Lotka paper, coffee, flower stains, and Aalta,,

These bodies of work are part of the series “Things We Skip,” where i intended was to shed light on the predicament faced by women and children during the pandemic in Bangladesh and India. I gathered leftover flowers from the local temple that were used in rituals (puja) to please God. The lack of material during the pandemic led me to search for alternative materials to work with from my surroundings. Every day, I saw flowers being offered for ‘puja’ at the temple beside my home. I heard the whisper of leftover flowers, a metaphorical link to the condition of the victims who are offered in the patriarchal system. I assembled those used flowers and kept them on paper for processing. I used other available organic colours, such as coffee, flower stains, and Aalta, as a vocabulary of my storytelling.

A song by Sex Pistols:

We’re the flowers in the dustbin
We’re the poison in your human machine
We’re the future, your future
God save the queen
We mean it, man
And there is no future…

However, if we throw the flowers in the dustbin, they will rot, but if we keep them in our book, they become part of our memory or something wonderful. It depends on where we keep the pieces.

In this series, I have (re)assembled, created a connection that layered one story with another, one reality with the other……