Laisul Hoque @ Whitechapel

This was only in the gallery for a day. Eight and a half hours, exactly. The door was heavy the room was dark and silent and empty. Empty except for one dark cabinet, a yellow screen and a yellow glow. It’s funny, the yellow glow is the most immaterial component, but it was the first thing I saw. The cabinet was facing away from the door, a shadowy body with its back to me. I walked round to see its face. Yellow glow. A tight square and very blinding. Two wooden shelves with two metal trays on each, doubled up again because the cabinet is mirror backed (2,4,8, quick maths). The light bending against the mirror, gleam on steel. Top shelf: jhuri if I am Bengali, sev if I am Gujarati, fried crunchy things made of gram flour if I am talking to you English. Bottom shelf: boondi, which is the same in both languages. One is salty and savoury and spicy, you are meant to mix it with puffed rice and spicy potatoes, lemon, red onion and green chilli. One is syrupy sweet, almost sickly, meant to be packed tight into a sugar crusted ball (a laddoo to me). But there were metal tongs and one paper cup, there I was mixing them together, listening to instructions. I ate them in the dark facing the yellow glow. Over my crunching I could hear something. Not silence, brown noise. I thought it was a fan whirring in the background, something else or, I don’t know. It barely registered until I stood in it.

I was last over in 2019, travelling with a camera and a tripod because I wanted to make a film about my Dada and the war and the rivers and ghosts. My uncle drove me around in his banged up Honda. He was more determined to make this film than I was, he would stop at nothing for me to get the shot. We drove out of Dhaka, past yellow fields and flat grey expanses of water, the delta. He stopped to pick up weed from his guy, a man selling marigolds on the side of a motorway. I got out the car too and looked through the windows of the shops. No glass, corrugated tin and tiled floors, fluoro lights and fan noise. Enormous stainless steel vats stacked on top of each other, bigger than buckets, full of milky cloudy liquids. The man in the shop was sat, watching YouTube videos on his phone. He saw me and got up, looked busy, stirred the vats with a big spoon. In the churn I saw soft beige blobs, like massive beans, swirling around. My uncle appeared next to me, asked if I had a sweet tooth. I smiled, shook my head. We got back into his banged up Honda and continued out into the countryside. He was smoking a zoot out the window, very Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but also not. We crossed a brand new bridge made of concrete. Tall trees, banana leaves, my Dada’s village between two rivers. He was born in a tin hut, he came to London and worked for the government. Nothing important, those days were over, he used to go down Brick Lane measuring the restaurants to check they were paying the right taxes for the square footage. I should’ve made a film about that instead. Silly old man, lovely old man, in his beige Harrington and flat cap. He’d walk in the door with packets of Hubba Bubba for me, pull them out of his pocket like they were magic. I should’ve made a film about that.

In early pandemic 2020 Mousse Magazine published an essay by Cedric Fauq, Transactional Objects Full of Contexts in Voided Sites. He writes about the work of four artists (Carolyn Lazard, Ima-Abasi Okon, Cameron Rowland, Abbas Zahedi), the connections and relationships between their practices, what that might mean or do in a gallery. Because there is a relationship between them. The object specificity, the way the objects all speak and feel heavy or loaded — despite being objects so, illegible through language, not able to like literally actually speak. It’s the shorthand of the readymade, one step two step plus. But they do something, don’t they? All those artists, their work says or does something through object — the objects are placed specifically and in relation to the institution. They’re speaking, oblique, and it’s actually not about the object but about the power dynamic, the players — what Cedric calls the transactionality. Something is secretly passing between the institution and the object. The object is pointing away, Cedric calls it ‘the enactment of various politics of refusal’, pointing at the institutional shell around them while simultaneously deserting it. Their work, the objects, they speak of a world outside the gallery container; a world that (conceptually and literally) doesn’t come in, a world that the gallery doesn’t go out into. They point at this hermetic seal, a world full of a context they are out of, in isolation and limbo they sing! Sing in empty rooms, sing of the impossibility of object and context being reunited once more. Cameron Rowland’s mortgaged doors, Ima-Abasi Okon’s stacked chairs available to be borrowed by the artist’s local church, Carolyn Lazard’s elevators full of white noise, Abbas Zahedi’s exit signs and singing pulsating shutters. The object is the container, the container is contained, the world outside is — ah, context!

Back to the gallery. Laisul Hoque’s An Ode to All the Flavours was only in the Whitechapel’s Gallery 2 for eight and a half hours. The snack in the cabinet is unusual, unconventional. It’s like dipping Maccies fries into a Maccies milkshake, a mix of separate things that come together to make a personal foible. It’s the artist’s father’s favourite snack. There’s a text on the back of the press release where Laisul describes a childhood memory of walking to a sweet shop with his Dad to eat this specific snack mix, holding his hand, feeling like there was an emotional intimate exchange in the sharing of this snack. A personal foible, a part of the person, a quirk. The text describes that the artist’s father is quite a conventional man, unemotional, there’s a distance between them. This cabinet is a monument to fleeting moments when there is no distance, only intimacy, only being known and seen and loved entirely for the tender soft spots, for the quirks and foibles, these delightful and human things that are ultimately only small. But the world is made up of small things, the small things are the entire point. This is a loving portrait, it conceals and reveals something precious.

