Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film Fog Dog, which premiered at the Dhaka Art Summit 2020, brings us into a community of human and inhuman inhabitants of Charukala, the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (designed by Muzharul Islam from 1953–55). Mixing fiction and contemplation, this work explores the past and future spectres that haunt present-day Bangladesh from the viewpoint of the stray dogs who live in and among its shared spaces. While life revolves around the art school for the protagonists in this film, the horrors of climactic and political violence elsewhere in the world appear and speak to the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate contexts. Employing sculpture, installation, film, holograms, and drawing, Steegmann invites the viewer to critically reflect on how the divide between culture and nature is perceived while exploring their constructed interstices. Echoing his interest in biological systems, specifically Brazilian rainforests, Steegmann’s works often introduce elements from nature into exhibition spaces.
Top: Fog Dog, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Vimeo version in cooperation with Esther Schipper Gallery
Above: Muzharul Islam, Faculty of Fine Arts, Shahbagh, Dhaka, 1953–56 (photo by A. Q. M. Abdullah, 2004; Zainab F. Ali and Fuad H. Mallick, eds., Muzharul Islam, Architect [Dhaka: BRAC University Press, 2011]).
The Dacca Gauzes
Those transparent Dacca gauzes
known as woven air, running
water, evening dew:
a dead art now, dead over
a hundred years. "No one
now knows," my grandmother says,
"what it was to wear
or touch that cloth." She wore
it once, an heirloom sari from
her mother's dowry, proved
genuine when it was pulled, all
six yards, through a ring.
Years later when it tore,
many handkerchiefs embroidered
with gold-thread paisleys
were distributed among
the nieces and daughters-in-law.
Those too now lost.
In history we learned: the hands
of weavers were amputated,
the looms of Bengal silenced,
and the cotton shipped raw
by the British to England.
History of little use to her,
my grandmother just says
how the muslins of today
seem so coarse and that only
in autumn, should one wake up
at dawn to pray, can one
feel that same texture again.
One morning, she says, the air
was dew-starched: she pulled
it absently through her ring.
- Agha Shahid Ali
