Nazlee Laila Mansur The Brush of Agony

Nazlees palette is rooted in the present. Her brush paints the world around us, composed in a photo realist mode. The Flute Piper (1997) is set in Chittagong, a section of a park by a street. Kids playing in the park, a weary cow. A prostitute seated on a bench at the edge of the park. Is she looking at the girl in the swing? Does the girl bring back memories of her own childhood? What was her childhood like? A young man looms in the foreground. In his lungi and vest, seated on the park wall, he plays a flute. Is it the sound of the flute that attracts the young woman in the rickshaw as she glances back? A rickshaw, CNG and a car forms the backdrop, the black and white part of her canvas. The central characters in vivid colour. This is how Nazlees brush `tells' stories. The characters in her canvas are people we come across everyday (maybe in the mirror too?) who through the stillness of their gaze, their leering glances, or the careful avoidance of eye contact, represent societys inequities, oppression, rootlessness and perhaps, dreams and longings. Nazlees colours are vivid, saturated and penetrating, but sometimes monochrome and grey (Dream, 1997).

While influenced by Marc Chagall, and the more contemporary David Hockney (some images remind me of Edward Munch), Nazlee is no purist. She says, in the interests of my work I have inclined toward whoever serves my purpose. In terms of artistic genre, Nazlee's deepest influence is ricksha art and cinema billboards. This indigenous artistic tradition inspires her, it is also what she aspires to. "Actually, I wish to paint like what you see at the back of a ricksha." Significantly, Nazlee has not embraced this subaltern genre in "form," a genre that has been appropriated by some of Dhakas fashionable artists and interior designers, and also the "handicrafts" industry of development corporations. Subaltern art traditions often entertain, and instruct, through story-telling. It teaches the viewer the distinction between good and evil. Nazlee does so too. The only difference is that her storytelling is also indisputably feminist. Her motifs include the youth by the lamppost whose drooling gaze devours the passing women, or the gentleman wearing a tie in the back seat of a car whose gaze seems fixed on the prostitute sleeping on the traffic island. His fingers grasping the window of the car seem to grasp her. Below the still waters a crocodile rushes to the decapitated body of a many limbed woman. For a middle class woman to take on a subaltern art form non-appropriatively, and use visual story-telling to impart feminist morals, speaks volumes about Nazlees politics. It is perhaps her practice that gives rise to this unhesitant statement, I dont paint for artists or art critics, nor do I care if my art reaches artistic levels. That is not my headache."

Her early work was considered satirical by many. It was in the year 2000 that she began the Bandaged Bondage series. The bandaged person is the artist herself. Each painting in this series talks of the social and political helplessness of the artist. Human violence towards nature, animals and especially women made Nazlee feel there was no longer any room for satire. What is the role of the artist, what is the meaning of art -- these questions caused deep anguish in Nazlee, it deadened her artistic creativity for two to three years. She did nothing besides illustrating stories during this period. It was at the end of 2003 that she began the Re-usable Painting series, in which we see designs based on her own paintings printed onto sofa covers, bedcovers, curtains, table cloths, even on the rug in the apartment's lift. Lying on the rug is the prostitute who lay sleeping on the traffic island. The young woman in the lift wears a sari printed on which is the youth in the park.

Nazlee explains, The theme of the Bandaged Bondage series was helplessness... And now I want to say, there is no respite, nothing to do... if artwork becomes merely ornamental, then what's the problem." In a capitalist world-order, the commercialisation of art destroys its radical possibilities. This is the story that artist Nazlee Laila Mansur is telling us now.

rahnuma ahmed
anthropologist