The maiden solo exhibition of young artist Nasrin Jahan Onika titled ‘Home’ began at La Galerie of Alliance Française de Dhaka in the capital’s Dhanmondi area on Friday.
Eminent artist Monirul Islam, renowned art critic Moinuddin Khaled and Zareen Mahmud Hosein, Director of Shasha Denims Limited, attended the inaugural ceremony of the event as special guests.

The objects of the ongoing exhibition have been made of works on paper, canvas as well as clay pots and wood. This cataloging of the everyday is graphic and lyrical, and while Onika has tried very hard to make the writing on her canvas escryptic (writing upside down and backwards in a tiny script), she comes across clear as day. In her art there is a long in grand desire to find home and belonging in oneself, in others, and in familiar objects. And there is also an awareness that those everyday things are also quite strange, and if you look at them enough, they lead to unfamiliar doorways and realities.

In the vastness between one action and the next, our bodies are voyager ships in infinity, carrying our imaginations, spirits and visions. And Onika is wise to celebrate habit, routine, and boredom. These are conditions that grant us the peace to be.  

Onika has studied under legendary painter Monirul Islam and volunteered at studio Kala Kendra. A graduate of the Department of Printmaking at University of Development Alternative, she celebrates all that is home —habit, routine, tediousness, safety, sanctuary and also confinement.

 It is a diary of the unremarkable and ordinariness of her existence and of the spaces that she inhabits. While Onika’s perspective is self-referential, she is looking creatively and critically at the world through herself. The objects are hard to make out, the perspectives are skewed, and there is a strange feeling of incomplete recognition. This must be how we all see when we come into the world, before dimension, definition, takes shape and we begin to use cache memory instead of seeing.
The exhibition will be open to all till 12 March.