Insomni - lucid sleep

Mixed-media installation, 2023
Bangla and English texts in LED neon, photograph (18 pieces),  single-channel video

Duration of video: One minute twenty  five second

Solo Exhibition: Of Fragments

Curated by Sharmillie Rahman
Kalakendra, Lalmatia, Dhaka

'The vast arsenal of embodied experientiality Palash calls into action emerge ‘re-materialized’ on photographic surfaces/screens in the form digitally encoded simulation. The virtual corporeality thus constructed becomes the stuff of a parallel reality which is based more on transposition or replacement of identity than on similarity or representation. In a spirit of suspension of disbelief, the audience is trans(tele)ported to the claustrophobic world of a series of digital photographs entitled “Insomni-Lucid Sleep” where the ‘characters’, partially defamiliarized with the help of props, stage a performative ‘re-enactment’ of straddling a threshold between light and dark, metaphorically indicating knowing without seeing, as the Bangla title roughly translates, “ I can see with eyes shut during sleeplessness”. Or, where the video projection of a night bulb turns into a lodestar, eternally failing to show any path of resolution to the meaningless absurdities of life.'

 - Sharmillie Rahman

Insomni - lucid sleep, LED neon installation, 6.5 X 35 in, 2023

Insomni - lucid sleep, LED neon installation,18 X 30 in, 2023

Insomni - lucid sleep, photograph (18 pieces), 12 X 9.5 in, 2023

Insomni - lucid sleep, props, 2023

Photo courtesy: Sheik Nafi Hassan

Insomni - lucid sleep, props, single-channel video, installation view,  2023

Insomni - lucid sleep, video still single-channel video, video still 2023

Arrow

Single-channel video and photographs, 2023

Duration of video: five minute fifty-two second

Solo Exhibition: Of Fragments

Curated by Sharmillie Rahman
Kalakendra, Lalmatia, Dhaka

Arrow, an imaginative piece, mirrors society's tumultuous movement with anarchy, reacting to its ever-changing social and political landscape. With twists and turns, chaos reigns, giving birth to uproar, as if the very essence of anarchy is brought to life. Amidst this chaos, a performative act emerges—a symphony of noise giving birth to an uproar. It is a performance in front of the changing television screens, collectively with voice and soundscapes that evoke an absurd sensorial experience.

'Palash’s deep-rooted fear and sense of insecurity resurfaces with every single stroke drawn on the surface of the TV screen as a signification of negation. Contesting and fictionalizing the dynamics of simulation Palash posits an antithesis of absence, or in other words conjures up a presence; presence of all those who fell victim to various means of disappearance. This is “Arrow’’ in a nutshell.'                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  -Sharmillie Rahman

 

 

Single-channel video screening, Kalakendra, Dhaka

Counter gaze of the video, photographs (2 pieces), 33 X 24 in 2023

                                                                                               

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ID

LED neon and two-channel video installation with sound
19th Asian Art Biennale, National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 
Materials: LED neon , red carpet, wooden frame and two TV

I developed a self-examined method for this work based on my everyday encounters with social and national identification and verification. Here, two words in Bengali 'দরকারি কাগজপত্র' and the words translated into English, 'Documents Required,'  are shown in the center of the wall in LED neon to show the tendency toward verification. The opposite of those texts is a red carpet on the floor, followed by two videos on two TV sets, both responding to the central texts, with one video showing typing letters and the other showing blurry fingerprints.

Photo Courtesy: Sheik Nafi Hassan

Video sample

Lesson

Performance 
Asian Art Biennale, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka,1 December 2022
Materials: Microphone, Books, notebooks, pen, dice
Curated by Abdus Salam

Exhibition view: Documentation based book.

Photo Courtesy: Sheikh Nafi Hassan 

This performance was a nuanced response that stemmed from my lesson, experiences and emotions, expressed through immediate actions. The actions of this situation were conveyed using a combination of auditory and visual elements, integrating noise into the performance. The viewers were exposed to unconventional activities facilitated by high-frequency microphones, featuring institutional objects like books, notebooks, and pens associated with the text.

