Page 263 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

260 ART AND CRAFTS

the Fukuoka Art Museum in Japan in 1994. He organized an exhibition of installation
work – made from wood, cloth and camphor - titled Waiting for the Heaven in the gallery
of Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka before leaving for Japan as an invited artist (fig.6.9). In
the second half of the same year, three young student artists of the Institute of Fine Art,
Dhaka University - Mahbubur Rahman, Tayeba Begum Lipi and Nasimul Khabir -
organized an environmental art camp in the hilly backdrop of Lama, Bandarban – a
district situated in the southeast of Bangladesh. In this ten-day workshop, an initiative of
their own, from 16th to 26th December, they practiced – in place of conventional art -
environmental art, earthwork, installation and performance art. They closely observed
the life and culture of the local tribal and immigrant Bengali communities in this
workshop titled Towards Nature: In Search of Art and Life. As a response to their
observations, the artists practiced various temporary works of installation and
performance art using environment-friendly and local materials.
Almost at the same time, in the annual exhibition of the Institute of Fine Art which
started on 19th December, a considerable number of student artists ventured to present
diverse and interesting installations at the premises of the Institute. These installations
were exhibited till January 1995. Next month, a post-graduate student of the same
Institute, Abhijit Choudhury, created different forms using pieces of wood, colored rags
and paper and installed them in natural and man-made environment and exhibited an
audio-visual presentation titled Shobdo Kolpo Chitro with photographs of the installation
along with music, on the Language Martyrs Day of 21st February. In the same year, on
the Independence Day of 16th December, Abhijit and his classmate Humayun Kabir
Bahar jointly organized an exhibition of installations. On this exhibition of Bahar and
Abhijit, Syed Manzoorul Islam, a professor of the Department of English in Dhaka
University, said, ‘Though the tradition of installation art is not new to the West, it is very
recent in our country. In fact, installation in the true sense has hardly been practiced in
Bangladesh. This art is considered Post-modern because it revolts against the
conventional concept of art by abandoning many of its elements.’ [Trans.]
3
Bahar and Abhijit, along with another companion Nazimuddin, ventured yet another
installation in the courtyard of the Institute of Fine Art on the Bengali New Year in
1996. The installation featured prints – and the participation of Nazimuddin, a mime-
artist, added the element of performance in the presentation.
Earlier in 1995, on the occasion of the Bengali New Year, two students of the same
institute, Moniruzzaman Shipu and Saleh Mahmud, arranged a performance-
installation work where they enclosed themselves in a cage. In the promotional
materials for this presentation, they termed it as Life Installation. In the exhibitions of
the young artists like Ahmed Najib, Rashedul Huda and others, installation-type
presentations could be noticed alongside traditional canvas and pedestal-based works.
It should be mentioned that the trend of creating installations that began in 1994 and
95 soon faded away and lost its continuity. The creators of almost all those
installations were young art students. They were also involved in academic art