I am Topu, an art researcher, curator, and practitioner based in Bangladesh. My work interrogates archives and memory, foregrounding how absence, erasure, and displacement shape the politics of representation and collective histories. Everything I do returns to one question: what remains when history is erased, displaced, or left unresolved? My work finds its ground at the intersection of colonial history, Indigenous knowledge, and the politics of what survives.
I approach the archive as an active terrain of power, where preservation is inseparable from selection and exclusion. Rather than reconstructing the past, I reopen it as a field of fragments, where what is unrecorded persists as residue, vibration, and embodied memory.
Absence, for me, is generative, a space for unfinished histories and shifting meanings to surface and contest dominant narratives. This approach shapes my curatorial work, where I create spaces that hold uncertainty and multiplicity. Absence as an Artifact (CISA 2026) engages with the displaced histories of the Kaptai region in Bangladesh, working with colonial photographic archives not as fixed evidence but as unstable traces of what was submerged, scattered, and survived.
My work has been presented across international exhibitions, research platforms, and collaborative projects. I participated in Documenta Fifteen (2022) as an art researcher and assistant curator with Britto Arts Trust, supported by the Goethe-Institut. In 2023, I was selected for the Leaky Archive digital fellowship at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Cologne, where I worked directly with colonial photographic archives from South Asia. I was also selected for the British Council Artists Make Space grant (2022). My engagement with archival practice extends through my contribution to the Britto Archive with the Art South Asia Project, exploring alternative approaches to memory, documentation, and collective art histories.
Alongside research-driven work, I have curated and managed large-scale exhibitions across public and institutional contexts, including collaborations with the Bengal Foundation and the Goethe-Institut's Pasch-Partner Schools Redesign Award (2022). Fearless Call (2023-24) brought together diverse artistic practices within a public-facing exhibition format, deepening my experience of working across materials, spaces, and collaborative processes.
I hold an MA in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (2019) and a BFA in History of Art from the University of Dhaka (2015), and currently serve as Art Programme Manager at the British Council Bangladesh, supporting interdisciplinary projects, creative economy research, climate justice, and artist-led initiatives.
My practice does not aim to resolve what is missing. It stays with it, allowing absence to generate meaning, and creating space for histories that remain felt, carried, and still in the process of becoming.