An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Professor Lotte Hoek (Sabbatical Fellow, 2026)
Folk Fictions: Popular Cinema and Contemporary Art in Bangladesh
When does popular cinema lend itself to incorporation into the practice of contemporary artists? In this in-progress paper, I explore the purposes and limits of the ‘reprocessing’ of the aesthetic forms of popular Bangladeshi cinema in contemporary art. I will focus on a reworking of the hugely popular 1980s folk-romance film Beder Meye Josna (1989, dir. Tozammel Hossain Bakul) and ask what the affordances are of its folk iconographies, action cinema aesthetic and gendered storytelling for a contemporary feminist art collective. I do so to attend to the ongoing debate about the utility of the category of ‘pop art’ within the context of South Asia. Written for an edited volume to accompany the exhibition Pop South Asia, in my paper I ask how and when popular form can animate activist artists. In the paper, I disaggregate the container term ‘popular cinema’, to read the citation of particular periods and genres in the works of contemporary Bangladeshi artists as a means of surfacing how popular cinema seeps into public debate and common sense.
Meeting ID: 387 413 976 148 588
Passcode: jk7Dn2rE