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About
About Me
Painting is just another way of keeping a diary
I am Farida Yesmin (my artist name is Kajoli Ilojak), and I am a socially engaged
Bangladeshi artist currently based in Folkestone, Kent. I make work across performance,
video, photography and drawing.
I am in the process of overcoming personal trauma whilst I am settling in the UK. My ever-
evolving artistic practice explores themes of gender and feminism, body politics and
cross-cultural identity. Through my work, I engage with Eastern and Western cultural
expressions, from the perspectives of a woman, an artist and an immigrant. My practice
is shaped by my interest in Human Rights, feminist politics and processes of
decolonisation. It is further impacted by my current home, its landscapes and the
proximity to the sea. The work I produce runs parallel to my lived experience of trauma
caused by complex asylum and immigration procedures, by past homelessness and
gender based violence. It seeks to negotiate barriers of language whilst staging my
“otherness” through body-based performance that utilises gestural mark making, painting
and voice.
In Bangladesh I studied Fine Art at Dhaka University (1998) and I have a Master’s degree
from Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal India (2003). Despite the extreme personal
barriers I have faced, I strive to develop and amplify my practice, my networks and
connections.
Since migrating to the UK, my work has been championed and showcased at Creative
Folkestone, Conversation Over Borders, Turner Contemporary, Performance Space,
Tempting Failure London Biennial of International Performance Art, Counterpoints Arts,
Refugee Week, Artsadmin and WIP project.
I am a current recipient both of an Axis fellowship bursary and of an Arts Council of
England grant supporting the development of my artistic practice (2023/24).
About
No country for women ,2017 . Weak festival at Performance space,Folkestone
No country for women 2017
NO COUNTRY FOR WOMEN
My work is dedicated, my Mom and Bangladeshi feminist writer Taslima Nasrin.
I would like to work on a project based on the story of my lived experiences from a feminist perspective, both in Bangladesh and in the UK. I have a background in fine arts and I would like to bring this background together with my life story into a performance. I have started developing ideas for the work in the past year and have tried to get some feedback form friends and colleagues but barely having the resources to support my basic life needs in the UK I am left with little to no time to focus on the project. The material I am using for this project includes evidence and stories from my childhood and later on the sufferings of my married life. When I was six, I had an accident which resulted in an injury from which I have suffered since then both physically and mentally because of the way people treated me in my country. Being regarded as a disfigured woman, I was ignored in the society and later on my husband's family neglected my basic rights and expected me to never stand up to their brutal behaviour. The experience of living with a visible injury and sharing a life with an abusive husband who openly cheated on me and took advantage of my presumed weakness have had devastating mental effects on me
The process of making this performance so far has been a way for me to communicate the distress of the traditional life style of my country with others and through this communication find a way to move forward with my art and career. This is not only my story and my injury but a story of life of all the women in Bangladesh. I have witnessed this unfairness towards other women in my family, my mother, sister, nieces and friends. To grasp a better picture of the situation of women in Bangladesh I have been researching the works of Bangladeshi writers who have focused on women rights and I am specifically interested in the writings of Taslima Nasrin, a Bangladeshi writer in exile, and her book No Country for Women as one of the resources for my project.
I am hoping to bring together these stories of sufferings into a performance that uses the body, my body, as its main source of storytelling. I would also like to explore the possibilities of a durational performance and how it can reflect the lived endurance I have experienced and witnessed from women in my country. Some of the visual and conceptual ideas I would like to explore are to have performers manipulate my body and clothes in ways that hint on pain and suffering,some examples are cutting my hair and eventually shaving off my head and acupuncturing my whole body.
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