Shabnam, Stereo Sound, Colour,22:32, 2022-2023
In Shabnam, the fragmented history of the fabrication of muslin and its scattered documentation across archives all over the world is stitched back together in a piece that is
as stunning as it is confrontational.
The result is a patchwork of uneasy encounters, hidden narratives and archival images in which the discomfort
of inequality is made tangible to the viewer. – IFFR
Shabnam (2023) presents a cinematic dramaturgy on muslin—the fine weave produced in undivided Bengal during the Mughal empire [MOU1] and then transferred into the hands of colonial mercantilism and British company rule in the nineteenth century. The portraiture of masterful weavers’ ties into a materialist inquiry of cotton as a body in motion from raw
to processed. The weavers’ loom emerges as an instrument that echoes traumatic pasts and unsettles imperial records frozen in museum archives and libraries in England; it also invites examination into global flows of garment trade in the present day from Bangladesh to the world.- Sharjah Art Biennial ‘25. Watch trailer here.