Bidrohi at Old Spitalfields Market

This summer we welcome the bold and beautiful work of three British Bangladeshi artists to the Market’s historic roof.

‘Bidrohi’ showcases the work of Mohammed Z Rahman, Puer Deorum and Ace Rahman together for the first time. This unique exhibition offers insight into their identities and experiences, sharing their stories through striking street photography and self-portraits, captures of everyday rituals in Bangladesh’s vibrant cities and paintings of dream-like domestic scenes exploring the lives of migrants in the East London rag trade.

This exhibition has been curated and produced in collaboration with Maria Guy and is supported by Jack Arts.

Ace Rahman 

A British-Bangladeshi multi-hyphenate, their ideas are expressed through a variety of mediums both digital and traditional. Recently launching their interdisciplinary design and arts studio “MADEULOOK.”

About the work: 

The photos displayed were taken from a series of photos “Dhaka-Sylhet-Kolkota” unusually taken a kids camera during Ace’s visit to Bangladesh and West Bengal, India.

And reimagined through the studios unique design aesthetic transforming ordinary visuals into thought-provoking art, MADEULOOK encourages us to see beyond the surface. It invites a deeper reflection on the nature of the work and plays around with perspective through typography & colour in public and online spaces.

Puer Deorum

Born and bred in London, and of Bangladeshi heritage, Puer Deorum is an interdisciplinary artist and curator. They approach art as a mode of archiving contrived halcyons, utopian scenarios, contexts that cannot be contextualised, developing sequences of mysticism and fantastical ambience. Blending themes of love and radical imagination to create non-linear realities with familiar, yet accentuated tropes within a polychronic experience of time, to grasp viewers into the unknown – where the orientalised transcend beyond (post)colonial perception.Narrating surreal paracosms with harmonious references to folk culture, psycho/socio political geographies, amplifying the mundanity of everyday proprioceptive and embodied feeling.

About the work: 

Taken between 2023-2024, the images explore details of public and historic spaces as well as gathering places in the streets and markets in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and across the border in Kolkata, Jaipur and Mumbai, India including Old Dhaka and Chor Bazaar. Capturing time and space through light and object, the photos serve as windows into everyday elements of spirituality, the essence of memory, relics of human presence, and ideas around familiarity and object permanence.

Mohammed Z Rahman

A British-Bengali visual artist and writer based in London. His work puts socio-political and personal histories in conversation through the lens of the domestic. Mohammed approaches art as an intimate and political force probing and mutating the ordinary. Drawing on dreamscapes, globality, queerness, biography and socio-historical perspectives, he creates work that celebrates his communities’ internationalist dreams, disrupts violent power structures and makes peace with unspeakable chaos.

About the work:

The works exhibited are three from the series “Under the Cloth”.  These acrylic paintings illustrate dream-like domestic scenes explore the lives of migrants in the East London rag trade most active between the 1970s and early 2000s.  The themes of these scenes encompass motherhood, death, craft, migration and leisure & community organising. The work moves beyond narratives of economic necessity- a hegemonic tool that disempowers and flattens the lives of working class migrants.

Read the full story of this series here