Firoz Mahmud, a contemporary artist recently held an exhibition at the Goethe Institut, where he displayed works from his visit to Berlin. The solo exhibition titled “Soaked Dream” featured photographs, video projections and installations.
During his tour, he visited around nine families and documented their hopes and dreams through photographs and video clips which he later presented as video installations.
At first, the artist made green eye glasses from waste containers and soft drink containers which he offered to all the members of the families he visited. He then went on to photograph them wearing the glasses. The green glass is a vision to reconstruct an individual’s perception for a better future. Firoz mentions: “I used the green-eye-glasses in the photographs as a metaphoric and conceptual feature.”
The art project addresses social hope through personal encounters and stories of life in which poetry and pragmatism meet. It is a re-birth of collective hope and dream that families and their children would like to cherish their vision through green eyeglass.
Firoz states: “I reconstructed a full-scale contemporary version of childhood among people whose vision is to reconstruct Berlin in the near future in terms of politics, glamour, culture, literature, film and many more.”
The exhibition displayed nine families’ photographs having common relation to Berlin. In the photographs the women wearing three frames represented empowerment.
Firoz Mahmud was born in 1974, Khulna and did his PhD from Tokyo University of the Arts, MFA from Tama Art University. He had completed research at Rijksakademie VBK in Amsterdam after graduating from Dhaka University’s Fine Art Institute. He did artist-residency at ISCP in New York and OZU Culture Center, Rieti-Rome among many others.
He exhibited at Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Fuchu Art Museum, Ota Fine Arts, Mori Art Museum, Hiroshima Contemporary Art Museum, Aichi Museum of Art in Japan, Queens Museum, Hammond Museum, Flushing Hall, ISPC, Location One and Rochester Con Art in New York, Metropolitan Mostings and many more.
He received numerous prizes and awards including from Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, ANA Singapore, Royal Over-seas League UK, ACC grants, Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant Canada.
Firoz experimented with various materials with different kinds of artistic genres. The materials includes paintings, drawings and all over media to create wide range of artworks and elements of nature and everyday materials, creating phenomenal works of art over the past decade. He works on installation, oil painting, research and art project such as “Urgency of Proximate Drawing NinKi: UoPD,” photograph, object, and video. The current exhibition was his experiments during his stay in Europe.
