From the garment industry to shipbreaking, global capital flows begin and end in Bangladesh, a land where culture and religion are increasingly at odds. Inspired by the words of Rabindranath Tagore, You Cannot Cross the Sea Merely by Staring at the Waves features works by a new generation of Bangladeshi artists who draw material inspiration from this landscape and challenge institutional order by creating new artistic families. Founded in 1971, Bangladesh is one of the newest countries in South Asia, and the artists in this exhibition are harnessing the potential energy of their challenging climate to address a growing local and international audience with a swell of artistic production.

Shumon Ahmed’s ghostly ships carry us into the Bangladeshi context, installed with recent works by Ayesha Sultana, Nabil Rahman, and Mustafa Zaman that further draw us into this material environment. Descending into the basement of the gallery, we enter the intimate space of family discussions, where Munem Wasif and Shumon Ahmed draw us into the increasingly complex tension between their biological and their adopted origins. In a defiant gesture against established modes of criticism, and parochial, institutionalized loci of art practice in Bangladesh, OGCJM (b. 2012 out of an exhibition curated by Rafiqul Shuvo called OnlyGodCanJudgeMe, now renamed OutGetCategoryJunkMagnet), occupies a space between a movement and a collective, its structure mirroring adopted Fluxus artistic ancestors. Concerned with an interrogation of the of the everyday as the site of the reproduction of structures of power and questioning an exclusionary politics of space, through a making strange of the notion of use, the OGCJM artists in this show include Shakhawat Hossain Razib, Ehsanul Karim Aninda, Eshita and Rini Mitra, Marzia Farhana, as well as founder Shuvo. His film Faster Satiation but Only for Nevertheless Behavior draws us into the dizzing, disorienting space from which this movement was born.

External links:

Gallery: https://www.galerie-krinzinger.at/projekte/curated_by_diana_campbell_betancourt/works