OVERLAPPING

Collective Project
Working session: 1-30 Nov
Exhibition: 1-31 Dec 2012
Project concept: Mahbubur Rahman

Participants: Britto Members

A two month long collective project was made as a part of our capacity building and audience Development. Britto members as well as few individuals drew on the walls and ceiling of Britto for a month. A day to day development, overlapping of drawings to ensure the collectivity rather than individuality by refusing the conventional idea of ownership of one’s art practice was the foremost thought behind this project. An ARTRELAX for the viewers providing a lovely large and colorful floor mat made by an artist, pillows on top, music and tea were the a part of the month long show in whole December. The exhibition was wrapped up by a social gathering on the last night of the year 2012.

Curatorial note:
For the Overlapping project, Britto Space has become a converging path for different people to come together in one place. When we speak of real time – that is actual physical time, one’s own geographical bearing and distance is commonly taken into consideration. To experience – as the brain indicates the hand – mouse – in order to perform by printing out (drawing), as in an electronic programme by giving command in computer signals.

When we’re in a crowded place, we create another layer of our own time in actual time space, experiencing isolation in our minds. The time element of memory is crucial for this project in which comes gesture as another dimension or way to express.

Britto Space is located in an overwhelmingly congested part of Dhaka city. In this project we were trying to find a concentrated point through diverse gestures branching out in forms of pleasure, pain, anger, joy, disappointment and other emotions from our immediate mental state, to discern a tangible time length, as in film, with a physical atmosphere. Films are made up of cellulose coatings that mark overlapping timelines – where you can get the duration of the time according to speed and movement. In the case of memory, they are also stored in many alternating layers like computer folders that we can retrieve, delete or create.

What the viewer will be confronted by are seemingly incomplete forms and shapes, revealing, simultaneously camouflaging in the process of layered mark making.

We may recall certain memories where the mindscape will be activated in a state of seclusion. At one point, the mind creates a void; goes back to another condition to remove the mind’s file, and go to the next ‘time’ file. Whether it is the performer marking out the gesture on the surrounding wall or the viewer experiencing the musical ambience of the transformed gallery space; one can discover fragments of the time capsules in their own time.

The use of black and white in scientific terms co-exists also in representations of beauty and perceptions shared knowledge. There are no parameters, no absolutes.

Mahbubur Rahman