“Death is a metaphor for life. We usually live to the fullest because we will die soon. If death is always a part of our life, then why do we die each day?” — Farzana Ahmed Urmi
Farzana Ahmed Urmi’s reflection on death lingers long after leaving her solo exhibition, “Witnessing to My Own Absence”, at the artist-run space Kalakendra in Dhaka. The question of death — and its mundane, everyday continuation — arrives quietly in the paintings, almost disarmingly, as an invitation to sit with the fragile thresholds of human emotion: between living, losing, and remembering. When Urmi first shared photographs of the works along with her poetic catalogue essay, I was drawn to the haunted quality that moves through the images — a slow unravelling that unfolds through image-making rather than spectacle. In “Witnessing to My Own Absence”, the head, or portrait, operates less as anatomy and more as a psychic surface. Memory, gesture and time converge here, hovering between abstraction and figuration, between presence and disappearance.
The persistence of the face as body in Urmi’s work invites comparison with American painters Kerry James Marshall and Joan Mitchell — not as stylistic parallels, but as entry points into a broader conversation about how marginalised and gendered subjectivities reshape the language of painting. Marshall’s insistence on the visibility and historical weight of Black bodies, and Mitchell’s gestural abstraction rooted in emotional intensity and bodily movement, offer precedents for artists who turn to the human form as a site of resistance and interiority. Urmi enters this dialogue while remaining grounded in the Bangladeshi context, where women’s representation of the body carries complex negotiations around gendered visibility, intimacy and social constraint. Her practice moves between the local and the global, asserting that Bangladeshi women artists participate in — and reshape — contemporary image-making.
Urmi’s brushwork feels restless, almost searching. Thick strokes accumulate like sediment, turning the surface into layered fields of feeling. Faces dissolve into pigment while the eyes remain hauntingly present. The viewer is drawn into a suspended dialogue where gesture and gaze coexist. Echoes of Marshall’s haunted figuration and Mitchell’s embodied mark-making linger, yet Urmi folds these impulses into a visual language distinctly her own — a fragile balance between presence and disappearance.
The title, “Witnessing to My Own Absence”, operates as both confession and critique. While the exhibition moves through intimate emotional terrain, it also reflects Urmi’s long trajectory within a Bangladeshi art ecosystem where visibility does not always translate into material support.
For many mid-career women artists in Dhaka’s tightly networked, resource-limited scene, recognition often remains symbolic, detached from the infrastructures necessary to sustain a practice. Urmi’s portraits become not only personal reflections but social documents, mapping the emotional labour of sustaining an artistic life within fragile cultural conditions. By staging this exhibition, she names an absence that extends beyond the self: the gap between public presence and institutional care, between being seen and being held.
What anchors the exhibition is its insistence on feeling as political language. Rage, longing, tenderness and disappointment circulate through the canvases without resolution. Rather than offering a singular narrative, Urmi constructs what might be described as an empire of feeling — a fragile architecture built from lived experience and layered gesture. Here, portraiture becomes less about identity and more about relationality: how bodies carry histories, how faces hold collective memory, and how painting itself becomes an act of witnessing. The work does not resolve into certainty. Instead, it opens a quiet space for reflection, where looking becomes witnessing, and witnessing becomes the beginning of recognising absence.
The exhibition “Witnessing to My Own Absence” is currently on display at Kalakendra, Dhaka, curated by Wakilur Rahman, and will run from February 6 to March 2, 2026.
Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi writer and interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her critical writing explores migration, gender and the politics of visibility within contemporary art and social movements.
