Scanning through the daily newspaper after breakfast, came across the news that Dhaka art summit had come to an end. And that reminds me, I went to our Asian Art Biennale two months ago and started writing a blog on the exhibition, which remained half done, and as usual, that got mixed up with the pile of my unpublished drafts. I know I'm too late for this post, but still can't resist the urge to share my stale experience. Roaming in an art exhibition has always been an exciting thing for me. But living in the suburb area, I hardly can experience that feeling. Almost all of our art exhibitions are held in the capital and my residence is at least 20km away from the city. So still having the longing, my wish hardly gets fulfilled.
But this time, surprisingly, I was able to hit twice in our 19th Asian Art Biennale and came out with some mixed feelings and experiences. So without further ado, let's hear it out!
In every two years, this Asian Art exhibition generally occurs and this year, around 114 countries' artists participated and we got to experience how the artist with different viewpoints interpret the world, bringing out their local cultural and natural elements, also their mental turmoil, cold war, and global barricades what they are facing.
If I speak for our country's art, most of them was dark-themed, including depression, anxiety and how people are dealing with post covid syndrome. How we are leading ourselves in our self-made mental cage, how people survived these long two years, to what level they faced their depression, some of the arts were so depressing like the artists brought out how we caged ourselves with our mental issues, how we are always blaming others, why we can't make ourselves free from the social barricades though how hard we try to fly, how the power of mass people engulf by the imbalanced politics, the fear of mistrust in people's eye and how suspension and anxiety spread into all over them.
Artists try to experiment with different mediums to construct their artwork besides acrylic and oil colors.
People also got introduced to the AR artwork and that was a fascinating element for me too!
In the foreign artist section, nature was also a vital element like before in this exhibition. There were some extraordinary nature-themed paintings from which I couldn't keep my eyes off!
Now if I try to analyze, there will come some discrepancies with the aim and arts of the exhibition. Many other countries are also famous for organizing the Biennale art exhibition but are renowned for maintaining the focus on their aim. The main aim of this year's Asian Biennale exhibition was to focus on global art practice, art philosophy, understanding the past and present condition of art and lastly, the focus of artists. Though we managed to display thousands of art from different corners of Asia, but it's a matter of thinking to what extent they ensure the quality of these arts and how they are relevant. Also, a complaint was raised on categorizing the artworks. Like a section of a gallery was reserved for Bangladeshi's top well-known 50 artist like Rafiqun Nabi but among them, some low-level artwork was also on display where it shouldn't supposed to be.
Apart from that, rather than enjoying the exhibition, I was feeling suffocating for the chaotic audience who were only there for clicking photos of themselves with an aesthetic background. It was really hard to leash my anger. These teen people always make me wonder when they will ever can get a life!
So as an overall experience, visiting this exhibition was not that bad for me. I got the opportunity to see a wide range of works by both established and up-and-coming artists. This helps to broaden the cultural horizons and deepen your understanding of different styles and techniques. Also as an artist, seeing original works of art was incredibly inspiring as it sparks new ideas and perspectives of the world.