For graphic designers, creativity rarely begins with a blank canvas. It begins with a brief, a client, a campaign and a message to communicate. Every colour, typeface and composition is ultimately expected to solve a problem. “Beyond the Brief”, currently underway at Bengal Shilpalay in Dhanmondi, asks a deceptively simple question: what happens when those problems disappear?
Bringing together ten graphic designers working across painting, installation, textile art and mixed media, the exhibition reveals what emerges when practitioners of visual communication reclaim authorship. Organised by Britto Arts Trust and the Bengal Arts Programme, and curated by Mahbubur Rahman, the show dissolves the perceived boundary between applied design and fine art, suggesting that the very tools used to sell products and shape brands can also preserve history, critique society and explore the human condition. What is remarkable is that almost none of the artists abandon graphic design. Instead, they stretch its language into unexpected territory.
Typography, for instance, becomes a storyteller in Mita Mehedi’s “City Shapes”. Through a series of embroidered textile panels, she revisits three familiar Dhaka neighbourhoods—Kalabagan, Bhuter Goli and Katabon—as repositories of forgotten histories. The Bangla lettering itself transforms into imagery: Kalabagan blossoms into banana leaves, recalling the plantations that once gave the neighbourhood its name during the colonial period; Bhuter Goli adopts an eerie visual rhythm while revealing that its name originated not from ghosts but from an early English resident named Mr Booth; and Katabon sprouts thorn-like forms that echo the dense vegetation once found there. By weaving history directly into typography, the installation invites viewers to read the city through memory rather than maps.
Memory also lies at the heart of Manir Mrittik’s “Unnoyon”, though his gaze shifts from the city to the countryside. Sprawling across the gallery floor, a hand-stitched kantha quilt depicts an aerial landscape of patchwork fields intersected by rivers and canals. Emerging from this delicately embroidered terrain are miniature terracotta brick structures that fragment and gradually consume the fabric beneath. The contrast between the slow, patient labour of traditional stitching and the rigid permanence of brick becomes a poignant meditation on industrialisation. The work asks whether development inevitably comes at the expense of ecological balance, craft traditions and rural ways of life.
Right beside it is Mehedi Hasan’s “We Are 98% Human”, which uses oversized Rorschach-inspired forms layered with typography, street-art motifs and intricate embellishments to explore identity and perception. Referencing the oft-cited genetic similarity between humans and chimpanzees, the work questions whether the remaining two per cent lies in biology, psychology or the stories we tell ourselves about being human.
Elsewhere, the exhibition demonstrates how language itself can become sculptural. Pijush Talukder Pintu’s “Gujober Kaan” centres on a monumental ear set against a vibrant woven backdrop featuring a familiar Bengali expression about rumours and hearsay. Bright threads spill from the ear like stories escaping their source, giving physical form to the way information shifts as it travels from one listener to the next. Every retelling introduces embellishment, omission or interpretation until truth becomes inseparable from fiction—a timely reflection in an age shaped by viral information and misinformation alike.
Imran Hossain Piplu approaches language from another direction. His installation, “Margins of Error”, presents bold, brightly coloured textual statements such as “Shave the Children”, “Smallest State of US is Unidentified”, and “Flood for the Hungry”. At first glance, the phrases resemble advertising slogans or public-service announcements, yet they resist straightforward interpretation. Borrowing the commanding visual language of billboards and commercial graphics, Piplu transforms text into open-ended puzzles that invite viewers to question meaning rather than consume it.
Shekhar Shashwath strips visual language back to its essentials through delicately embroidered monochromatic works bearing words such as gratitude and tribute. Removed from the urgency of commercial messaging, these familiar words become quiet invitations to pause and reflect.
That interrogation of advertising reaches its most literal expression in Ali Sagar’s billboard installation. Towering over viewers like a roadside advertisement, it commands them to “FEEL MORE”. Beneath the slogan, the two hemispheres of a brain merge into the shape of a heart, accompanied by the words “Made by the Universe”. Deliberately out of place within a gallery, the billboard mimics commercial persuasion only to reject it. Instead of selling a product, it advocates emotional openness, asking what advertising might look like if it promoted empathy instead of consumption.
Several artists turn their attention to consumer culture itself. Mahbubur Rahman’s “Net Weight: The Standardised Self” presents vacuum-sealed packages containing translucent casts of human ears, noses and fingers, arranged like cuts of meat on supermarket shelves. Complete with product labels and barcode aesthetics, the installation raises unsettling questions about identity in an age in which even the self can be packaged, standardised and commodified.
Shimul Datta’s “In a Perfect Illusion” similarly adopts the visual language of consumer products. Oversized white sculptures of a capsule, an egg, a grain of rice and a money bag appear pristine at first, yet each bears unsettling inscriptions suggesting that health, food and wealth remain firmly in someone’s grip. The minimalist forms expose the illusion of security surrounding life’s most essential necessities.
Sanad Kumar Biswas also works with the debris of consumerism, assembling discarded snack wrappers and food packaging into vibrant murals depicting stray dogs chasing bones and slices of pizza. The colourful collages capture the intersection of fast-food culture, environmental waste and urban survival, revealing how everyday packaging continues to shape both the city’s landscape and the lives that inhabit it.
Taken together, the exhibition reveals that graphic design is far more than a commercial profession.
Typography preserves history. Packaging critiques capitalism. Billboards become philosophy. Branding gives way to introspection. The exhibition’s greatest achievement lies not in separating designers from artists, but in demonstrating that the instincts cultivated through years of visual communication remain powerful even after the brief has disappeared.
In “Beyond the Brief”, the designers are no longer solving someone else’s problem. They are asking their own questions, and the answers are far more compelling.
The exhibition is open for visitors until August 8 at the Quamrul Hassan Exhibition Hall, Bengal Shilpalay, Dhanmondi, Dhaka.
