The first solo exhibition of young artist Nasrin Jahan Onika titled ‘Home’ has begun on Friday at La Galerie of Alliance Française de Dhaka, Dhanmondi in the capital.
Eminent artist Monirul Islam, renowned art critic Moinuddin Khaled and Zareen Mahmud Hosein, Director of Shasha Denims Limited, attended the inauguration event as special guests.
Onika has studied under legendary painter Monirul Islam and volunteered at Studio Kala Kendra. A graduate of the Department of Printmaking at University of Development Alternative, she celebrates all that is home — habit, routine, tediousness, safety, sanctuary and also confinement.
It is a diary of the unremarkable and ordinariness of her existence and of the spaces that she inhabits. While Onika’s perspective is self-referential, she is looking creatively and critically at the world through herself, according to AFD.
The objects are hard to make out, the perspectives are skewed, and there is a strange feeling of incomplete recognition. This must be how people see when come into the world, before dimension, definition, take shape and people begin to use cache memory instead of seeing.
The exhibition consists of works on paper, canvas as well as clay pots and wood. This cataloging of the everyday is graphic and lyrical, and while Onika has tried very hard to make the writing on her canvas escryptic (writing upside down and backwards in a tiny script), she comes across clear as day.
In her art there is a grand desire to find home and belonging in oneself, in others, and in familiar objects. And there is also an awareness that those everyday things are also quite strange, and if you look at them long enough, they lead to unfamiliar doorways and realities.
"These are conditions that grant us the peace to be. For we are not here forever, not for so long at all. And while we are here, it helps to feel at home, in our skin, in our rooms, in our world, so we can love it all, with our attention," the artist said.