Nazlee’s palette is rooted in the present. Her brush paints the world around us, composed in a photo-realist mode. The Flute Player (1997) is set in Chittagong and shows the section of a park and a street. Children play and a weary cow grazes in the park. A prostitute is seated on a bench. Is she looking at the girl in the swing? Does the girl bring back memories of her own childhood? What was her childhood like? A young man looms in the foreground. Perched on the wall, he plays a flute. Is it the sound of the flute that attracts the young woman in the rickshaw as she glances back? A rickshaw, a three-wheeler and a car form the distant black and white background. The central characters are drawn out in vivid colour. This is how Nazlee’s brush ‘tells’ stories. The characters in her canvas are people we come across everyday (perhaps in the mirror too) who, through the stillness of their gaze, their lecherous glance, or the careful avoiding of eye contact, represent society’s inequities, oppression, rootlessness and perhaps, dreams and longings. Nazlee’s colours are vivid, saturated and penetrating, sometimes veering on black and white or grey (Dream, 1997).

While influenced by Marc Chagall, and the more contemporary David Hockney (some images remind one of Edward Munch), Nazlee is no purist. She says, ‘In the interest of my work I incline towards whoever that serves my purpose’. In terms of artistic genre, Nazlee’s deepest influence is rickshaw art and cinema hoardings. This artistic tradition inspires her and it is also what she aspires to. ‘I wish to be able to paint like the rickshaw painters’, she says. It is important to note that Nazlee has not merely embraced this subaltern genre in form, something that has been unashamedly appropriated by some of Dhaka’s fashionable artists and interior designers and also the handicrafts industry. Subaltern art traditions often entertain and instruct, through story-telling. Nazlee does so too. The only difference is that her story-telling is also indisputably feminist. Her motifs include the youth by the lamp post whose drooling gaze devours the passing women or the gentleman wearing a tie in the back seat of a car whose gaze seems fixed on the prostitute sleeping on the traffic island. His fingers gripping the car window seem to grasp her as well. in another work we find a crocodile rushing towards the mutilated body of a many-limbed woman. It is interesting to note how Nazlee, coming from a middle-class background, takes on a subaltern art-form non-appropriatively, and uses visual story-telling to impart feminist morals. This speaks volumes about Nazlee’s political orientation. It is perhaps her vigorous exercise in painting that gives rise to this unhesitant statement, ‘I do not paint for artists and art critics, nor do I care if my art has reached an “artistic” level or not’.

Her early work was considered satirical by many. It was in the year 2000 that she began the ‘Bandaged Bondage’ series. The bandaged person is the artist herself. Each painting in this series speaks of the social and political helplessness of the artist. Violence towards nature, animals and especially women made Nazlee feel that there was no longer any room for satire. What is the role of the artist, what is the meaning of art–these questions caused deep anguish in Nazlee. It deadened her artistic creativity for two to three years. She did nothing besides illustrating stories during this period. It was at the end of 2003 that she began the ‘Re-usable Painting’ series, in which we saw designs based on her own paintings printed onto sofa covers, bedcovers, curtains, table cloths, even on rugs in public spaces. Printed on the rug was the prostitute who lay sleeping on the traffic island. We saw young ladies attired in saris on which was printed the lonely youth in the park. Nazlee explains, ‘The theme of the “Bandaged Bondage” series was helplessness… and now I want to say that there is no respite, nothing more to be done…what harm if art-work becomes merely ornamental?” In a capitalist world-order, the commercialisation of art destroys its radical fronts and possibilities. This is Nazlee Laila Mansur’s current thinking and that is what her work relates.

Rahnuma Ahmed