Special Feature

Three channel video installation
18th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh
National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy, 2018

This work brings into play a sense of disruption about the way we are fed news, views and ideology in the guise of knowledge in the mediated world by examining the condition of the body in connection with the narratives or textual matters. There are three types of performance in relation to Bangla newspapers that I have developed and finally showcased in three separate channels. This video installation takes its point of departure from a single event, to make an attempt to carry out a postmortem of sort in metaphorical term to elicit some truths about the event. The result is the distribution of the theme into sub-themes. I break it down to many different responses -- The first one shows erasing the texts from the newspapers using a blade, the second one shows newspapers soaked in water and the last one shows hammering the nails on the newspapers.

Text edited by Mustafa Zaman


Special Feature from Palash Bhattacharjee on Vimeo.

Compose

Five channel video installation, 2018
Seven minutes loop
Samdani Art Award Exhibition, Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Production supported by Samdani Art Foundation.
Curated by Simon Castets

Image from Samdani Art Award Exhibition, Dhaka Art Summit 2018, National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy

In this work, the idea of the search for knowledge is overlapped with that of the educational exercises that we are habituated to accept as our only means to become educated. In order to unsettle this concept of the ‘ideal method’, the work re-arranges the books to critique the established notion of knowledge dissemination and reception which is tied to the colonial legacy. These specimens underline some of the misrepresentations developed under the colonial gaze.
Here, academic, Intermediate-level and Gradute-lable books of grammar, literature, math and some journals are used to demonstrate the shady regions of the colonial education system. The video work has done on the inspiration of naivety of some reading experiences of my childhood. The first video show the pages of the books are being flipped, the second video shows books are being read, the third one shows books are being torn, circles are being inscribed into their pages besides the final act of stapling them.

Text edited by Mustafa Zaman

Sample of five channel video work

Compose from Palash Bhattacharjee on Vimeo.

Video still

Marked 18

Performance, 3 February 2018,

Venue: Faculty of Fine Arts,University of Dhaka 

The final exhibition of the project ShohorNama, Daily Star-Bengal Arts Precinct

2 March - 16 March, 2018

This is part of a series of sound-oriented performance works.'Marked' could be away from the humanistic approach where machines are advancing to assert their existence. They could mark their own memory and sensory powers.  No significant humanistic sense is attached or detached with the activities of the performance.