In 2018, on the outside wall surrounding the entrance of the National Theatre of Bangladesh, I first encountered a work by the artist Reetu Sattar. A group of musicians were perched on construction scaffolding, all dressed in white and playing a single note on the harmonium – an instrument used in Bengali classical music. Together, they produced a low hum that seemed to vibrate through everything around me. The work was called Lost Tune.
I came across the work at a time when I desperately wanted to learn a musical instrument, but music was not allowed in my house. A growing sentiment in many Bangladeshi Muslim households held that music was prohibited in Islam, despite our long histories of musical traditions. It felt as though everything we knew of the past had been locked away inside the Jadu Ghor, the “magic house” (the Bangla words for museum), quietly collecting dust.
It amazed me that an artist could gather so many people to commit themselves to an artwork when nobody around me seemed to believe art had any value at all. Until then, I had only felt art in my eyes and my mind. In Lost Tune, I felt art in my chest.
I continued following Reetu’s practice, though much of it took place abroad. Eventually, I too left Bangladesh to study art in the UK.
It was here that I discovered the work of Adam Farah Saad. At his exhibition at Camden Art Centre in London, I smelled KA soda the moment I entered the room. A fountain bubbled it endlessly. It was the first time I felt art in my nose.
It was also in London that I discovered Brick Lane’s Bengali sweet shops. There I found my father’s favourite childhood snack: one sweet and one savoury item that he always mixed together. I remembered the first time he had taken me to a sweet shop in Bangladesh. That memory has always been yellow, a display cabinet glowing beneath warm tungsten light. It is my earliest emotional memory of him.
That memory became the foundation for the work I conceived two years ago and am re-presenting in East of the Aldgate Pump, a group exhibition at London’s Whitechapel Gallery as part of a new collaborative East End arts festival, Backyard Biennial. Every day, members of the Bengali social enterprise Oitij-jo Kitchen help maintain the work, preparing and bringing the specific mixture of snacks into the gallery. Their contribution isn’t separate from the artwork. It is part of it. In many ways, that collaboration feels like a direct descendant of Lost Tune: people choosing to sustain something collectively.
A recent review in the Guardian of East of the Aldgate Pump provoked questions around where meaning in art actually resides. During conversations with the curators, I found myself thinking about the Aldgate Pump itself. For centuries it has marked the symbolic gateway to east London while witnessing continuous movement, migration and change. I thought about the geographer Doreen Massey’s idea that places are not fixed locations but meeting points of multiple journeys. Every artwork in the exhibition seemed to have travelled a different route to arrive there.
When my mother visited London in 2023, she went to Brick Lane with a friend. They came out of Aldgate East station, and her friend pointed out Whitechapel Gallery.
“Did you go in?” I asked later.
“No,” she replied. “We were scared.”
I want art spaces to become less scary to enter, for me, for my mum, for everyone. I hope, more and more, they become places where people feel that they belong.
If projects like Backyard Biennial have a purpose, it is not to provide tidy answers or singular narratives. It is to create the conditions for people to encounter one another, their histories and themselves. It is to give people an opportunity to recognise something of themselves in a space the previously may have felt closed to them. That meaning may be messy, partial and collective. But it is not meaningless.
