Seasoned visual artist Syed Muhammad Zakir’s second solo exhibition titled ‘Maya’ will begin at Bengal Shilpalay in Dhaka’s Dhanmondi on July 22, Saturday.

Dhaka University Faculty of Fine Arts’ Prof Lala Rukh Selim, artist and art writer Mustafa Zaman, and artist Mahbubur Rahman will join the inauguration ceremony and speak on the occasion.

A visual artist from Dhaka, Syed Muhammad Zakir mostly works in public spaces where he interacts with people and the environment. Zakir explores the lives and ponders deeper issues about the cosmos through performance, installation, land and wall art.

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As a trans-disciplinary artist, Zakir aims to engage his audience while using movements and spontaneous actions. He enjoys working with a variety of materials, forms, textures, and items that are frequently seen and easily accessible.

His drawings, which frequently feature bright and metallic colours, feature strong lines and bold expressions, often considered satirical, scathing, and even humorous.

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Now in his second solo exhibition ‘Maya’, Zakir recreates a city – the imagined city of ‘Baghreb’. Time, for him, is not a linear entity, but an aspect of the space-time continuum; and in the exhibition, Zakir draws on the lives of the unnoticed millions wrestling with the city, and the loss and decimation of nature that they face every day.

As per his choice of materials for work, he manipulates and transforms a broken bough, discarded plastic bottles, a tree trunk, an overflowing plastic bag, a tottering cart, layers of styrofoam packaging, and many more ordinary objects, mundane belongings, and materials, that hint at a dangerously teetering environment.

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“The unlikely juxtaposition of everyday objects, their artistic manipulations and their improbable dialogues inside an unfamiliar space, all work towards building a new, and perhaps startling, consciousness – a realisation of the urgency to return to nature, before we exhaust ourselves completely,” Bengal Foundation describes the motifs and vision behind the exhibition on its website.

Born in 1975 in Rangpur, Syed Muhammad Zakir started his art practice when he enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Dhaka, in 1994. There, he trained as a sculptor and moved forward towards his first collaborative performance show which was held in 1996.

After that, Zakir performed in many solo and collaborative performance art shows. He continues to make drawings.

‘Maya’ will remain open from 4 pm to 8 pm, every day from Monday to Saturday till September 2 at level-4 of the Bengal Shilpalay.