পুনরায় / Punaray: A Return to Process

My work explores personal memories rooted in childhood, whose influence persists like hidden roots in the unconscious, waiting to surface into awareness. Inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Marianne Costa’s Metagenealogy, as well as Freud’s and Jung’s theories on the unconscious and collective memory, the artworks address inherited patterns, intergenerational trauma, and the human search for self beyond imposed identities.

My paintings focus on human vulnerability in all its dimensions—psychological, cultural, historical, and philosophical—symbolised by the image of flesh (Flayed series of artworks). This unsettling metaphor provokes viewers to question the realism and meaning of the imagery. The initial reaction of discomfort acts as a threshold, inviting deeper reflection on consciousness and shared human experience. Material details are rendered with such precision that they create visual tension, pushing the viewers beyond their comfort zone. Each object is unique in form and dimension, conceived as a rebellion against rigid social order and a metaphorical act of breaking invisible constraints. This liberation—breathing beyond societal masks—reveals the essence of being.

Some of my artworks (Memories, Back to past, Layers of soul series of artworks) translate inner tensions into unconventional mixed techniques, embedding emotional and psychological depth into the materiality of the works. Recurrent motifs such as eyes and distorted portraits embody moments of solitude, introspection, and moral deformation, ultimately striving for a sense of spiritual balance visible in the palette, technique, and process.

Ioana Palamar
Artist

Dear Lotus, 

I am writing this letter to you because I have realized I want to learn how to be a gem amid dross, as you rise from mud without denying the mud. I am in love with your transformation technique. Teach me.

Lotus: Why? What troubles you?

ATS: In the age of climate crises, our screens, cameras, technical tools, and servers are not neutral but complicit in the crime if there is a court for climate justice. They are dug from the same earth my film claims to defend. I work inside that compromise. I want that discomfort to teach me.

Lotus: What will you learn first?

ATS: To stop spectating and start witnessing. Spectating asks for clean views and quick meaning, like advertisements, but witnessing stays with bodies, matters, textures, and time. It does not rush to fix. It listens. It stays with the trouble, it celebrates the discomfort. It uses all the senses to preserve the experience in the memory. Let me rewire the sensory patterns: witnessing with ears and listening with eyes can transform the audience into an artist.

Lotus: Where did you learn to listen with eyes and see with ears?

ATS: At the Brihatta Art Foundation, I find the space functioning as a medium to introduce a different lens for seeing Hazaribagh, Dhaka, by the Buriganga River. I met climate migrants (women) who sort plastic for a living. Their hands map the city’s afterlife. They showed me how survival is created from waste, how care can begin with a pile of scraps. At Brihatta, I learned that art can be a place where industry and hope intersect without giving the illusion of comfort and redemption.

Lotus: Without the “illusion of redemption”? How?

ATS: The action of saving or being saved from sin is the literal meaning of redemption, which is the core ground of religion. Art exceeds this concept and decenters authorship. Brihatta, as a space, showed me what collaborative art with multispecies authorship is, beyond human mastery, but shared inquiry. To me, the action of saving is less important than the action of responding. I will get back to it later.

To speak of “how,” I can start by naming the tools, the mediums, the vessels. Contrary to the commodity aesthetics [of the bourgeoisie] that hides the process, Brihatta reveals it. I get to ‘sense’ the ‘matters’ (not only see). Yes, materiality matters. It inspired me to think of… if I can name the tools, make them visible in my art: metals and watts in my filmmaking process, if I can keep the glare that burns the image and the wind that ruins the sound, there I may encounter a counter pedagogy and an anarchive: not a vault that closes, not a top-down teaching method, but a living bundle of traces that stays open to weather and error.

Lotus: Why honor error?

ATS: Error is evidence of a relation. Not every wound heals. We must accept nature’s duality. Fire destroys and also enables making. The lotus-in-muck figure fits (Bangla: gobor-ey poddophul): beauty emerges from contamination without pretending the muck is gone. If I keep the window open, I will also get dust, bacteria, and viruses, along with summer sunshine and autumn breeze. These are two sides of one coin. I can’t expect only one side to be correct. I should accept the storm, too.