Performance at ShilpaKala Academy, Dhaka 

1 December 2022

Photo Courtesy: Shadman Sakib

Link Road

Three channel video installation with sound (synchronize)
2021/2022

Show:  ''Language is Migrant''  Colomboscope 2021 at Colombo

Warehouse 421 at Abu Dhabi 

Supported by Warehouse 421 UAE , Goethe-Institut Bangladesh and Colomboscope 21

Curated by Anushka Rajendran

Artistic director: Natasha Ginwala

 

''Language is Migrant'' Warehouse 421 at Abu Dhabi, Colombo, 2022, Image Courtesy of Warehouse42,  Abu Dhabi

''Language is Migrant'' Colomboscope,  Rio Complex, Colombo, 2022 Photo Credit: Shehan Obeysekara

I examined my personal experiences with political and cultural history in this work in Link Road, my spoken dialect, which arose from the confluence of numerous historical and geographical flows on the river Karnaphuli, which runs through Chattogram. Within the confines of language and water, efforts are made to imagine existences that are close, distant, marginal, and unknown, depending on recollected pieces and detached affirmations of my childhood viewpoints. The work is influenced by familial and friendship bonds defined via personal and spiritual attachments to the river and language, prevalent in marginal and coastal life along the India-Myanmar border. A riverboat adrift and fragmentary recollections of coming to terms with "otherness" as something that dwells within the self, not beyond, are paired with linguistic and identity meanderings. Except for the middle video, I used single-shot videos from a single boat without being controlled by the boatman. The middle one, which includes voice-over, is also a single-shot video but takes a different schedule.

Chobimela 2021, ''Anatomies of Tongues''  Curated by Anushka Rajendran, Dhaka, Image credit MD FARHAD RAHMAN

Pass

Two channel video installation,
2019/2020
Samdani Art Award Show at Dhaka Art Summit, National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, 2020
Curated by Philippe Pirotte

Supported by Samdani Art Foundation

The work based on purposive act and event extracted from everyday life is being produced. One video shows the scene of opening and closing drawer and the last one shows restless movement of hand holding some small sized papers and shaking those papers. Through the actions, desire and its prospective form of outcome are being focused.

Shakti

Three channel video installation
National art exhibition
at National Art Gallery Shilpakala Academy,
Dhaka 2019

A connection between power and ability is coined by applying necessary objects taken from familial and social tradition. In this work, some of the myths have been experimented to look at the reality. There is a scene of creating air using a hand-fan in the first video. The second one shows a scene of a special moment of a place and a scene of fire and fume in a censer / dhunuci.


Shakti from Palash Bhattacharjee on Vimeo.

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.

Unlock!

Three channel video installation, 2017
First show: 22nd National Art Exhibition, National Art gallery, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 2017.

In this three channel video work, I captured some awareness procedures of our day to day life which are connected to personal entrance or intrusion to anywhere. Through this repetitive performative act, with the mass awareness and safety related experiences, person's psychic repression is expressed. In the first one, the act of knocking door is present. In second, shows the locking of the door. The third, entering and exiting by opening a door and closing the door is shown.


Unlock! from Palash Bhattacharjee on Vimeo. sample of the three channel video work

Image from 22nd National art Exhibition at National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka 2017.

ইতিহাস আলাপ ( Coursing through History )

Two channel video installation
Exhibition: 17th Asian Art Biennale,
National Art Gallery, Shilpakala Academy,
Dhaka, Bangladesh. December 2016.

Coursing through History could be seen as a reaction against the naturalized legacy of the colonial past which, needless to say, spilled over into the scattered and fragmentary readings of the Liberation war of Bangladesh. This audio-visual work comprises a double channel video with one screen showing the wounding of books with a ball point while the other captures an acceleration of the speed of reading both in image and sound; in essence, an analogy for destabilizing the grand historical narratives by vandalizing the textual composition of the pages of history.
Text edited by Sharmillie Rahman

Video still, ইতিহাস আলাপ ( Coursing through History ) 2016



Video sample

Marked

Ephemeral Perennial

Mixed-media installation

Materials: Photographs, electric blower, hammer, video, micro phone devices 

6 January to 20 February, Daily Star-Bengal Arts Precinct, Dhaka, 2017 

Curated by Mahbubur Rahman and Tanzim Wahab 

Performance: 27 December 2016

Photo

Image: Ephemeral Perennial Exhibition

 Daily Star-Bengal Arts Precinct, Dhaka, 2017 

Image: Performance 'Marked' at Bengal Galley of Fine Arts, 27 December 2016. Image courtesy: Bengal Foundation 

Photo courtesy: Bengal Arts Programme, Bengal Foundation












Technology is advancing rapidly, asserting their existence. They have the ability to make memories and develop sensory powers. The results of their actions matter little to them. Even non-action doesn’t bother them. Their functions are not attached nor detached to human emotions or concerns
Marked is a study of one such hypothetical situation where I’m trying to make visible, information that is invisible.

This is part of a series of sound-oriented works, where I work with making the audible visible.



Marked from Palash Bhattacharjee on Vimeo.
Video courtesy: Bengal Foundation 

Marked from Palash Bhattacharjee on Vimeo.