আমি কোন নৌকায়?
This is the predicament that artist Khandakar Ohida tries to grapple with in life and art: which world do I belong to? Recognising the double-bind of oppression manifesting in the form of familial pressure to conform to socio-religious norms on the one hand, and state obligations to perform perfect citizenship on the other, Ohida navigates ways of escape for the Muslim woman through a series of watercolour paintings. This getaway acquires the colour of magic realism, which infuses the works with a gentle affirmation even as it depicts a quotidian horror.
The ascendancy of parochial politics in India has rendered life for the marginalised Muslim precarious, with numerous bodies having succumbed to mob lynchings in the last decade. Attacked on insubstantial grounds, these bodies are consumed by a deep vortex of nationalist fervour. With mostly men dying in these lynchings, a host of women have been rendered widows, childless, or wanting in other capacities. Carrying the weight of both grief and rage, these women are crucial to the living memory of the abuse. In Ohida’s work, the women step forward to reclaim the air that was denied to the men they lost.
The film Collision in the Wind (2024) mobilises these concerns through the tale of a woman who has lost her beloved. She drifts from one location to another, trying to assess what feels closest to home after he has left her. A bronze বদনা becomes a visual leitmotif; used as a wash-jug during ablutions preceding the namaz, the object imbues the character’s world with a deep absence, and her worldview with fury and agony. The film is punctuated with Ohida’s paintings as narrative interjections, guiding our eye to the battered bodies that stare back as faceless silhouettes. Limbs recur throughout the works—as lifeless, as support, and as apparition. The film condenses these limbs into the body of one woman as she tries to locate meaning in her loss.
However, the voices we hear in the exhibition are heterogenous. In her exploration of the intimate precarities among Muslim women, the artist acknowledges the ways in which the veil becomes a tool of both control and empowerment. While women are often forced to wear the veil in order to access educational spaces, the veil is also exercised as a choice by women as a way to be emphatically visible against systemic erasure. In such cases, men have tried to curb women’s agency by outright banning the veil. Against chauvinistic arbitrariness, the veil is a double-edged sword. The Muslim woman then occupies a strange zone of overlap, entangled in the friction between patriarchy and feminist reclamation. She bears the grief of her community’s persecution while also nursing the wound of her own oppression.
আঘাতটা তো একই ।
The voices in the exhibition call out to and connect through multiple nodes, harking to a trans-continental history of women’s liberation movements through the recurring purple fabric. Figures throughout the works are poised in protest even as they are beaten down by their circumstances. The weapons take otherworldly forms in futurist anticipation. A rippling demand for justice is made palpable through arrested motion. Flowers emerge from dead tissue. And there is a clamorous demand for accountability raining on power in a call for seismic realignment—like হাজার বজ্রপাত। (a thousand thunders).
- Najrin Islam, 2024.