Coming back to your question of “error,” I won’t say it’s honoring or not; I would rather say it’s an action. As promised earlier, to define action: here, it is not a promise to heal everything, but it is “response-ability,” as Donna Haraway puts it [not responsibility]. The only way to be able to respond to any species, matter, human, or nonhuman is to learn to communicate. There comes the creative arts. If science excels in discoveries and innovations, the creative arts provide it with a medium —the body —to communicate with the world and other species.

Lotus: What kind of space can hold that conversation?

ATS: Brihatta has already done that and continues to do so. New visitors to this space in Hazaribagh should consider the following questions: How does this space affect your body? How does it shape time and space for you? As a visitor, it taught my body to respond to art by listening with my eyes!

Lotus: So, how do you plan to hold on to that inspiration?

ATS: Bishwajit Goswami’s project Poddo [Lotus, 2025] reveals how contamination can be a teacher, human limits can be forms, slowness can be a method, and shared authorship can be a practice. Here comes our film Lotus in the Wasteland. I wish to film with “the world,” not about the world. I wish to craft a pedagogy of collaborative art through this film, undoubtedly inspired by Poddo.

Lotus: When shall we meet again?

ATS: We will be meeting soon—where the city’s waste meets the river’s breath, either in the form of these bodies we hold on to for now or on the elemental bridge—in the form of the air, dust, and soil/mud.

—ATS

Ahmed Tahsin Shams
Filmmaker, Author, Graduate Researcher, and Associate Instructor, Cinema Studies,
Media Arts and Sciences, Indiana University Bloomington, USA;
Former instructor at the University of Chicago, Illinois,
and Notre Dame University, Indiana, USA.

পুনরায় / Punaray Talk 03 brought together two projects – River Chants and Gangaburi; in their own ways, with an attempt to listen to the river not as landscape, but as a living archive of emotion, memory, and belonging.

In a time when environmental discourse often centres on catastrophe, these projects offer something quieter yet deeply rooted within. Both River Chants and Gangaburi turn away from distant observation and lean toward closeness in an approach shaped by listening, sensing, and being together.

The ‘river’ here is not a backdrop; it’s a participant, a co-narrator.

In River Chants, artist and researcher Giuditta Vendrame and her collaborators approach the river through sound; what she calls a “sonic and poetic hydrology.” They listen to the voices of women who remain in climate-affected regions, women whose songs and memories flow like tributaries of resilience. Here, listening itself becomes a form of research practice that treats water as a living narrator, dissolving the boundaries between human and environment, body and current, voice and echo.

Gangaburi approaches the Buriganga through visual and material languages: painting, photography, sculpture, installation, and collective storytelling. It connects artists and communities around the river to reimagine its presence not only as a site of loss, but also as a space of reconnection. Through this collaboration, Gangaburi restores the river’s presence within contemporary consciousness; transforming its polluted, neglected body into a site of reflection, empathy, and renewal.

If River Chants gives voice to those ‘who’ remain, Gangaburi gives form to ‘what’ remains.

পুনরায় / Punaray Talk 03 ultimately delved into the finding that both River Chants and Gangaburi are not simply about rivers, they are about ways of being in relation. About belonging, endurance, and the fragile beauty of staying connected – to a place, to a community, to an ecosystem that sustains us even when we fail to sustain it. They show us that engaging with a river is also engaging with time.

We see what flows, what stays, and what returns.

Souradeep Dasgupta
Researcher
Brihatta Art Foundation

Founded in 2021, Shwasmul Arts is a contemporary art organization rooted in the cultural and ecological landscape of Bengal. It operates through community-based art practices, collective initiatives, and interdisciplinary approaches that merge traditional sensibilities with contemporary thought. The collective seeks to cultivate dialogues between local knowledge systems and global art discourses, emphasizing collaboration, experimentation, and shared authorship.

"Nature Study and Creation" is a long-term, community-based project that explores the relationship between humans and their environments through art., education, and collective engagement. This program reflects the organization's commitment to connecting artistic practice with lived experience, drawing from rituals, gestures, and materials embedded in local communities to shape new forms of creative expression. Through residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and collaborative projects, the organization engages artists, researchers, and community members to explore the intersections of art., environment, and social transformation.

