From May 17th to 31st, the solo painting exhibition titled “Debris” by Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed adorned the walls of La Galerie, Alliance Française de Dhaka, Dhanmondi. The two-week-long, thought-provoking exhibition featured nearly 30 works on board paper, providing spectators with a glimpse into the artist’s most recent studies.
Remembering is a kind of rebellion in Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed’s universe. His solo exhibition, “Debris,” was an uncompromising documentation of human vulnerability. The artist’s recollections of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War seep into modern tragedies—Gaza’s annihilation, the Rohingya exodus, and Kashmir’s stifled cries. The paintings didn’t merely show ruins; they also resurrected spirits.
Ahmed’s life had several eras of turmoil. Born within a world transformed by partition and war, his early work in the 1980s was abstract, but the twenty-first century tightened his emphasis. The song “Debris” captures this progression. Each piece is a palimpsest, with layers of pigment representing the strata of history, where erasure and evidence fight silently.
Ahmed’s use of board paper as canvas makes a statement in and of itself. Board paper repels, as opposed to ordinary canvas, which absorbs, forcing the artist to handle surface tension. The resulting sculptures have a temporary quality, as if they would disintegrate like the makeshift shelters in Cox’s Bazar’s refugee camps.
Though anchored in Bangladeshi stories, “Debris” speaks to a lexicon of global migration. The exhibition’s centerpiece, “Babel Fragment” (2024), depicts the mythological tower as a jagged silhouette against a sulfurous hue. Its shattered planes evoke both bombed-out Aleppo and the decaying tenements of Old Dhaka. Ahmed, who has flown from Paris to Islamabad, appears to imply that rubbish knows no boundaries. In “Eclipse of Return” (2024), a skeletal stairway rises into the emptiness, its steps fractured like vertebrae. Nearby, “Archive of Dust” displays a child’s sneaker half-buried in a thick texture that mimics charred dirt
“The utter erasure of Gaza, which was once full of life; the ongoing miseries of people in Kashmir; or the hopelessness faced by displaced Rohingyas attempting to make a living in camps in Chattogram—all of this jostles the mind as one attempts to ponder the future of the human race. Furthermore, it is difficult to leave behind the legacy of Bangladesh’s repeated failures to shape a future. The people’s desire for political stability has always been a never-fulfilled dream in our country. The demise of the authoritarian dictatorship has undoubtedly allowed everyone to focus on a future beyond the current system, but it appears that things are still breaking apart, leaving us with only emotional rubble,” observed famous art critic Mustafa Zaman.
The intimacy of “Debris” sets it apart from other forms of protest art. In “Letters Unsent,” bits of Urdu and Bangla letters emerge behind layers of gray, like voices muted by time. The piece is similar to Ahmed’s 2018 series on refugee diaries, but the language is virtually illegible—a metaphor for history’s selective memories.
