A Fantastical Protest against a Capitalist World
Noah's menagerie, domestic animals and birds, fairy tales, Biblical stories , popular proverbs, popular, fiction and movies are rolled into one. Einstein, Dracula and Batman may also creep into Ronnie Ahmmed's creations. He is concerned about the real world rapidly losing touch with reality. He imagines a barren, disintegrated world losing its ideologies. He has used myth and history before, creative forces that shape the human imagination. His myth serves another purpose. Ronni uses human imagination to create a salvage of patchwork to get a babble of disconnected voices. This is not a parable or a narrative, it is more like a pastiche, a semblance of stories. There are Cyclopses, animals, strange men. There are allusions to Aesope's fables and Humpty Dumpty. He mixes technology with science. He deals with greed and violence.
His art has an inner dynamism that brings the primordial man with the post verbal era of consideration. It mingles magic with words. He introduces folklore to its different origin. It is as if Noah's boat carries everything from chaos to hope.
Ronnie's works are often a criticism of the existing power structure. Terrorism, he says, is a political weapon to gain lucrative political product. Terrorism can be used by the terrorist and those who are against it because it is a creation of capitalism and manipulates the common man's beliefs.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. In a recent installation called 'Terrorism in other planets' he elucidates these ideas. An auditorium of empty chairs wait to be filled. Some of the chairs are occupied by vegetables, a cauliflower, potatoes and aubergines. Each chair is reserved by a powerful person or celebrity. Name tags with Lady Gaga, 007, Bill Gates, Karl Marx and Naom Chaomsky are attached to the chairs. The vegetables indicate the plantation for a new planet. There are shoes with a big walking ball. This work was shawn in 2013 with Shehzad Chowdhuary as the curator. The place was Dhaka Art Centre.
There is a painting which makes a joke of death. A tree is chased by a ghost. This was in the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts in 2006. There was the Epic River in 2002 at Alliance Francaise. The vision was that of a fusion of a man and a fish and a mechanical projection. The entire thing was on a boat. The boat was driven by an ambulance. It has multi-layered meanings and appeals to fantasy.
An enormous painting , 9 ft. by 7 ft. displayed at the Tafe Gallery Museum in Perth, Australia, showed metamorphic life forces. The frog like creatures were neither human nor animal with their blue bulging eyes and long tentacles. The creatures had evolved in protest of Capitalism, and criticised the Futuristic Society. This was called Capitalist Invasion of, Extraterritorial Khalipha in a Microscopic Egg land in the Future.’
There was the collage of myths and stories and the world contained by the Ark of Noah, a print displayed at the Cosmos Gallery. The collage of myths contained fairy tales and stories from religion and symbol and iconic , intellectual properties. Post-modern in its theme, it had comic strips of Spiderman and Batman. There was Apollo 11, 'Gazir Pot', rickshaw painting, Aesop's fables etc. The 'Cosmic Arc', one of Ronni's much talked about works, was launched at the Venice Biennale and was published by Mermaid Art Foundation and curated by Ebadur Rahman.
Turtle Myth is an 18 ft. High, 65 ft long sculpture 'Inside the Turtle Dome' at Cox's Bazaar. As a sculpture it has been placed as an emblem at the Mermaid Resort centre in Cox's Bazaar. Ronni has dedicated this sculpture to protest against the depletion of turtle eggs all over the world. It has eight windows and two doors through which visitors can enter and examine the mural inside.
For Ronni art is not a vision. It is a rediscovering of the relationship between the universe and man.
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