There is a kind of story that never quite finds its way into words—the ones that live instead in a half-finished letter, a stitched-over photograph, or a page folded shut before anyone can read it.
That is the territory Untold Story, a new group exhibition that opened at Alliance Française de Dhaka on September 1, has set out to hold curated by Fareha Zeba. The show opened at 6pm at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Dhaka, with Frédéric Inza, Deputy Head of Mission at the Embassy of France in Bangladesh.
The room, on opening night, was full of people who kept stopping mid-sentence. That was the strange pull of the show—everyone who walked in seemed to slow down, lean in, and try to work out what exactly they were looking at.
Some pieces felt like peering through the window of someone else’s life, a private scene you weren’t quite meant to see but couldn’t look away from.
Others did something stranger: they showed you your own reflection in the glass instead. Memory, it turns out, can be universal too—and the right fragment of someone else’s can still reach into your chest and stir up something warm and unplaced.
This is a show built to fling open the floodgates of your own memory, whether you arrived looking for that or not.
At its center is a form that resists easy definition: the artist’s book. Not simply a medium for reading, it becomes here an intimate artistic space in its own right—a place where personal narrative can be explored, preserved, and reimagined, rather than merely described.
Using painting, drawing, collage, stitching, textiles, found materials, handwriting, and experimental book forms, the artists in Untold Story reflect on childhood, family histories, cultural heritage, loss, longing, and emotions that are often difficult to put into words.
Seven group artists—Fareha Zeba, Surovi Akter, Shulekha Chaudhury, Esha Ahmed, Sumana Akter, and Kazmin Samia—spent the past year developing their work for the show through the artist’s book form. They are joined by six guest artists working on the same theme over a shorter span: Rafia Mahjabeen Bushra, Rituparna Saha, Venessa Kaiser, Alia Kamal, Mahmuda Siddika, and Arpita Singha Lopa.
Surovi Akter’s untold story folds itself around a single missing object from childhood. “I always wanted a toy bus growing up, but my mother couldn’t afford to buy it for me. I don’t need the bus anymore now that I’m older, but the desire is still there. So, I shared my childhood memories, in the shape of a bus, through my art,” she said—and it was easy, standing in front of it, to feel the specific ache of a want that never really leaves you, just changes shape.
A few steps away, Mahmuda Siddika’s kinetic book Bari-r Tane pulled visitors into motion rather than stillness—a journey she’d taken many times but never quite set down in words until now. “The piece is my personal memory of travelling by train—the landscape changing, the mud houses, the paddy fields, the dense shal forests—on the way to my village,” she said.
All the artists had very different memories. The exhibition draws out just how differently memory can be recorded, reinterpreted, and made visible. And that, in the end, is what made the room feel less like a gallery and more like a shared act of remembering: a train ride still moving somewhere in Siddika’s pages, a bus still waiting, unbought, in Akter’s, and a little bit of everyone else’s own untold story caught somewhere in between.
The exhibition doesn’t stop at the page. Related works extend the books’ concerns out into the gallery itself so that private memories become part of a shared environment—connecting individual experience to something more collective.
Untold Story does not seek to present a single narrative. It leans instead into fragmentation, silence, and the gaps between what an artist chooses to reveal and what remains between the lines—those experiences that may resist explanation yet continue to shape who we are. The wager is that the most private material, handled honestly enough, ends up speaking for more people than just the one who made it.
Untold Story runs until September 9 at La Galerie, Alliance Française de Dhaka, 26 Mirpur Road, Dhanmondi. The exhibition is open to all, daily from 3pm to 9pm.
