Review of artist Moon Rahman's art work
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Moon Rahman is a freelance artist from Bangladesh who paints her thoughts and inner fears onto canvas. She was unaware of her artistic talents until 2004 when she began experimenting with leftover paints while her husband was away. Her works depict biomorphic forms and everyday objects composed in a way that evokes hidden violence and fear. Living in Dhaka exposed her to many unknown faces and facts that may have influenced her disturbing aesthetic. Though largely self-taught, her pieces possess a quality that engages contemporary viewers in a spiritual dialogue about humanity's unsettling fears within the universe.
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Review of artist Moon Rahman's art work
- 1. Veiled violence in dwelled periphery by Kehkasha Sabah, Freelance Artist and Curator All art is representational -in that sense it represents real things and real events, some of which exist in the physical dimension, while others exist in the dimension of thought. Artist Moon Rahman likely to represent her dimension of thoughts, as we know from her own affirmation -"I paint the way to have in order to give my thoughts a life itself. This playing with thoughts surprises and completes me. And her contemplation of creating such poetic works, surprises us as well. As far from investigation, she was born in Dawlatpur, Feni at 1975, completed her HSC from there, got married in 90s and moved to Dhaka with her artist husband around 2000, meanwhile she became a mother of two children. She starts to living in Dhaka as a traditional Muslim housewife, while she was totally unaware of the excitement of creating artworks. She knew she likes to paint but never got courageous enough to take that seriously. Initially in 2004, she took this challenge as a secret mission when her husband went to Italy and she started to draw with the leftover printing colors of her husband's studio. But gradually from 2008 her hobby became a passion for making images. It is assumable that, coherently all these years she had immersed her husband's few techniques, which contented her works profoundly. At 2013 she started to show her works through social media. From there she had chosen to participate in our previous curatorial exhibition 'Celebrated Violence 1' at 2014 and 2015 she participated in Kibria Print Fair. Other than these she don't have any participation in art exhibitions and she hardly informed about professional art scenario. But remarkably her works doesn't show any touch of unprofessionalism, naivety or any gender prejudices. Rather the quality of her works well sufficient to our contemporary taste and the elements she chooses have a social discursive excellence.
- 2. In her most of the early original works, I can feel a process of autonomy like abstract expressionism, where she spreads various color with plenty of water in canvas/paper surface to evolve with each other. Again this is not a proper autonomy as she seems very well controlled to create some identical watery blotting biomorphic forms out of this process and with a mastery she draw simple few dots or small line over them and those forms became known to us- likely to a vaporous face of human or animal, fish, birds or insects. Possibly this predominance use of a biomorphic forms reflects her inner paranoiac imagery of something uncanny or rotted within. Her recent works grasp with technique of Etching and Aquatint amid some heavily blotted color and materials. Here I can also see her dexterity with extreme contrasted images using bold white with balanced blackish colors. In here she also uses her biomorphic forms with some identifiable objects, like- kitchen tools, domestic elements, boat, rikshaw, birds, trees and lots of portraits, with a playful abstraction. As if she focus on the visible content of everyday to create her visual journals and assemble these objects with her thoughtful psychological dialogue and turn them into a two-dimensional abstraction or non-objectivity. " Non-objective art creates alongside the real world a new world which has nothing to do externally with reality. It is subordinate internally to cosmic laws"- these words from Kandinsky helps me to understand why exactly Moon's images has nothing to do with the apparent reality, rather she places those simple everyday objects in a special compositional way where they are capable to evoke shivering violence in our senses. When she was asked about these formal arrangements, she replied, "I investigate the relationship of our hidden fear to nature, environment, community, family and self." Now what's her hidden fear? May be living in a mega city like Dhaka creates some uncomfortable situation for her as she has to experience lots of unknown faces and unpleasant facts every day. And also as a housewife, her most of the time passes roaming around in domestic periphery with newspaper and television. Perhaps these sources informed her about the violence around us, which has shifted her whole thinking topography and aesthetical taste that way. I don't know what might be the right answer but what I know from her images, with those bold lines and dynamic composition have the ability to turn her objects in a veiled horrific subjectivity. As if her intention in life and art making is to enter into a spiritual, psychological dialogue with the natural world, through which the unify fear of human body, mind, and soul is revealed as a process of our unnerving universe.