Bangladeshi young artist Auntora Mehrukh Azad depicts the landscape reshaped by human activity in her solo exhibition titled Solastalgia: Fragments of a Fading Horizon.
Curated by Rayana Hossain, the month-long exhibition is featuring the artist鈥檚 26 artworks, under way at the Platforms, an art organisation at Baridhara in the capital.
Through an exaggerated and artificial colour palette, her paintings emphasise gradual dominance of urbanisation over the natural world.聽
Her artworks give an essence of the powerful relationship between the landscape and water as Bangladesh鈥檚 geography is shaped by rivers and monsoons.聽聽
The exhibition portrays distress of flood-hit communities, their displacement and migration through abstract landscapes and urban materials with unnatural colours.
鈥楾he neon pink that flows through my works is deliberate, a jarring reminder of the unnatural forces shaping our world,鈥� said Auntora Mehrukh Azad.
鈥楳y art flows like rivers that shape my homeland, where the monsoons do not simply bring rain, but untold stories of survival and loss,鈥� added Auntora. An acrylic and oil on canvas painting titled Urbanisation shows the city merging with the village landscape where bamboo groves are used as traffic lights and water bodies going to be compressed.聽
An acrylic on canvas painting titled The Never Ending Woe shows people rescuing a car from a flood-affected area.
An acrylic and oil on canvas painting titled Portal shows the border between the village and city where urbanisation compressed land for farming.
An acrylic on canvas painting titled Ark shows migration of displaced people for climate change while flood victims are seen going to settle in a city.
鈥楩rom the Sundarbans to Dhaka鈥檚 dense urban fabric, Auntora鈥檚 works reflect the convergence of these worlds, blending internal emotions with external observations of a landscape reshaped by human activity and environment crisis,鈥� said curator Rayana Hossain.聽
The exhibition was inaugurated on October 19 and will conclude on Saturday.
