Anthropologist and Urban Ethnographer
“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.”
― Frida Kahlo
No color stands alone; each contains the promise of change.
Khoyabnama [Book of Dream]
This painting traces the dreams that linger behind women’s eyes—visions held in suspension by the quiet weight of gendered constraint. They gather there, luminous yet withheld, like horizons glimpsed but never reached. What appears as stillness is not absence, but containment: a reservoir of becoming pressed inward by the architectures of inequality. In rendering these unspoken desires, the painting invites them into visibility, where what was once confined begins to breathe, to imagine, and to insist on its unfolding.
Unimagined "Others"
This poster reimagines a familiar image from the 1971 Liberation War in Bangladesh—a vision that gathered Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians under a single name: Bengali. I return to it not to repeat, but to unsettle. With the quiet insistence of a “No,” I fracture its unity, revealing the silences it carries. Into that absence, I inscribe the names of Indigenous peoples—tracing their presence against a narrative that sought to absorb them into erasure, restoring their right to be seen, spoken, and remembered. Since then, the poster has traveled beyond me, taken up by activists across Bangladesh.
Foring
Basonto [Spring]
This painting was born in the aftermath of the July Uprising in Bangladesh, when far-right voices moved to erase a textbook image of unity—the five leaves that once held Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, and Indigenous peoples together—and to deny Indigenous existence itself. In response, I turned to a quieter language. Here, leaves gather again, not as symbols imposed, but as a promise: that seasons cannot be legislated, that belonging cannot be erased. However harsh the winter, spring will return—and the leaves will bloom, again and again, beyond denial.
Kriya
Kriya, an award-winning work from the Women’s Dream Exhibition, draws its name from one of the many forms of Goddess Durga. The painting bears witness to the violence inflicted upon Hindu idols and sacred forms, yet it refuses to remain in mourning. Within fractured figures and wounded surfaces, it reveals something enduring—the quiet, unextinguished spirit and power that resides within women. Here, destruction does not mark an end, but a threshold: from the broken emerges a force, ancient and intimate, where Durga lives not only in temples, but in every woman who refuses to be undone.
Machranga (Kingfisher)
This painting bears witness to the thousands forcibly disappeared under Bangladesh’s authoritarian rule between 2009 and 2024. Against this vast absence, a kingfisher emerges—sharp, watchful, unforgetting. It carries our collective conscience, a quiet vow to remember, to hold the names and faces of those taken. In its still gaze, memory refuses erasure; love endures where the state has tried to silence.
Freedom is a verb
The dragonfly in this painting becomes a quiet summons: change begins within us. It asks us to choose—between the ease of passive hope, waiting for freedom to arrive from elsewhere; the comfort of cynical retreat, where resignation masquerades as wisdom; or the difficult path of becoming our own emancipators. With fragile wings, it reminds us that even limited strength can take flight, that every chain can be unsettled. Here, freedom is not a destination but a verb—unfinished, unsteady, and yet insistently in motion.
The Burned Sacred
Burned Buddha recalls the 2012 Ramu attacks, when eighteen Buddhist temples in Bangladesh were set aflame. The work holds that moment of devastation, yet refuses silence. In charred forms and quiet embers, it speaks a resistance: when the sacred burns, it is not only stone or image that is lost, but something of our shared humanity. And still, within the ash, a fragile insistence remains—that memory endures, and with it, the will to stand against such violence.
Potaka [The Flag]
Potaka—the flag—unfurls as both emblem and indictment. It marks the cost of nationalist fervor, where lives are taken in the name of patriotism, yet their sacrifices fade into sanctioned forgetting. The fabric holds absence as much as pride, reminding us that beneath every flag are stories uncounted, lives given but not always remembered.
Joban [Voice]
Joban—voice—rises as a quiet defiance. It insists on speech where fear once sealed mouths, breaking the chains that have long suppressed and terrorized. In its resonance, the painting affirms that even under threat, voices gather, persist, and refuse to be silenced.
Firey Asa [Return]
This painting holds a rare return—the moment when a few of the disappeared step back into the world from Ayna Ghar after the fall of an authoritarian regime in Bangladesh. It is not a simple celebration, but a fragile threshold where absence meets presence. Figures emerge like echoes reclaiming form, carrying the weight of years erased. In their return, the canvas gathers relief and grief together, reminding us that survival is itself an act of resistance, and that even after enforced silence, life insists on being seen.
Dead without grave
While the state inscribes memory in stone and spectacle, the grief of countless families remains unmarked—without name, without rest. Their cries dissolve beneath the shimmer of sanctioned narratives, where power speaks louder than mourning. In that dense noise, the dead do not dwell in slogans, but in the pauses between them—in a shadowed silence where they linger, unburied and unacknowledged. This painting opens a space that insists we sit with the uncomfortable and ‘unpatriotic’ questions: Whose lives are grievable? Who is granted remembrance, and who is denied even a grave? How does a nation abandon its own, and allow such spectral absences to endure?
Dream Catcher
The painting gathers us into a shared horizon—where private dreams touch a common human longing. It gestures toward other possible worlds, where care might replace violence, and imagination becomes a quiet architecture for more just and livable futures.