“Why does so little of Bangladesh’s contemporary art history survive anywhere except someone’s old Facebook album?” was one of the questions Sarridon Collective explored in their exhibition ‘triggered after s*x’, held at Daagi Art Garage from 1–8 August 2026.
Months after it closed, those questions and the discussions around them still ruminate in my head.
The show looked not so much at tragedy as at the moments that come after, what Marx, extending Hegel, calls the tragedy that comes the second time as farce. The revolutionary moment dissolves, short-lived, and disillusionment follows right on the dopamine hit.
A bitter reminder to prepare for what’s to come.
Instead of relief there is greater tension; before we can process one tragedy, we are met with events of multiplied severity.
There is little possibility for a ‘post’-traumatic experience, because stress persists.
Looking at the hyperactive happenings of this ongoing melodrama, at tragedies dimmed by newer technologies of infrastructure and media, at our isolated strategies to mute our own weeping, feels, in retrospect, humorous.
I’d call this humor defiance or resistance, if those terms had not been used elsewhere to build the very thing the humor in this exhibit responds to.
In the post-politically correct era, where we have internalized the language of possible accusations and deniability, the jester’s joke stands elsewhere entirely.
It does not accuse or defend; it simply passes, reveals its truth, and acknowledges unspoken truths ostracised by, and outside of, old and emerging narratives.
It does not live in opposition, so it never loses its footing.
The exhibit, featuring artists Imran Firdaus, Shikdar Shaikat, Fahad Hossain Kazmee and Nafees Sabur, looks at national trauma through this joke, well aware of its own tendencies to self-censor and repress.
The trauma is now transnationalized. Shaikat’s illustrations reiterate the language of oppression through ridicule, lifting the veil on the close-knit habitus between neoliberalism and MAGA.
Kazmee’s paintings allude to the materiality of trauma through a missile piercing the vertebrae.
Sabur’s prose compositions on the mundane life of tragedy testify to structural violence in a subjectivity that changes its register as the political absurdities play out.
Firdaus’s video essay plays 13 film openings from 1972, in the newly formed nation, against the audio of the ongoing state radio, which somehow syncs on its own, offering the viewer a way to trace a pattern of origin and look at the self within.
The censored sex in the title, achieved through the asterisk, pulls the word out of the regular, otherwise mundane at best and medical at worst, and foreshadows the censorships the show wishes to talk about.
I visited twice and still couldn’t explore every artwork, , each visit a round trip of more than 30 km.
Between industrial buildings and tanneries in Hazaribag, a few minutes from the Buriganga, the show was inaugurated with a Constitution cake on an August afternoon, close to two years since the “mass uprising”.
What appealed to me immediately and lingered longest were Firdaus’s text cards, a cross between a guerrilla exhibition and a homage to love letters, written from the precipice of coming to terms with the precipice itself.
They are scattered on the floor like the ‘abashik hotel’ brothel adverts found on city footpaths and footbridges. The cards announce and confess poignant truths.
Their acceptance of our shared predicament echoes as the late-late-stage capitalist successor of chopping wood and carrying water; it is either the result of enlightenment or the path to it.
One card, in an omniscient voice, says “You are in tension because you lose attention”, which may suggest that tension comes from the body’s restlessness and inability to focus, in an economy where attention is currency, or it may point to an existential crisis of being unseen, the anxiety of evanescence.
“Ami tomar phone er bhetor ekbar ghure ashte chai” (I want to explore inside your phone once) replaces “mon” (the simple Bengali word for the unified spirit of the heart and mind, unconcerned with Cartesian dualism) with “phone” in a popular 2009 Bangla pop song.
Appropriately revised for a rapidly transforming era, where we still yearn for love (and suspect infidelity) even beneath a global technofascist, transhumanist project.
This doesn’t make the device an alternative to the heart.
It shows they are synonymous, and how we weave technologies into the emotional and the unconscious, producing newer forms of subjectivity.
It is not a mere moralistic critique of ‘consumption’, much as David Graeber rejects the reductive assumption that people are passive victims of products.
Firdaus’s wordplay is not a literal replacement of the real with the internet-mediated mechanical; it shows how technological artefacts hold the most human and visceral things: desire, insecurity, restlessness, longing. It also reminds me of his one-line poem, “Attyar shathe jantrik shomporko” (mechanical relationship with the soul), or, bent slightly, “jontrer shathe attik shomporko” (a soul relationship with the machine).
You find humor again in Shaikat’s digital collage “Porimoni Suffering From Severe Fever”, framed next to Firdaus’s vintage cinema clips.
The series tells of a plague that has captured the metropolis, in partly absurdist and partly Kafkaesque satire. Porimoni’s fever is treated like a state of emergency; chairs and table fans are “living”, going through the predicaments of the masses, grappling with depression and culture wars.
Some of the text will be familiar to the chronically online.
It is taken from real Facebook posts and comments, which stand alone as commentary on social realities, no longer bound to their creators.
One text, “the woman’s work is to stay at home and raise children”, appears with the wrong Bengali consonants, exactly as the original commenter posted it, which undeniably adds humor.
