Reconstruction of Experience in Karail, Dhaka, 2019

During our fieldwork in Karail, I came across a plant with sharp, thorny leaves. I didn't know its name. But I kept thinking about it — how something so fragile-looking could protect itself so precisely. How the thorns aren't just defense, they're also form. They're part of how the plant exists in the world.

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The installation started from there.

 

It grew out of a few ideas I kept returning to: geographical location, climate and heat, the ready-made garment industry, precarity, fragility. When I tried to bring all of these together into physical objects, I kept coming back to one thing — the interiors of Karail homes.

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The most striking object in those homes was the bed. And above it, almost always, a piece of cloth hanging from the ceiling. That bed was everything at once — kitchen, living room, guest room, bedroom. And that fabric overhead was a simple, quiet solution to the heat. A household material doing what it could.

Bachelard calls the corner "being's first refuge" — the place where we first feel sheltered, contained, known. In Karail, I kept finding these corners everywhere — in homes, in streets, in the edges of the settlement itself.

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And Karail does this too, in its own way. Mosques placed along the edges — not randomly, but carefully. Like the plant, it knows where its boundaries are.