“Parables of Womb” is one of 10 portraits from the installation series by the same. It was first exhibited in the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit. To express the story of our Biranganas(war Hero), Dilara Begum Jolly, picked up the only form of art still free from the patriarchal influence, Nakshi Kantha. She used repetitive but meditative needle piercing on all ten portraits of women who fought in the liberation war of Bangladesh, lived through the trauma, and challenged the narrative of our existing society. She considers all of them together as one art piece hence, during the exhibition, she put the portraits in lightboxes and arranged them in a dimly lit room and provoked us to walk in their shoe. She asks to be the source of light in a world of darkness and terror.
Parables of Womb is the celebration of lives who are more than their flesh and bone.
Dilara Begum Jolly
Dilara Begum Jolly(1960-present) is a Bangladeshi print artist, sculptor, installation artist, and painter. She is known for her work highlighting discrimination against women and explicitly presenting feminist perspectives in her work. She studied painting and printmaking at Government Arts College, Chittagong (BFA 1981); then gained her Master of Fine Arts, Painting at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, in 1984. In 1991, she gained a Post Diploma in Print Making in Santiniketan, West Bengal, with a scholarship from the Indian Government. Jolly began her career as a printmaker.
The work of Dilara Begum Jolly was included in the exhibition, A Beast, a God and a Line (Dhaka Art Summit, 2018). Bengal Foundation has organised several solo exhibitions of Jolly’s work, including Excavating Time (Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts, Dhaka, 2006), Threads of Testimony (Dhaka, 2014) and microtears’/Omorar Akkhan (Daily Star-Bengal Arts Precinct, Dhaka, 2015).
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Artist Art Style
Dilara Begum Jolly’s work explores strife, political turmoil, and gender identity. She touches upon themes of gender, trauma, and the female body. Initially trained as a painter, she has expanded her practice to include various media such as performance, video, and sound. Jolly has developed a signature practice of needling on paper and, more recently, photographs – a painstaking process during which she draws motifs on paper, or highlights areas on photographs, through needle prickling.
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