Shikh Sabbir Alam’s Bon-Manush at Experimenter, Ballygunge Place is a meditation on our fragile entanglement with the natural world. Through a series of acrylic works on canvas and linen, Alam constructs a world that is simultaneously familiar and elusive, where creatures become metaphors and landscapes dissolve into memory.
Apparition of a Squid II, a diptych, positions the squid as both predator and ghostly presence, hovering between destruction and radiance. The work evokes fragility rather than fear, capturing the moment before something vanishes from perception. Similarly, Blue Blood challenges conventional associations by depicting marine creatures whose lifeblood flows blue, prompting us to reconsider how we assign meaning to colour and form.
Alam’s fascination with adaptation and transformation finds expression in Colour Shifters where camouflage is not deception but a state of being. Reek Yard captures an olfactory map where scent, unlike sight, remains unfixed, transient. Distant Scene and An Orange Place explore memory’s imprint in colour and form, suggesting that recollections are mutable, shaped by time and emotion. Papaya Tree Couple extends this inquiry, questioning whether human-imposed gender categories could hold meaning beyond our systems.
Yet, for all its conceptual reach, Alam’s hand wavers. His painterly tongue — those soft washes, those veils of translucency — sings a lyric strain, but at what cost? The works drift toward the ethereal, their edges dissolving like mist. Is this a deepening of their meditative pull, a refusal to shout where silence might suffice? Or does it blunt their force, leaving them to hover rather than strike? The viewer must wrestle with this: does his particular aesthetic soften or sharpen the question?
Assessment of the Forms introduces a structured, almost scientific gaze, contrasting with the more fluid compositions. Sacred Crocodile and Inanimate Turtle delve into how belief reshapes nature, questioning how we distinguish the animate from the inanimate. Jungle Man interrogates the Bangla term, jonglee, reclaiming it from its pejorative connotations to explore the blurred boundary between human and wild.
Bon-Manush is a visual essay — one that does not resolve tensions but allows them to persist, weightless yet insistent, like a figure glimpsed through water.