Embodied Vestiges: Iram Art, Ahmedabad

Dinar Sultana

Being born in a small, rural district in the north part of Bangladesh, my childhood can be narrated as episodes outlined by rigorous discipline and control. Inarguably so, the desire was always to be independent be it from the clutches of my mother’s reproach, or from the expectations at school.

When I came to Santiniketan as a student, the picturesque town both nourished me, when I was caught in the rapture of independence, and also challenged me, when I received the news of my mother’s untimely demise. For a while, in nature I saw but a vast sea of emptiness. I reconciled my own loss with what I saw in nature; how its remnants are not lost but quite simply reborn.This is how I began not painting, but documenting, observing, understanding. Most of this process happens out of my control. The result is at best accidental. I’d like to think that my art tells a tale of both control and accident, echoing a principle of life itself. Once I began my training in art, it was through my newly evolved vocabulary that I found reprieve. Steaming through a ruthless wave of time, I try to make art a little more sensitive. As I transform everyday materials and those associated with rituals and history, the emphasis is on hand worked processes. Oftentimes engaging in a play of absurdity, I have also used architectural and terracotta mould, cotton-pulp, human-hair, snake-skin and a slew of other discarded ephemerals. I then began creating my own paper from using pastes of flower based pulp, News paper recycled pulp and extracting colour from el- ements such as flower, bark, seed, leaf, sometimes stone and clay. However, creating is nothing but a violent process of making. Something that an artist must come to terms with at some point in their journey. For me, it was through loss. I do not paint; I quite simply make. The fleeting ephemeralities of nature have long since fascinated me. I often asked myself, how can I translate this materiality of nature onto my work, when it refuses to be tamed or controlled as per one’s will? To this extent, I have adopted an almost archival, quasi scientific method of categorizing and documenting various hues, forms, textures, surfaces, as well as materials such as clay, coal, graphite, pulp made from newspapers (to demolish written language and establish visual language), and a slew of other discarded ephemera found in nature all in pursuit of understanding its materiality. Simultaneously archiveing the process and the source substances. My respect for traditional ways of life is borne out in the handmade objects and many of these elements are like fossils to me. I am influenced by historical figures such as the engineer and architect Buckminster Fuller and utopian visions of a self sustaining, egalitarian society. My recent works draw on ideas expressed in Fuller’s book Grunch of Giants and the formal characteristics of cartographer, architect Bernard J. S. Cahill’s Butterfly map and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapience” book, which then merges with my own artistic language and world view. My interest in cosmology and imaginative cartography is inherently connected with pressing concerns around income and resource inequality. A space without a ship alludes to Fuller’s concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’, a phrase Fuller used to describe the entire planet. In this case however, the title implies that our trajectory is adrift, as we forge ahead without adequate care for the planet itself or humanity. My work advocates, as Fuller did, for a collective rebalancing, or global cooperation around human intelligence and the earth’s resources, in a way that allows for an ‘integrated regenerative system’.

Selected Collections - Anu Munjal (Satyam Auto Components Pvt Ltd), Prashant Goenka (Emami Art Foundation), Rajeeb & Nadia Samdani (Samdani Art Foundation), Lotus Jewels (Mumbai), Apurva Amin Architects, Hetero Pharmaceuticals (Hyderabad), Lalbhai family (Ahmedabad)
Selected Awards - Samdani Art Foundation 2022 shortlisted artist, Sovereign Art Foundation Asia award shortlisted artist
Selected Residencies - Samdani Art Residency 2024


Promiti Hossain

Promiti Hossain is a Bangladeshi practicing artist with a background of mixed nationalities and religious descent. Born in Bangladesh in 1991, she has spent her life mostly in Dhaka, Bangladesh and partly with her family in Santiniketan, West Bengal, India. She studied Painting from Kalabhavana, Fine-Arts Department, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan (2010-2016). After completing her course in 2016, she continued her artistic pursuits in Santiniketan. She has participated in several national and International group exhibitions. She was a participant of a group exhibition of the twelve shortlisted young artists for Samdani Art Award in “Seismic Movement”, Dhaka Art Summit 2020, curated by Philippe Pirotte. She is the winner of the Samdani Art Award’s first ever jury’s special mention prize for her collaborative art project “personal and social”, awarded by Andrian Villar Rojas, Julie Mehretu, Eungie Joo and Carolyn Christov-Bakarviev. She has also been one of the 100 recipients from Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and Africa of the prestigious Prince Clause Seed Award 2022. Her works were shown at the Bangladesh Pavilion at Venice Biennale in 2022 and she recently was invited by Hampi Art Labs for a residency in 2024.

She has shown at India Art Fair 2024 and Asia Now Paris 2023. She is currently preparing for a two artist show "Echoes of Heritage" which will be exhibited at Iram Art Gallery, Ahmedabad from 5 July 2024 to 15 August 2024. Promiti will be showing her works at Asia Now Paris in October 2024, India Art Fair in 2025 and has been invited for the Samdani Art Residency in 2024/25