Age of Saturn (2016)
Age of Saturn (2016) is a two-floor parafictional exhibition in which a diasporic artist attempts to recover his broken relationship to Bengal through the political historian Dr Shahidul Zaman. Film, illuminated portraits, staged photographs, family documents, collages, sculpture and performance reconstruct lives shaped by Partition, political violence, exile and return. Yet every apparent piece of evidence is troubled by substitution: memories contradict documents, private lives merge with public history and fact becomes inseparable from invention.
At its centre, the film and mirroring text, both titled 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 light-boxes confront intimate photographs, publications and archival composites. Organised into unstable temporal states, events separated by decades coexist as fragments of one unsettled present. In System Decay and Its Origins, uniformed soldiers 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.
Shortly after opening in Dhaka, the exhibition was dismantled amid opaque pressure surrounding its treatment of Bangladesh’s post-independence history. Its uncertain closure echoed the work itself: censorship became another missing document, disputed memory and invisible force. This experience generated the wider Saturn cycle, in which whatever is repressed returns—altered, doubled and increasingly difficult to leave behind.