It reflects a tragic reality, but plays more as farce.
What catches the audience’s attention most is Shaikat’s book installation at the centre, laid on a table, wrapped in styrofoam and plastic like packaged meat, with photographs of raw beef and chicken on the cover.
This hyperreality brings unease, reminding us that nondegradable plastic almost immortalizes this period of our lives, full of inconvenient conveniences.
Who could have guessed the Kali Yuga would be so characterized by simulacra?
On the next wall, Kazmee paints the state of the corporeal in the Kali Yuga, the remains of ethnonationalist violence.
‘Anatomy of Hunger’ shows nameless skeletons, missiles, rubble and blood, and the multispecies scrambling in the ruins.
The fish, the bird, the crocodile have evolved into their deformation.
The monster in one painting has a nationalist icon for an eye. Kazmee’s thesis is quite straightforward. His hungry, consuming subject is far removed from those in the other artworks.
As Graeber reminds us, to consume means to use up, to “eat up, devour, waste, destroy, or spend”; and in Hegel’s view, we differ from other animals in desiring from lack.
The paradox in the master/slave dialectic relates to what Kazmee presents in his paintings of obliteration: what it means to really consume.
I had initially overlooked the series by the entrance, overwhelmed by the Bangla text that filled most of each composition, but revisiting it struck me.
Sabur’s series is, for lack of a better word, relatable to the citizens of this young and restless state.
His line on post-July iconoclasm and replacing the ‘fascist icon’ with new sculptures memorializing the movement related closely to my own work, which was fun to see; the fun is furthered by the text above a pixelated apple, “I enjoy being bitten but not all the time”.
Sabur’s prose plucks from the new political project, a gruesome news story that citizens have grown accustomed to and numb to.
Sabur’s series faces Shaikat’s on parallel walls.
They mirror each other, both satirizing the imperialist project, neoliberal ‘norms’ in bed with looming fundamentalism, and internet-induced culture wars, from a male subjectivity that suits the digital medium.
Mediums are tacit; they communicate before we can identify them.
Their work also shares a sense of the struggle and confusion that constructs and challenges masculinity. Shaikat’s choice to centre Porimoni, a widely ‘trolled’ yet desired public figure, connotes that impulse.
Perhaps it is most directly addressed by Sabur, in “us male tortoises”.
The male subjectivity is important, since it acts as the medium for the political theatre of the nation-state and urban life, which photographer Rahul Talukdar might call “Dhaka Opera”.
Men’s trauma, economic and sexual, goes unacknowledged, lacking language in legal and media discourse that refuses to even name it.
And since representation takes precedence in the drive for development and progress, perhaps what we need is a revised representation of men, and a revised understanding of themselves to themselves.
In “The Past That Never Told Me Its Name”, Firdaus’s five-minute stitch of the opening one to two minutes of 13 found films, out of the 29 released in newly independent Bangladesh in 1972, offers a space for introspection.
We see national trauma expressed through the local practice of melodrama, and the unavailability of the other 16 films raises the question of what survives and what was worth keeping as archive.
The audio comes from a radio set playing the state broadcast.
On the table beside the screen are copies of two legal documents: “The Censorship of Flims act,1963” and “The Cinematograph Act, 1918”. The clips are left as they are, “with no narrator telling you what to think”, as are the documents, but it still evokes a small grin.
“Political memory in Bangladesh does not only wound,” Firdaus writes in the concept note Satire and the Return of the Repressed, “it also produces absurdity, running jokes, the humour of a population that has learned to read between the lines of official language”.
The joke can only claim to be a joke, nothing more, and simultaneously a “confession dressed as comedy”.
I also think about the afterlife of the joke. But if archiving is what we do (or in some cases don’t do) with art, what about the joke?
When tools of resistance like art are co-opted, I think the same done to jokes fails far more miserably.
Appropriated humor becomes a sort of kitsch that does not quite trigger sincere, involuntary laughter and, at best, produces a simulation of it, a desire to be a part of it.
We see this in political cartoons, where genuine humor hardly gels with hypocrisy.
By the time such a cartoon is exploited as a centrepiece of a new narrative, the artist has already moved on to ridicule it, as the work of cartoonist Mehedi Haque may show.
Jokes reveal tacit truths, and their inherent refusal or inability to conform lets even the most self-censored subjects embody resistance beyond ideology.
“The exhibition,” Firdaus writes, “stands as the obscene, unserious cousin of testimony: no less political for being funny, no less true for arriving after the fact”.
Whether Sarridon Collective intended the show as a vehicle for somatic relief, satire, or both, its ability to sit with our own suffering and precarity is freeing.
This acceptance points towards the possibility of a spiritual life, giving a visual language to the complex, confusing predicaments we are still enduring.
The audience is allowed to touch the art, and its tactility, like the laughter the jokes may trigger, attempts to remind us of something about being human.
Maybe it is through suffering the profane that we can access the profound, not in spite of it. The show does not promise catharsis, but it can provoke a chuckle or laughter.
And that singular trigger might just be enough.
Ohama Raaz is a visual artist.