Dhaka Wala’s Street Art
May 5 - June 4, 2005
Ashek Sakhawat & Mehzun Rub

Ashek Sakhawat & Mehzun Rub, Dhaka Wala's Street Art, 2003, duratran

Dhaka’s streets can be compared to "melas" or festivals that celebrate local graphics and colors through a multitude of urban elements: hand painted Bengali cinema posters, swarms of ornate rickshaws, colorful hoardings, vivid advertisements for locally made products, cheap bright plastic toys and antique-looking stalls. Home to the Rickshaw capital of the world and a place where most street posters and hoardings are still hand painted, Dhaka is a prolific center for urban folk art. Drenched in this city's popular art, the series, Dhaka Wala’s Street Art, documents Dhaka's street iconography and juxtaposes them with vibrant compositions to create a contemporized frame that is pulled away from its local context for the rest of the world to see.

Mehzun Rub is a collage artist with an avid admiration for the energies that define urban culture. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto and is currently a graduate student of architecture at the University of Toronto.

Ashek Sakhawat is a Toronto based photographer who has produced several varied bodies of work related mainly to Dhaka and Toronto's streets. His work has been shown throughout North America and was included most recently in the Contact 2004 Toronto Photography Festival.

Their collaboration in this project has been an opportunity for both to delve into Dhaka’s street scene mix so as to ‘capture’ a facet of it before it surrenders itself to the forces of globalization and homogeneity.