When Joydeb Roaja travelled from Bangladesh to Dubai, where his work was showcased as part of a collective exhibition at the recent Art Dubai, he was stopped and questioned by immigration authorities on both sides. A part of the indigenous Tripura community of Bangladesh, the authorities at home couldn’t identify him as Bangladeshi; when he arrived in Dubai, they demanded to know if he could speak Bengali or if he was Rohingya.
“Indigenous communities get written out when you’re looking for sameness,” says Diana Campbell Betancourt, the curator of Fabric(ated) Fractures, the exhibition that brought together the work of 15 artists from Bangladesh, South Asia and Southeast Asia. “The way we identify the world today is based on fractures created by colonial powers. We wanted to look at all the strands of difference that get written out when you’re only looking at these majority narratives.”
Not a little brother
Roaja’s pen and ink drawings echo political conflicts in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), which straddle the borders of Bangladesh, India and Myanmar. These depict female subjects engaged in mundane tasks and traditions, fused with military tanks and equipment — a disturbing portrayal of how violence has been absorbed into the everyday. Equally telling is Ashfika Rahman’s Rape is Political, a series of portraits depicting rape victims from the CHT’s Khagrachari hills. Words in ethnic languages are strewn across their faces, as if to conceal their individual identities while reinforcing a sense of communal resistance. Kanak Chanpa Chakma’s Soul Piercing, which deals with the ironies of religious violence, draws from the 2012 mob attacks against the Buddhist community in southeastern Bangladesh.
In these works, and in many others, Bangladesh’s many threads of connection with Southeast Asia come to the fore. “The longer you look at Bangladesh as the little brother of India, you miss its connections with Myanmar and Thailand,” says Betancourt. “Bangladesh is very interesting, with all the rivers, how it is this cross section between South and Southeast Asia. Other than the word ‘Zomia’, there’s no word that really looks at that connection.’”
Between the weaves
The Rohingya crisis perhaps highlights the crucial nature of this relationship. Since August 2017, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled atrocities in Myanmar to take refuge in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar. Embodying this and linking it with the plight of Bangladeshi migrants is Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s, Haven is Elsewhere. The work, which joins together the discarded clothes of these migrant communities, collected over a period of time, uses traditional kantha embroidery to create a colossal piece of art — one which contains within it imprints of pain, suffering and longing. “What’s interesting is that some of the works that deal with the Rohingya crisis actually pre-dated it blowing up,” observes Betancourt. “So artists are really on the pulse of what’s going on, and see things sometimes before we see them.”
The element of fabric ties together many of the other pieces. Rashid Choudhury’s intriguing tapestries depict stories and traditions from his village in Faridpur district (now Rajbari, Bangladesh) — “woven constructions of the magic that can be found in plurality in village cultures,” as Betancourt describes them. There’s also the thought-provoking work of photographer Pablo Bartholomew (Untitled), which captures the common identity of the indigenous Chakma community, split across Bangladesh, India and Myanmar, through interpretations of the community’s DNA patterns by Chakma weavers. “Politics change, languages change, religion changes; but weaving processes change a lot more slowly,” says Betancourt. “If you look at Pablo Bartholomew’s piece, the communities might not be meeting now because of political borders, but their weaving history talks to a shared past.”
Fabric(ated) Fractures is a collaboration between the Samdani Art Foundation, a private arts trust based in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Alserkal Avenue in Dubai.