Salvador Dali

At the beginning, we wanted to tell stories with pictures. Our goal and our starting point was the graphic novel, that Frankenstein of literature, which is either loved or disregarded – mostly disregarded and left to be used to educate or entertain children.
But in recent years the graphic novel has been rising from its lowly comic book beginnings into the ranks of high literature. In 2012, Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart, and Mary and Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes were nominated for the Costa Book Award. Previously in 2011, Chris Ware won the Guardian First Book Award for Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.
The irony is that graphic storytelling is not innovative at all; it goes back to cave painting, scroll painting, Greek pottery and other forms of sequential art. We were drawing before we were writing; illustrating our day-to-day events and concerns on different surfaces. The graphic novel is simply a more detailed, stylized version of the spring festival depicted on the tapestry or the ascent of a God depicted on the patua.
Graphic storytelling has the power to address complex, intimate and taboo subjects in a delicate, un-probing manner. The subtlety of the language of illustration allows the writer/artist to express the finer details of the characters and the setting.
At the beginning we wanted to show stories, and to inspire others to tell their own. Because it is an art akin to magic, a fabrication of a parallel reality that is as powerful as the one we touch and see.
Federico Fellini described comics as possessing an ‘inexpressible secret power of suggestion that resides in that fixity, that immobility of a butterfly on a pin’. This image lingers, in all its graphic detail – the immobile butterfly on a pin in a story frame.
The exhibition is the beginning, of what we hope will become a library of graphic storybooks. It aims to inspire and ignite the desire to narrate using new forms and styles.
In this catalog we sought to present a fragment of the history which led up to this event, and we ask forgiveness of those who were left out.
In The Future, we saw the collaboration of Karrie Fransman and Steven Harris from the UK with Syed Rashad Imam Tanmoy, a key figure in helping to organize this exhibition, Anika Mariam Ahmed, a young painter and Nuhash Humayun a promising cartoonist. This short story was an exercise which each one of them approached with their own style and sense of humor. How is the Future? It looks good.