Dinar Sultana's tête-à-tête with Ina Puri describing her art practise right before her works being exhibited at Asia Now Paris 19-22 Oct 2023. Being born in a small, rural district in the north part of Bangladesh, my childhood can be narrated as episodes outlined by rigorous discipline and control. Inarguably so, the desire was always to be independent—be it from the clutches of my mother’s approach, or from the expectations at school. When I came to Shantiniketan as a student, the picturesque town both nourished me, when I was caught in the rapture of independence, and also challenged me, when I received the news of my mother’s untimely demise. For a while, in nature I saw but a vast sea of emptiness. I reconciled my own loss with what I saw in nature; how its remnants are not lost but quite simply reborn. This is how I began— not painting, but documenting, observing, understanding. Most of this process happens out of my control. The result is at best accidental. I’d like to think that my art tells a tale of both control and accident, echoing a principle of life itself. Once I began my training in art, it was through my newly evolved vocabulary that I found reprieve. Steaming through a ruthless wave of time, I try to make art a little more sensitive. As I transform everyday materials and those associated with rituals and history, the emphasis is on hand-worked processes. Oftentimes engaging in a play of absurdity, I have also used architectural and terracotta mould, cotton-pulp, human-hair, snake-skin and a slew of other discarded ephemerals. I then began creating my own paper from using pastes of flower-based pulp, newspaper recycled pulp and extracting colour from elements such as flower, bark, seed, leaf, sometimes stone and clay. However, creating is nothing but a violent process of making. Something that an artist must come to terms with at some point in their journey. For me, it was through loss. I do not paint; I quite simply make. The fleeting ephemeralities of nature have long since fascinated me. I often asked myself, how can I translate this materiality of nature onto my work, when it refuses to be tamed or controlled as per one’s will? To this ex- tent, I have adopted an almost archival, quasi-scientific method of categorizing and documenting various hues, forms, textures, surfaces, as well as materials such as clay, coal, graphite, pulp made from newspapers (to demolish written language and establish visual language), and a slew of other discarded ephemera found in nature - all in pursuit of understanding its materiality. Simultaneously archiving the process and the source substances. My respect for traditional ways of life is borne out in the hand- made objects and many of these elements are like fossils to me. I am influenced by historical figures such as the engineer and architect Buckminster Fuller and utopian visions of a self-sustaining, egalitarian society. My recent works draw on ideas expressed in Fuller’s book Grunch of Giants and the formal characteristics of cartographer, architect Bernard J. S. Cahill’s Butterfly map and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapience” book, which then merges with my own artistic language and world view. My interest in cosmology and imaginative cartography is inherently connected with pressing concerns around income and resource inequality. A space without a ship alludes to Fuller’s concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’, a phrase Fuller used to describe the entire planet. In this case however, the title implies that our trajectory is adrift, as we forge ahead without adequate care for the planet itself or humanity. My work advocates, as Fuller did, for a collective rebalancing, or global cooperation around human intelligence and the earth’s resources, in a way that allows for an ‘integrated regenerative system' Dinar uses motifs from the crafts "kantha" "terracotta" "bamboo crafting" while the rawness of coal signals both the political and the void. This is how she began "not painting" but "making, documenting, observing " as a mark of her commitment to the revival in the contemporary post modern context, trying to blend art and aesthetics with the science of taxonomy and biological classification. Her works resonate with nature and its constant flow of biological, ecological cycles, impregnated by a strong undercurrent of eroticism, sexuality and politics of the female body.
