At the age of 63, Syed Quomer Hossain Sheerajy better known as Bahram finally dipped his toes into Bangladesh’s art scene. That’s actually not correct. For over 50 years he has painted in the public domain, from baby-taxis to cinema banners and everything in between. It’s highly likely that if you have ever been stuck in traffic, the baby-taxi in front of you or the rickshaw that scraped the side of your vehicle at one point in time was painted by Bahram. With ubiquity comes anonymity.
Bahram’s mask was finally pulled back when a fortuitous encounter with the artist Nisar Hossain, who piled coal onto his artistic fire. No more moving canvases with generic animals and oversaturated faces. This time around he decided to walk straight past a fork in the road dividing the absurd and the surreal.
He ended up with his first solo exhibition, curated by Mustafa Zaman at The Dhaka Art Center aptly titled DeReal. The canvases are dominated by animal human hybrids midwifed by his commercial artistic ethos, which for a few paintings no matter how much he tries, it is difficult to extricate his so called “previous” artistic oeuvre from his current one.
Throughout the exhibition, Bahram seems intent on deconstructing the human face into animal instincts and traits. Thus turning the face into a window on the mind, where our collective identity is on display. By placing the identity squarely on his faces, he turns the very core of our mind inside out.
In Eyes of the Hunter, the hunted deer not only creates the eyes of hunter but shows the hunter his prey. By both creating the gaze and being the object of it, the deer is both the self and the other. The head is placed on unknown shoulders not connected by the neck but by a set of feet, thus implying that the head/face is a separate entity from the rest of the body.
Others pieces such as Animal Likeness Big, Lost Youth of the Lady Reveler and One that Flew Away along with a host of others use animal forms to create human faces in a style that is at times relatable to his street art roots while also veering wildly into the avant-garde as well.
The content of a Rorschach test falls into four categories, animal, abstract, nature and human and one could say so does Bahram’s work. His exhibition is a Rorschach test of sorts, ambiguous images that provide a look into the human mind.
