Bipasha's artworks are divided into three parts. First, black monochrome paintings and relief works, which are symbolized by inner deep spiritual world, second, excavation series which has a lot of color layers show an archeological allegory derived from scars of history, joy and sadness of inhabitants, etc. Third, black Muslin installation works symbolises inner feelings created by recollection of memories. She continuously writes something on black silk scarf. But cannot be recognized or interpreted. Only we can say their destinies

Bipasha Hayat has made an international name for herself as a Bangladesh ‘Conceptual’ artist and has turned her attention to one of the most important areas of human existence – memory. Issues of our humanity, identity, self, ‘I’ and ‘Other’, culture etcetera are reliant upon being remembered. In a series of intriguing works Bipasha Hayat has woven a tangible treatise on memory through the colour black.

 In her series of images comprising the installation ‘Cast My Vote For Socrates' Acquittal’ (2020) Hayat references the Greek philosopher Socrates’ sentence of death in 399 BC (B.C.E.). According to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (in The Apology), Socrates’ crimes were ‘failing to acknowledge gods worshiped by the city’ and ‘corrupting the young’. In her hand-pressed impressions, printed from chiselled stone and black acrylic paint on 221 pieces of watercolour paper, Hayat brings back to our cultural memory the injustice served on one of the greatest Western philosophers of all times. The number 221 references those who voted for Socrates’ acquittal (220), plus her own vote, against the 280 votes for his demise via the drinking of hemlock. The artwork is her vote against injustice, historical and current. Remembering that initial trial, some two thousand and four hundred years later (2012), a new international panel gathered to re-run Socrates’ trial, in Athens and, ironically, acquitted him of his crimes.

In other works, such as her ‘Memoir’ series (2016), Hayat uses corrugated cardboard painted black and rendered to intimate words, spaces, sentences, even paragraphs. With raised sections initially ‘reading’ as anonymised and coded segments of ‘text’, the viewer observes what once, from a distance, appears as text recodes itself before their eyes into the corrugated board painted black, which it is. The viewer misreads, mis-recalls and mis-projects images from memory, onto the presented artwork. As the visitor’s brain conjures, clinging to the initial notion of text, desperately trying to make meaning where there is none, their thoughts bid for logic, rationality, and auto-realign to thoughts of Braille (the system of raised dots read with fingers by people having low vision, or who are sight less). As the viewer closes on the artwork fresh recollections occur. Perhaps this enigmatic work, though not text in the common visual sense, can be ‘read’ through touch, though touch is not permitted within the viewing space.

The work confounds and puzzles. Memories dragged up are catapulted at the artworks, hoping that one might stick; that the recalled memory might decode the not encoded. It doesn’t of course. The text, which is not text, only hints at some, seemingly unassailable, language.

Asemic calligraphy arranged across draped black muslin in Hayat’s ‘Shadow of Memories’ are reminiscent of Dada and the Surrealist notion of ’Psychic Automatism’. Images rendered onto the draped muslin resemble text, just as the cardboard indentations did in Hayat’s ‘Memoir’ series. Once again the viewer is challenged by the appearance of text that is not text, but the appearance of text. Again the mind wishes to decipher and asks ‘is this the text of another language?’

Hayat’s ‘Shadow of Memories’ ‘script’ is hand rendered. To all intents and purposes is ‘in the wind’. The installation’s black muslin has the possibility of a fluidity of movement of, essentially, throwing its ‘text’ to the wind, making it tentative, possible, but uncertain just as the script itself appears laden with possibilities, but remains an enigma and undecipherable. Those works of Bipasha Hayat are the antithesis of the idea of Tibetan prayer flags, which traditionally are hung in high places to catch the wind so that the Buddhist prayer is carried to bless all sentient beings. Hayat’s works proffer but rescind.