Shwasmul Arts aspires to articulate a new artistic language that reflects both the identity of Bengal and the complexity of contemporary art practices. By promoting connections between regional traditions and international contexts, it aims to construct a platform where cultural memory, ecological awareness, and contemporary aesthetics coexist, generating a critical and inclusive space for artistic dialogue and collective imagination.

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Moni Majhi

Moni is a Bangladeshi visual artist renowned for his community-driven work in painting and sculpture. He earned an M.F.A. in Painting from Rabindra Bharati University, India, in 2013, after completing his B.F.A. from Khulna Art College, Bangladesh, in 2008. He is the founder of Shwasmul Arts, an art collective in Khulna, Bangladesh, dedicated to supporting and advancing contemporary artists and art projects in his locality.

Bishwajit Roy

Bishwajit Roy is a Bangladeshi visual artist renowned for his community-driven work in sculpture and public art installations. He earned an MFA in Sculpture in 2019 and a second MFA in Design (Ceramic and Glass) in 2021, both from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, Santiniketan, India. His educational background also includes a BFA in Sculpture from Khulna University, Bangladesh, completed in 2015.

Roy is a founding member of Shwasmul Arts, an art collective dedicated to fostering creative expression and collaborative practices. His work is deeply rooted in an ongoing dialogue with nature and cultural heritage, particularly focused on the Sundarbans and its surrounding regions. Through land art and interactive installations, he transforms public spaces into immersive experiences that explore themes of ecological preservation and collective memory. 

The Sundarbans cannot be contained within one individual narrative.

It lives in its diversity – the flora and fauna, the shifting water, and most importantly – in stories whispered between tides, in rituals shaped by fear and faith, in hands that learn to read the forest before they learn to name it. Here, culture grows from survival, and art is not separate from life – it moves with it, quietly.

It was from this way of thinking “Stories of the Sundarbans” emerged. A two-day workshop organized by Brihatta Art Foundation in collaboration with Shwasmul Arts, as part of পুনরায় | Punaray, the workshop did not attempt to define the Sundarbans singularly. Instead, it opened a space to reflect on the deep, intertwined relationship between nature and human life through memories, materials, customs, and shared experience.

Each day began with looking and listening. Artist Moni Majhi led a visual narration where rivers, forests, animals, beliefs, and communities appeared as one continuous body rather than separate elements. His approach connected the participants with the experience of Sundarbans through a visual storytelling journey. This was followed by artist Biswajit Roy, whose lived experiences of the Sundarbans brought the communities and practices closer through fragments of memory that resisted distance and romanticisation.

Followed by the conversations, the space shifted from listening to making. Clay, water, and time were offered to the participants. They were asked to shape whatever surfaced when they thought of the Sundarbans. Slowly, forms appeared – boats, figures, animals, mangroves, and so many more. When placed together, these individual gestures dissolved into a single flowing landscape, reading almost like a riverine landscape formed collectively.

The first day was spent with students from the Department of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, and Charcoal – BUET Artista Society, BUET. Their engagement was reflective and measured. Many paused between gestures, negotiating questions of representation, ecology, and responsibility. The conversations were about how to approach a place like the Sundarbans without reducing it to imagery.

The second day felt different, and it stayed longer. Working with the children from the school of Abinta Kabir Foundation, the room was filled with curiosity. Alongside clay, the children painted alpona (traditional floor art style), inspired by the visual stories and community cultures of the Sundarbans they had just encountered. For many of them, this was their first experience of designing something like this. The act was instinctive, joyful, and deeply attentive. Later, sitting together on the floor in a circle, they spoke about what they once imagined the Sundarbans to be, what they learned through the workshop, and how they now see its cultures beyond fixed or ethnocentric ideas. Their questions were direct. Their reflections, unguarded.

What lingered was how gently the workshop took shape – for curiosity, for uncertainty, for listening. This is where it aligns most closely with Punaray: a programme rooted in returning, revisiting, and reshaping knowledge through dialogue, material, and shared labour. Art here was not an outcome, but a way of paying attention.

When the smeared clay on the floor and the alpona slowly faded from the floor, something remained unresolved in the best way. Like the Sundarbans, reminding us that some things are not meant to be captured, only to be listened to, and to be encountered.

Souradeep Dasgupta
Researcher