Faydabad For-Sale (2023)
At one of architect Marina Tabassum’s earliest buildings, a looped performance unfolds through architectural interventions, video projections and death-metal music. Five performers move in synchrony with a guitarist’s death-metal score to explore the tangled history of an imported modernism and its obsolescence amid Bangladesh’s urban transformation.
Faydabad For-Sale (2023) is the second performance and installation staged at Tabassum’s abandoned early modernist property on the edge of Dhaka. Stripped of its fittings and enclosed in a metal frame and black hessian shroud, the building awaits demolition. In its place, a real-estate company proposes a contemporary block of forty flats. Pink Puma tape traces the complete replacement building at full scale across the house and grounds, intersecting the performers’ routes.
A salesman, an architect and a caretaker attempt to make a final sale. As the salesman inflates costs, the architect prepares to leave for Switzerland and the caretaker weighs his displacement against the promise of new homes and business. Their choreography is timed by a shadowy guitarist on the roof, whose death-metal compositions wash over the building through three enormous speakers. The performers follow separate paths, sometimes converging as scenes unfold simultaneously throughout the site. At the end, they return to their starting positions and begin again. Repeated four times, the work reveals different moments with each iteration while ensuring something else is always missed.
Performed in Bangla, the work is accompanied by a printed translation followed like a libretto. Upstairs, a video shows an early reading by the actors; downstairs, a large projection presents the first performance in the series, staged years earlier.