Catalogue > Un extrait vidéo au hasard

To make the moving-image work for Means the recently returned Australian-Bangladeshi artist Omar Chowdhury headed out into the Australian bush seeking a form of simple and focused sensing. Carrying stills and cinematic cameras, he ventured into the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, crossed the Great Dividing Range, and wandered out to the remnant Victorian gold towns, searching. Haunted by the ‘weirdness’ of the trees, the totemic termite mounds, the warbling creeks and dirt packed roads, he felt himself and his thinking seep into the darkening landscape. The traces of this spiritual ethereality inhere in his strange and occult video footage of animals, rocks, branches, burnings, machines and the silence of the isolate people. In it, somewhere, lie the means of his being.

Bangladeshi-Australian artist Omar Chowdhury makes moving-image, photographic, conceptual and textual installations based on immersions into contested spaces and their histories. Often mixing notions of ontology, political economy, and the spirit, they hold in uneasy tension various polarities: facts and the surreal, humour and melancholia, rhythm with chaos, weakness and power, and memory with forgetting. Out of these cohesions and frictions he produces densely woven languages and environments of moral and psychic inquiry. In 2016 he has an upcoming solo presentations at Bengal Gallery (Dhaka) and Dhaka Art Summit 2016 and screenings at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) for Asia Pacific Triennial 8. Recently he has had solo exhibitions at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (Sydney), ALASKA Projects (Sydney) and MOMENTUM (Berlin). He was a finalist in the 2015 John Fries Award (Sydney) and the 2015 and 2016 Blake Prize Award (Sydney). He is the recent recipient of a Bengal Foundation Practice Grant, Keir Foundation/4A Commission, Australia Council Skills and Development Grant, Edward M. Kennedy Grant for the Arts, and an Australian Cinematographer`s Society Gold Award. He also founded and often programs the Bengal Cinematheque in Dhaka.