In Hayat’s ‘Shadow of Memories’ there is also the sensation that we might be looking at the darkness of memory loss, through degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's, where working memory and long term memory are affected early and where sufferers encounter difficulties in the retelling and reading of texts. In a sense, we the observer of Hayat’s black asemic scripts are forced into the role of the recipient of a degenerative brain disorder. There is much (deliberately) ‘lost in translation’. Much we cannot quite grasp. We become thrown onto the images that are not words, like films in languages which we do not understand, sans subtitles to guide our otherwise active mind (s) through the complex plot twists. There again, we are faced with something resembling the fascinating non-textual, but illustrative, ‘magic scripts’ of the Korwa. Yet Hayat’s work does not use her asemic imagery as an exotic decoration like the pseudo-kulfic script, but more like an offering akin to the Korwa’s ‘magic scripts, and with her works we, her audience, are forced to accept that there may be meanings other than those we can effectively grasp as she intrigues and teases her audience with hints.

Hayat's work is a beautiful discovery.

MINDSCAPE is an exhibition that proposes a reflection on the theme of memory, declined by the artist's second skillful mix of chromatic happiness and material thickness, which evokes memories, places, suggestions of the past. A historical past, public and common, which dialogue, however, with an all internal, personal and subjective past that is fixed in deposits of matter, thick, adhesive or in its removal, in a work that seems to imitate layering from memory. But, above all, it hits the beat. Slow, cadence and irreversible of the picturesque texture, fluent as a dance and harmonious as a song. Frame like the invocations and decorative plots of that distant culture.

Bipasha Hayat exhibition is a place of spirit where east and west meet and communicate.

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Bipasha's work is influenced from ancient times, as a trace of reinterpretation of a dense and tightly woven historical site. As a result of the time accumulated in this place, it reveals and digs each layer, layer by layer, and captures the temporality on the screen. . The work has never been smoothly polished and polished, but the artist pursues a more artificial, non-artificial way of expressing the surface of the work. Bipasha has been inspired by a lot of inspiration from historical places, for example, the land where human life has existed, such as walls and ancient buildings, where you can feel the traces of ancient times. I found the focus of my work in the field. In a space with an eternal temporality, there is the narrative of human history and the life cycle of individuals that have been buried during that time. The artist saw the traces of human beings engraved in a lot of time through historical places, and focused on the historical richness of the land where human life has existed, and obtained the motif of the method of work.

The thick paint applied to the canvas is the earth and the soil to the artist. It has been brought about by humans, and new things revive and dying of the earth's currents are rough but beautifully carved. Under the white background, there are many color surfaces, the artist says, as a space of stillness that has been quietly broken down over a long period of time, a space of silence that reproduces each individual's history.

To know history and to constantly testify to remember it. It can be said to be a work of regenerating individual and common memories. The artist examines the rich land that has had human history and the memory of the history that exists in it in the same attitude as an anthropologist, and creates it in lines and shapes. The recombination of the irregularly peeled fragments under the white surface has the potential of abstract language and makes you feel that the life of someone that has been repeated for a long time and the life of the current artist are mixed.

The recently started monochrome work is based on stone slabs. The artist uses not only canvas, but also wooden panels, corrugated cardboard, etc., and media other than canvas enable expressions such as phrases engraved on slate. If it is said that the color canvas work was a work that reveals historical memories, the work engraved in deep darkness on wood and cardboard has a visual effect that allows us to penetrate into individual historicality.

In addition to canvas work, this exhibition will show 21 works made with various media, such as PVC board (soft plastic board), corrugated cardboard, and muslin cloth produced in Bangladesh.

We are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.
(Jorge Luis Borges)
Remnants of memory; ancient walls translated into live fragments with light strokes, color pirouettes
and graffiti gently blurred; life scenes lurking under our eyes if we only approach the canvas to
observe its materiality, or we are sufficiently distant to distinguish the narrative and evocation.
Memory is life.
(Saul Bellow)
Bipasha Hayat's evocations are ancient buildings, remains of walls and traces of existence that,
thanks to the deconstruction made on the canvas, give testimonies and stories that must not be lost:
they represent both personal and collective memories.
Moreover, the work of this eclectic artist is based on the concept of memory as fragments of our
personal history shaping everyday new images, but also as a force generating new possibilities and
emerging from the tales and imaginations of every human being who has ever lived on Earth.
Being in front of Bipasha's canvases is like staring at a mosaic, with the difference that here is the
abstraction the main guideline of the work, instead of the meticulous contours of mosaic art.
The tiles of this conceptual and creative mosaic become scratched strokes, framed by an uneven grid
of luminous (often white) painting which, in parentheses, puts each ‘Tile’ as a connective fluid to the
tale that we are faced with.
These brushstrokes get a double result: on the one hand they have the same function as the words
in any narration recalling an event or describing a scene; on the other hand they create the space of
the silence, that suspended void where everyone can stop and recreate their own personal story.
Bipasha Hayat is fascinated by the remains of past civilizations, attracted by the ruins of great cities
and monuments which can be observed mainly in Libya (Leptis Magna among all), and then in Rome,
Egypt, Greece, and Pompei. She pictures herself walking among those buildings, amphitheatres,
castles, homes, and mixing her existence with the lives of the people who lived there in the past, or
who have crossed her path of life.

