Aditya Novali participates in Dhaka Art Summit 2020: Seismic Movements. Primarily commissioned corresponding to the theme On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention.
On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention is a group exhibition of primarily commissioned works by 17 artists and collaboratives responding to the built and unbuilt legacy of the groundbreaking Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam (1923-2012). Co-curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt with Sean Anderson (Associate Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art) and Nurur Khan (Director of Muzharul Islam Archive), the exhibition observes the interplay and occasional confrontation inherent among architectural spaces within an emergent nation-state. Active in politics because of his own conviction that "it was the most architectural movement in what was East Pakistan, as part of a broader claim toward decolonial consciousness in the 1950s leading to the country's independence in 1971.
Islam's buildings and ideas influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects working today as well as international figures such as Louis I. Kahn, Richard Neutra, and Stanley Tigerman, each of whom contributed to ideas around modernist architecture in South Asia. Working across photography, painting, sculpture, performance, sound, and film, the artists in the exhibition present work that negotiates and builds worlds that are borne from the local environmental and cultural climate of Bangladesh. For Islam, and the artists presenting, architecture and art are conceived as benefitting all who make up the lands of any nation, no matter their origin, without the boundaries of class or caste.
Novali creates a series of hybrid paintings that are rotatable, inviting the audience to investigate and establish new configurations of relationships in which the works thereafter continue to change throughout the course of exhibition in a multitude of configurations. Novali highlights two figures in this new body of work — the Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam and Indonesian architect Y.B. Mangunwijaya. Despite coming from two very different places, they both believed that architecture could surpass political, social, economic, and religious borders.
Artist
Copyright belongs to The Artist
Photoraphy by Randhir Singh and ROH
Courtesy of The Artist, Dhaka Art Summit, and ROH