Age of Saturn (2016)
Age of Saturn began from the artist’s attempt to recover a broken relationship to Bengal through the contradictory life and archive of political historian Dr Shahidul Zaman. Rather than treating the archive as stable evidence, the exhibition staged memory as something performed, administered and repeatedly remade. Domestic photographs and national history entered the same unsettled field, asking who is permitted to speak for the past and under what conditions.
At its centre, the film and text Memoirs of Saturn follow a solitary figure—performed by the artist Dhali Al Mamoon—moving through apartments, classrooms, streets and archives. Around the film, monumental lightboxes, photographs, publications and archival composites collapse events separated by decades into one unsettled present. Dr Zaman’s life moves between family memory, Partition, political violence, exile and return.
In System Decay and Its Origins, uniformed performers classify visitors, grant or refuse access, direct selected people to read aloud and return their recorded speech to the installation. Colonial administration becomes a bodily encounter in which the viewer is made subject, witness and participant. The abrupt dismantling placed the work’s own mechanisms under pressure: censorship entered the project as another missing document, disputed memory and invisible force. This generated the wider Saturn cycle, in which whatever is repressed returns altered and doubled.