Memory is the treasure and guardian of all things.
(Cicero)

Experimenter, energetic and attentive, Bipasha never betrays herself or her story, but rather
combines her personal roots with the memories of each of us, and states: "All the lines visible
between these floating forms are my existence”.
Her painting evolves from vigorous brushstrokes evoking visual fragments and mnemonic traces (for
example Resonance of Memories), to shreds of colorful landscapes, embracing both Impressionism
and Abstract art (Oh it's a sunny day), subsequently heading towards more conceptual forms, as in
Memoir 2016, a work that earned her the Honourable Mention Award at the 17th Asian Art
Biennale.
In this last work Bipasha tends towards monochromy, creating a stronger analogy with the concepts
of archeological find and historical evidence: the writing are engraved vertically on tall stone slabs,

here made of cardboard. The words become signs and symbols emerging from the depths of the
unconscious, in a sort of reverse interpretation of Plato’s Myth of the Cave: unlike the Platonic
allegory, the more we go deep into our conscience, the more we approach the reality of our lives,
because we shed light on our existences with the glow of our memories.
Faith in the most visceral, genuine and immutable humans’ emotions gives Bipasha naturalness of
execution, curiosity towards the future, and respect for the unique identity of every human being.
In Forgotten Memories (2015), acrylic on canvas, it almost feels like we are observing a satellite
photo of some industrious and peculiar city, where the artist’s extraordinary attention to all the
mechanisms that generated life on this planet forces us to take the role of the researcher, using our
eyes to ask ourselves what this precious image reminds us.
One more time, Bipasha points out that "Our memories are there with us even though we might
think they are not”.

We have an immense memory, present in us without us knowing it.
(Denis Diderot)
It is possible to read in some critical biographies that draw the beginnings of her professional
journey, that Bipasha Hayat is an "actress-artist", as if to be an actress was not to be an artist, and
Art was something related to just one of our many senses instead of being the expression of their
connection. Bipasha manages to remind us that our senses are all that we perceive, physical and
nonphysical; they are the images that remain with us, the evolution of self-perception, and the
traces and interpretations of sounds, colors, smells, flavours, thoughts, that we transformed into
emotions, and therefore memories.

Reality is not created if not in our memory.
(Marcel Proust)
The "realms of memory" are the union of our personal and heterogeneous kingdom, with the
collective, sharable and historical one: they are the combination of layers of opaque paint with the
revealing scratches and lighter brush strokes; both stratified as History is.
This deep and pure form of art, simple and introspective, pushes us to go further, deeper and
beyond, to investigate our moods through a dense painted surface. We gain abstraction through the
matter.
Bipasha Hayat works on canvas, cardboard, with layers of colour, scratches and engravings, with
paints, varnishes and various types of brushes, creating tangible but evocative paintings. The artist
guides us through the reign of the material, delimited and subjective, to then raise towards the
kingdom of imagination, emotion, abstraction and correlation.

The subjective becomes collective. The narration becomes history. The colours become sounds and
music. The abstract patterns become rough surfaces, and vice versa.
The unclear acquires a perfect order, a constantly evolving form.
Maria Giulia Marletta
30/12/2016 (English translation July 2017)A

Minding the gap between truth and data

While working from within a particular semiotic system, certain images or objects are created with a definite intention – they function as key symbols to carry forth meaning. Since our understanding of the world is primarily mediated through ‘imagination’, these objects/images transport us to the event or the time an artist attempts to recollect in his or her own terms. Take for example the way Bipasha Hayat's work "Cast my vote for Socrates's acquittal" re-enacts the trial of the great Greek philosopher. A stone, which is a found object, is used to create a series of images – 221 to be exact. Together they take us back to the infamous trial where 280 favoured conviction and 221 opposed it.

