Art & Culture Report :
The Bengal Art Lounge organised the artist talk titled ‘Towards the Horizon: Representing Landscapes,’ a discussion with eminent thinker Alimur Rahman Khan, celebrated architect Rafiq Azam and architect-artist Nasima Khan to mark the closing of the Shifting Sands, the two-week solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Nasima Khan.
The artist talk was held recently on the Bengal Art Lounge premises in the city’s Gulshan area.
In the session, Sufi scholar Alimur Rahman Khan, celebrated architect Rafiq Azam and architect cum artist Nasima J Khan discussed issues and questions like why are landscapes and particularly the deltaic landscape of Bangladesh such a source of fascination for artists, What is at stake in their representation? Do landscapes have a spiritual dimension? And so forth.
Nasima Khan’s minimalist representation Shifting Sands takes the viewer to the essence of Bangladeshi nature: light strokes and minimal dashes of colours suffice to evoke the immense power and the infinite vastness of the Bengal delta.
The artist’s distinct sense of composition is informed by her education and professional practice as an architect.
Not evident at first in the inhabited, often desert landscapes painted by the artist, the influence of architecture becomes evident in the subtle combinations of horizontal and vertical lines used by Nasima Khan to instil a dynamics in her compositions.