Ziaul Karim

An intense yet subtle play of different shades of red and black in the horizon and twinkling stars evokes tones and atmosphere of a city. This unspecified city assumes an identity with the suggestive lines of the Brooklyn Bridge, its iconic steel-wire and tower confirms us it is New York. The bridge that connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River becomes a recurrent symbol of the plight of artist Azmeer Hossain who tries futilely to settle down in New York.

Impulsive and introvert, Azmeer Hossain who enrolled himself for Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka in 1996 left Dhaka abruptly for Montreal, Canada after a year. The trauma of an emotional breakup with his girlfriend proved to be unbearable for him. A fish out of water in Montreal, Azmeer decided to move to New York, the art capital of the world in the hope to finding the right milieu for his artistic inspiration.

Azmeer’s painting, done during his thirteen years of stay in NY, is a classic example of first generation South Asain diaspora art production. A major feature of diasporic art production is the concern with place and displacement. With that concern the crisis of identity comes into being.  For critic DES Maxwell the development or recovery of an effective identifying relationship between self and place is the defining model of post-coloniality. A valid and active sense of self could be eroded by dislocation, resulting from migration.

As a result diasporic art production is an attempt to negotiate between the two polarities of exile and homeland. The creative output of exiled/immigrant artists undertakes two moves, one temporal, and one spatial. Diaspora literature, by extension diaspora art production, according to Menna Alexander is ‘writing in search of a homeland.’

The temporal move is a looking back at the past, which involves a negotiation with a retreating history, past, traditions, and customs. It produces nostalgia, memory, and reclamation as themes of art production.

The spatial move involves a de-territorialization and a re-territorialization connected by journey/travel. De-territorialization is the loss of territory. It is both geographical and cultural. Diasporic literature and art are concerned mainly with spaces, landscapes, and journeys. Dealings with space in diasporic art production as a result move between home and foreign country, between the familiar and the strange, the old and the new. Contrasts and comparisons   between the two spaces are frequent in the writings of immigrant postcolonial authors and artists.

Caught between alienation and acculturation, Azmeer’s life and living in the ensuring years in NY has been that of an outsider in an adopted land, unable to adapt in the country that he has moved to. The preoccupation of his painting of NY years, to borrow a phrase by one of South Asian Diaspora writers Bharati Mukherjee, was with ‘the aloofness of expatriation.’

Exile and displacement themes in Azmeer’s work combine a sense of disquiet with their nostalgia and longing. The lonely bridge in the foreground of Mindscape-2 is a symbol of his aloofness and at the same time an expression of his desire to bridge the gap between new home and the original one. The sense of homelessness and the quest to understand the meaning of identity in the painting is accentuated by the recognition that he has not found a new home in the adopted country. The recurrence of Brooklyn Bridge and seascape of Coney Island suggests that his desire to connect his original home as now lost due to exile and his attempt to find solace in the breaking waves of the Atlantic on the Coney.

His colour palette varies from murky red to mud purple, to sad blue evoking a sense of melancholia and feeling of aloofness. There is also a tranquil, mystical quality to his painting, which is often found in Abstract Expressionist work.

Trained as a printmaker, his watercolour paintings display an unmistakable rigour and draughtsmanship of the graphic medium. His ingenuity enabled him to transform the fluidity and wetness of watercolour into geometric discipline of the graphic print. Quite obviously, his watercolour paintings are mistaken for graphic prints. His immaculately distanced himself from  his raw desire to overcome feelings of aloofness, trauma and loss incurred in exile in his painting and expressed his longing for reconciliation of what was left behind with what is possible in the new home in the rigour of graphic medium. His message lies in his medium, to borrow a phrase from the Canadian philosopher of communication theory Marshall McLuhan.

‘The medium is the message’ is a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan meaning that the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived.

At one level Azmeer is trying to come to terms with raw emotions of displacement and identity crisis and on the other translating his sense of dislocation and nostalgia into the language of graphic medium.

Mindscape-1 is a reflection on the Atlantic seen from the Coney Island. He divides his experience of the sea in six panels in his attempt to capturing different moods and atmosphere. His canvas appears like a window through which he perceives the world outside. Atlantic for him remained a distant reality, an experience to be perceived through the window.

Azmeer Hossain has finally returned to Bangladesh, to his home of origin last year, ending his life in exile. The current exhibition showcases his work done in NY, but most importantly this show reflects on the issue that identity is formed in motion across time and space and not in stasis.

The message to be found in Azmeer’s canvas can be summed in the words of Susan Stanford Friedman: ‘ Home is created in the act of writing about what has been lost in leaving and what has been gained from moving from place to place'(Bodies on the Move: A Poetics of Home and Diaspora).