Documenta
Fifteen
Participant Artist and Researcher at Documenta Fifteen with Britto Arts Trust, 2022
At Documenta Fifteen (2022) in Kassel, Germany, I participated as both artist and researcher under the Britto Research Grant, with guidance from Artist Tayeba Begum Lipi and Artist Mahbubur Rahman. My contributions formed part of Britto Arts Trust's installation, a complex, multi-layered examination of food politics, displacement, and cultural preservation.
The installation brought together several interconnected works. Palan was an organic Bengali kitchen garden that supplied fresh produce to Pak Ghor , a communal space where Kassel's immigrant community gathered to share meals, narratives, and food cultures from a hundred nationalities over a hundred days. Rasad assembled a bazaar-inspired scene
composed of handmade food items crafted from crochet, ceramic, metal, and embroidery, made through workshops held in Dhaka. Chayachhobi was a 200-foot mural styled after Bengali cinema banners, depicting scenes from Bengali film that engage with historical events of famine, food scarcity, and political strife.
The three-channel experimental film Re-Visit extended this inquiry further, chronicling fieldwork with seven Indigenous communities in Bangladesh and documenting their displacement, land crises, and the ongoing impact of state violence. The film critically frames issues of land rights and cultural resilience in border regions, placing the Documenta installation within a longer, ongoing history of rupture and endurance.
Britto Arts Trust, founded in 2002, is an artist-run, non-profit collective and part of the Triangle Network. Operating within Bangladesh's socio-political landscape, it fosters cross-disciplinary artistic collaboration and functions as an alternative learning platform for experimental and politically engaged practices across the region.