Rosa Maria Falvo

I first met Joya Shahrin Huq and her husband Abdus Salam, also an artist, during the monsoon of 2008 on a trip throughout Bangladesh to investigate its contemporary art and indigenous crafts scenes. I was immediately impressed with the couple’s dedication to their individual practices, and after seeing Joya’s “With my Imagination” show I promptly bought several pieces at once.

Though much has happened since, in this current exhibition we once again see a selection of drawings and etchings of a typically personal nature. Ordinary belongings seem etched into the artist’s mind’s eye and positioned alongside strategic symbols – parrots, plants, fish – the effect of which is like a series of emotional ‘still lifes’. Indeed, as the artist herself describes, her work is consistently centred on the theme of relationships and the “magic of existence”; how human beings actually navigate the often turbulent waters of modern living, where connectedness is “challenged at every step”; how objects and clothing take on special meanings in our lives; how co-existence necessarily relies on and mirrors subtle relational webs; how grief, happiness, irony, and desire seek their expression beyond physical limits; and how our sense of community is precariously reliant on individuals linking to one another, like words in a collective sentence.

Joya’s ensemble of imagery reminds me of what Carl Jung referred to as “little dreams”; those emotionally vibrant ones we tend to remember for the rest of our lives. And if dreams are meaningful representations of our true feelings and concerns, Joya’s art may be transformative. Her imagination does not just harvest images from remembered experience, it has a poetic creativity that connects the dots and deforms the given, turning scattered memories into vivid, experiential vignettes that reflect on her life, and perhaps even our own. Such encoded reflections – chaotic stories and unlikely pairings – are largely drawn from our personal past and tend to be loosely put together. This artist’s collection of visual metaphors helps structure and narrate these to ourselves. Grief itself is a process of disassembly. The bereaved must let go of the selves they were, as well as the loved ones they have lost. You learn to look within for the loved one and reassociate the role that person played in your life. This becomes part of a function that you can provide for yourself. Joya’s symbolic inner landscapes capture these subtle dramas; that emotive dimension, which is often not easily associative on a rational level, but is nonetheless intuitively appropriate on a deeper, intimate level.

In the past, Huq was often concerned with the unfettered spirit and energy of women against the backdrop of a patriarchal society, using mostly theatrically black and white prints. Human figures, flowers and animals still populate her work, but she has introduced colour and a more fanciful style. Images of physical force in the form of army tanks, guns, and tigers have replaced the menacing wolf and assertive black cats that echoed in her previous works. Perhaps the artist’s notions of the struggle for power, witnessed everywhere from geopolitics to the bedroom has altered over time, with her deepening understanding of herself and relationships. She seems to have digested yesterday’s poignant fears and irritations, which have transmuted into today’s amusements or accepted realities. What is always encouraging is her courageous choice on the artistic path to interpret emotional life.