The cabinet, the trays, the yellow glow. They are also an object. The object points. They call Brick Lane Bangla Town don’t they? Or they used to. The street signs are bilingual. You leave the gallery, turn the corner and you see an actual real and entire Bengali sweet shop with laddoos stacked in pyramids. Pointing outside the gallery. Whitechapel Gallery is an interesting kind of space because it operates with a proper, deadlocked hermetic seal. The artist is from Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. This is the first time an artist with Bangladeshi heritage has been invited in to the Whitechapel’s gallery for a solo commission.

In January 2020 Imran Perretta’s, the destructors opened at Chisenhale Gallery. It was the first time Chisenhale had invited an artist with Bangladeshi heritage to come into their main gallery space with a solo commission. I am saying this carefully so read it carefully. Numbers and representation doesn’t matter, they don’t affect material change. What I am pointing to is a dynamic, power. Chisenhale is in Mile End, Whitechapel is obviously in Whitechapel, both are in Tower Hamlets. Tower Hamlets council’s 2021 census report reckons that 34.6% of residents in the borough are Bangladeshi, 14% were born in Bangladesh, Bengali/Sylheti is the second most commonly spoken language in the borough.

Both Whitechapel and Chisenhale are very different galleries, both in Tower Hamlets. In 1988 Chisenhale opened their second ever show, a survey show called Essential Black Art (Black at this point was Politically Black and meant Black and Asian artists), curated by Rasheed Araeen. None of the artists in this show are/were from Bangladesh, but Sutapa Biswas was born in West Bengal. Whitechapel have included work by Bangladeshi artists in group shows: Rana Begum, Shahidul Alam, they’ve had Naeem Mohaiemen in for a talk, they did a day long festival called Elo Melo with loads of Bangladeshi artists and arts workers (including, full disclosure, me). What I am trying to say is that there is a specific kind of artistic value ascribed to solo commissions and it is weird that these firsts come so late for Bangladeshi artists, despite there being so many Bangladeshis in London’s art world, despite there being so many galleries operating in London’s East End, a part of the city that has traditionally been home to London’s Bangladeshi community.

It is a strange little knot to try and unpick, and I have clumsy fingers, an ability to say things cack-handedly. But the sun went in and it got dark. I sat in Whitechapel’s second gallery, waiting for everyone to settle down so the speakers could start. I listened as Laisul interviewed Maher Anjum and Sameera Wadood. Maher runs Oitij-jo, a social enterprise that supports British Bangladeshi women into the catering industry by bringing home cooking into the public sphere. Sameera is a fine dining chef reimagining what Modern Bangladeshi cooking might look like. They spoke and they weren’t cack-haded. Authenticity is an awkward term to apply to any form of culture because it is weilded as a conservative power. Bangladesh has one of the biggest diasporas, considering it isn’t even a massive country. Huge diasporas in Venice, New York, Dubai, London — all global art hotspots. In the UK, 8 out of 10 Indian restaurants are owned and run by Bangladeshis. Britain expects this food to be cheap, takeaway, why? British Bangladeshi women are the least economically active group in the UK, Maher said, they are made busy with social reproduction but that doesn’t pay a wage and so it doesn’t give you automatic access to the power to make decisions for yourself. I looked down at Maher’s bio on the press release and thought about my last day job. I used to work for a sustainable fashion brand that was a co-operative and a social enterprise. The co-op part was: I was paid the same amount per hour as the founders, the designer, the seamstresses. The social enterprise part was: British Bangladeshi women have sewing skills and no agency to turn those skills into gainful employment, so the sustainable fashion brand trained them up and gave them experience and paid them well for it. The food industry and the fashion industry, we expect these things to be cheap — someone is paying for that expectation, somewhere in the supply chain. Laisul asked Sameera a question about plating and ingredients, and her answer made me think about ways to grab at conceptual value. Ways to assert value when it isn’t a given.

We were sat in a crowd in this gallery, no more brown noise, listening to the conversation. But I remembered the room earlier, nearly empty except for the dark cabinet, the trays, the snacks, the yellow glow. The gallery felt like a liminal space, so cold and clean and empty. The yellow glow was so omnipresent, it almost had a body. The objects were pointing across land and sea, at artist and father, quirks and foibles, something precious. The objects were pointing round the corner, down Brick Lane. The objects were pointing at the gallery walls, the container around it, the institutional shell, the power dynamic, the players. At the impossibility of being reunited with its context from behind this hermetic seal. I don’t know, I don’t think there was a desertion. I think there was a grab at conceptual value. It isn’t always a given.