Site specific installation
'Landscape Happening' is a film of ‘A Landscape Activity’ by installation artist, Shohrab Jahan and the Jog Art Space in Chittagong, Bangladesh. The happening was made as a response to the Creative Activism project themes. The film was captured by Morshed Himadri Himu and edited by Shohrab Jahan and Emilie Flower during Shohrab’s residency at the Pica Studios in York.
A Landscape Activity
Shohrab Jahan
A landscape activity is a public happening that tries to give people a different experience by giving the opportunity to engage with objects—to create their own performance. This helps them feel that art is not so far from their life (most people local to Chittagong don’t have any relationship with visual art). As a sculptor or sculpture activist I love to work with different people in the community and involve them in the work of making art. I want to see people enjoy engaging with my art form, so I mostly choose to work in local rowdy spaces. I love to deal with space; with its history and also its natural beauty. I don’t want to impose a narrative, I try to rethink the narrative related to that space, I try to re-make it as an image.
This landscape activity took place on the banks of the Carnaphuli river at a ferry station called Avay mitra Ghat. The Carnaphuli is the mother river of Chittagong and the first road into Chittagong led from Avay Mitra Ghat. The ferry station is a popular space, now it’s a very busy and rowdy space, but before Avay Mitra Ghat existed it used to be a space where lots of birds came to play with nature. But there are very few birds now. My project is simply the representation of the situation as it was before.
I belong to the riverside village where I was born. I saw the river, the beauty of the river, the noise and human involvement that make the river even noisier. The sound and the noise make us unhappy, but we are involved in making it noisier. I feel strange when I see that we are destroying nature slowly, sometimes for trivial reasons, sometimes without any reason at all. My project starts from that thought.
This is a continuing process, so this landscape activity is just the start of a bigger process. This time, it is for people who belong by the riverside. I want to experience things differently by interacting with them and also want to give them an experience which is now missing; of seeing lots of birds flying.
As an artist I want to play an active role in society—I want to participate in development in its many layers. This small-scale activity with local people is a practice of social art. I make objects, but what I want to do is to work with people and for people. The object for me is a means of communication and the purpose of communication to change the way we see the world. To take part in the process of making a better world where we want to live.
Chittagong, January 2018