Bangladeshi Modern Art Starts Its Revolution – From a Basement

For decades in Bangladesh, hundreds of paintings by the country’s leading artist gathered dust in institutional storage, while the government spent a fortune on artistic tributes to ousted Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina.

 Today, in the wake of last summer’s student-led uprising, the new director of Fine Arts at Dhaka’s Shilpokala Academy is beginning to promote that unseen collection of modern art worth tens of millions of dollars. But he has also inherited a bizarre new collection he doesn’t want to exhibit: more than 3,000 paintings of Sheikh Hasina, her family, and her infrastructure projects.

In November, Mustafa Zaman found an army camp inside the Shilpokala Academy, an all-purpose government cultural centre. Because of its convenient location – near Dhaka University – it had been used by the previous regime for cracking down on the student protests that erupted in July. 

An infantry battalion was stationed in the Academy’s spacious compound, with armoured vehicles parked inside its open-air theatre. “A brigadier was billeted in my office because it has an attached bathroom,” he says, while troops erected camp beds in the ground-floor sculpture galleries. Five months on, they are still there.

Since the fall of the government in August, a revolution has been afoot in the cultural sector, with symbols of the old regime dramatically destroyed and figures seen as close to it swiftly replaced. With statues of the ruling family under attack across the country, Zaman relegated hundreds of sycophantic portraits of Hasina’s father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the “Father of the Nation”, to the Academy’s basement.

“I don’t know what to do with them, they take up a lot of space,” he says. Reports indicate that the former government spent more than $100 million on thousands of memorials to Mujib across the country; most now lie in rubble after the “Monsoon Revolution”.

But Zaman has a different priority: the revival of the country’s unique artistic heritage. He has begun to sort through the Fine Arts department’s storage unit, containing thousands of modernist paintings, gathering dust in stacks. Few have been on public display in recent memory. 

Drawing from this collection, he plans to inaugurate a permanent exhibition, showcasing Bangladeshi Modernist art. Pride of place will be given to four works in the Academy’s collection by Zainul Abedin, Bangladesh’s best-known modern artist, who died in 1976 and is highly sought-after on the international art market. But hundreds more of the best paintings lie out of his control; they continue to rot in the damp vaults of the National Museum, a short walk away. 

“Every rickshaw driver on the street knows Zainul Abedin”, says artist and curator Amirul Rajiv of the pioneering modernist painter, whose works adorn Bangladeshi bank-notes and passports. 

Abedin trained in then Calcutta and set up an Art College in Dhaka after the Partition of India in 1947. It went on to train a generation of fine artists, who shared an artistic lineage with their Indian colleagues, but innovated a unique strand of global modernism, rooted in the political and cultural context of East Bengal, which became Bangladesh in 1971. “Zainul was our Picasso,” says Ebadur Rahman, convenor of a new museum commemorating the July uprising. “He had a vision.”

But in Bangladesh hundreds of his and other artists’ works were hidden away in damp museum basements, and their legacies forgotten over decades of mismanagement of the cultural sector. “These people didn’t know what a treasure trove they had; they squandered it away,” says Rahman. 

Meanwhile, independent-minded contemporary artists found their opportunities constricted under Hasina. “Artists suffered over the last 15 years,” says Zaman.

The new head of the culture ministry, filmmaker Mustafa Sarwar Farooki, was appointed by the interim government’s chief advisor, Nobel-laureate Muhammad Yunus in November. Farooki has set about righting decades of mismanagement. “It’s a matter of shame that all our master painters’ works were dumped in a storeroom,” he said. “it breaks my heart.”

With institutions in the grips of a cult of personality dedicated to Sheikh Hasina’s family, very little investment or attention was given to the country’s artistic heritage. “Our culture ministries never knew what their job was,” he says. “They didn’t care.”

But wealthy collectors in Bangladesh and abroad have valued what the government forgot; in recent years, prices for Bangladeshi art have soared at auction. A 1970 sketch by Zainul Abedin, depicting a dead body, sold this September at Sotheby’s in London for over half a million pounds, one of five works by the artist to have fetched prices in six digits in the last year. 

And with fierce competition in the private market, the government collection of 807 paintings by Zainul Abedin and hundreds more by his contemporaries including Quamrul Hasan and S.M. Sultan must rank as one of the country’s most valuable assets.  

Abedin’s family sold 758 works to the museum at a nominal fee in the 1980s. “My father painted things that resonate with the people of this country,” says the artist’s son, Mainul Abedin.

“After his death, the Smithsonian wanted to buy all his paintings, but we thought it would be a disgrace if they left the country. But its very sad- we have no idea how they’re being kept.”

The the paintings are now on display in just one room of the museum, with the rest in storage a unit, which lacks a dehumidifier to combat Dhaka famously steamy climate; for years, it reportedly also lacked an air conditioner. 

Now Farooki hopes to see a revival of the arts in Bangladesh, in part by reforming the country’s approach to cultural heritage: “It’s a total shambles,” he adds. “We need to change the way we preserve things.”  

But, amidst an uncertain political and security situation in the country – where the police are still not fully functional – visitors to the Academy will have to cross lines of armoured vehicles. And, as Zaman struggles with bureaucratic hurdles at the Shilpokala, the world’s most valuable collection of Bengali art continues to languish unseen in the storage of the National Museum. 

Cyrus Naji is a writer and researcher, currently working in Bangladesh.