Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq returned from Bangladesh’s capital city, Dhaka, to his hometown, Comilla, at the onset of the COVID lockdown. Confined to his home, Fatiq located his artistic experiments in the heart of the everyday ‒ on his kitchen table, at his balcony, inside his refrigerator. His work was fuelled by the anxieties that marked this period, when daily objects transformed into sites of possible contamination and fear hung heavy in the air. Using the language of abstraction, the images play on the uncertainty in the mundane. Flies buzzing on a window surface, veins revealed through transparent skin, feathers strewn across the bottom of a bloody bowl. Harking back to a recent time ‒ when the familiar became the unknown ‒ Home functions within the unresolved emotional tenor of the pandemic.

Persuaded by a universal circumstance, the images bear no sense of time or trace of place. They do not visualize an event, but work with the residue of sensations. Never truly revealing the scene, the artist steers clear of fixing meaning, allowing viewers to impose their reading on what lays before them. Given the ubiquity of the pandemic’s impact, and the banality of objects in view, this could be your home or mine.

Created within the lexicon of the pandemic and its effect on the mind and body ‒ death, decay, trepidation, relief ‒ Fatiq’s visceral explorations gesture towards that which lies beyond the frame. Broadly evoking memories of unease and discomfort, Home is punctuated with moments of respite: fleeting points of exhalation; the reassurance of life. While bodies pile up outside, the hibiscus still blooms. In taking on a surrealistic aesthetic, the domestic space assumes a psychological dimension, recalling the interior volatility of the pandemic.

Tanvi Mishra