine, a weekly supplement of the daily Observer. He joined The Daily Star in 2002 and worked in the scope of a feature writer for Star Weekend Magazine for three years writing on a gamut of subject matters including art, literature and politics. He has contributed numerous art reviews and articles on major Bangladeshi artists to a number of vernacular dailies including Bhorer Kakoj and Prothom Alo. Zaman is now editor of Depart: a magazine launched in 2010 and focused on contemporary art from South Asia with special emphasis on the emerging art scene of Bangladesh. He has written numerous prefaces to exhibition catalogues of major Bangladeshi young artists. Zaman’s major curatorial efforts include ‘CrossOver’ (2011–2012), which occasioned two back-to-back workshops and exhibitions planned in collaboration with co-curator Sushma K Bahl, sponsored by Art & Bangladesh in Dhaka, and Art Mall in Delhi, with artists from India and Bangladesh as participants; two solo exhibitions in 2013 including ‘DeReal’ by Bahram, a rickshaw painter who crossed over to mainstream art circle, and ‘Gravity Free World’ by expatriate artist A Rahman; and lastly a retrospective exhibition in 2014 entitled ‘In(site)’ by Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed. As an artist Zaman had his first solo in 2002 where sourced image were placed alongside texts to interrogate the order of knowledge; his second solo showcased his large paintings on canvases in an exhibition in 2010, at Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts; and the third was a playful mix of two and three dimensional works framed as a series of seemingly disparate yet thematically related conceptual pieces at Alliance Francaise in 2010. His most recent multimedia installations and interactive pieces were presented at Bengal Lounge in 2013, at a duo exhibition with fellow artist Rafiqul Shuvo, under the title ‘Automated Subjectivity’.