The number 221, representing the Athenians who favoured acquittal, became pivotal to the artist. The series of images made in paper, together with the other components of the installation, is a way for Bipasha to hark back in time to attend to the historic folly that would continue to mar the polity throughout history. Over the past century, it has acquired a name – majoritarianism. No doubt, its sinister face has redefined democracy and given a bad name to the nation states that claim to have been the progenitors of such a noble idea.

It seems that the work, Cast my vote for Socrates's acquittal, is created not only to lament the death of one of history's most famous 'naysayers' but also to afford a rereading or re-examination of the trial that made explicit how hierarchy and power penetrates the sphere of knowledge and also ensures that the social and individual processes of engendering knowledge are held in check.

On the level of linguistic expression, the archaic quality of the stone images and the presence of the stone itself seem to evoke a sense of timelessness, or geologic or deep time, though the event they refer back to is the stuff of history, European history to be precise.

There are layers to be unravelled here. As one reads the surface of the stone in the painting done on paper, which comes in myriad forms and expressions, one is pushed to the edge of a precipice – a precipice of a holistic understanding of life. It happens through a form of art which is ultimately a way of releasing historical as well as ahistorical narratives in a space. By way of a process of 'place-making', the artist creates 'imaginary ruins' of history which, in turn, seems tied to our cognitive power to generate meaning using signs and symbols culled from nature and read in both the contexts of the current socio-political realities and eternity.

The installation, composed of myriad components, acquires a ritualistic aura not only through repetition of images but also due to the fact that they are generated from one piece of stone.

The stone, though small, works as a central piece, one that presides over the images and in turn stands for time and its continuity. Thus, the sense of past, present and future is evoked through one symbolic object, one which assumes the status of a 'mnemonic object' in which symbol-meaning pairing occurs without much effort. As an archetypal sign it, perhaps, subsumes the complexities of things real and unreal and through its presence it brings to light a flurry of associative meaning that are absent its immediate feature.

In its entirety, the installation look like a testament to a world where the man-made or manufactured always, as a rule, overlaps the given, which is nature's creation.

The series of works that uses black ink to achieve the impression of the stone she chiselled to achieve a desired surface quality, is an extension to the stark minimalism of some previous works. A series of works under the title "An anthology of torn memories" used corrugated cardboards. Their surface, peeled to reveal the corrugated surface in places in some works and throughout the entire surface in others, articulated a language of their own as they were devoid of any expressionistic elements.

The surfaces of those black works that defied the bounds of convention of painting still resonated with the viewers. Some of the major pieces were not about resonating surfaces at all; they were like surfaces of the archaeological tablets.

Stone and deep as well as historical time are the concerns that have shaped the world of this artist whose life went through a crucial transformation after she settled down in the USA following a stunningly successful career acting in TV dramas and a marriage to another actor of considerable fame that finally led to a daughter and a son. The stone she collected from a friend's garden after landing in the US soil was not the sole muse she considered to bring into the gallery space. Her relationship with stone can be traced back to the time when she first visited historical places around the world as a child when her famous father, an actor in theatre and on TV, took her to Egypt, among many other places.  

There is a curious underside to the very idea of history writing. And one who writes may not be oblivious to the overarching need to orient oneself to the tide of the time. As new materials are being excavated, the story of Socrates, the philosopher, martyr, is also being seen in the light of his role as an antidemocratic exponent of his time. One writer has gone as far as to draw a parallel between the political partisan of Athens to Robespierre, the most significant yet ruthless leader of the French revolution.

Bipasha did not find much inspiration in such counterfactual histories as she seeks to draw attention to an ethics of collective action and the social-spiritual processes of knowing. Thus, she prioritises wisdom over historical narratives.

The reference to the stone recurs in this exhibition in many a painting. Whether it is something to do with the philosophers' stone, a symbol of a mystical system of the past, is a question that should not disturb our grey cells, turning us into addle-brained art lovers, as we try to unpack the artist's symbolism. The power of imagination ensures that our relationship with the world is more than the sum total of the sensory data collected about the world, it is in this grey area where the essence of life resides. And this is the site from where she spins her tales of signification.