Zareen Nawar

What makes a visual artist tick in the cacophony of your typical modern existence, which in hindsight has the tenacity to make one increasingly distracted? One of the answers lies with the recently declared winner of the second iteration of the 2025 East London Art Prize, Laisul Hoque. This all-media art prize competition received 900 submissions from artists and collectives living or working within London’s ‘E’ postcode this year. Laisul won £15,000 (over $15,000) and the opportunity to host a solo exhibition at the Nunnery Gallery in Bow, scheduled for 2026, owing to his interactive installation art piece “An Ode to All the Flavours” (2024), which was selected from 12 shortlisted artists.

Bangladeshi singer Resmi Mirza, one with a sharply grounded vocal prowess is also one with a tried and true love for folk music since the beginning of her musical voyage. Mentored by the celebrated Khulna Shilpa Kola Academy music teacher and founder of his own Music Academy Sa-re-ga-ma-pa, Mirza Golam Rasul, who also happens to be her father, Resmi found her direction. In a way, she found her calling having come from a musical family — her siblings are self-assured musicians too.

The country might have undergone an unprecedented shift in power this year, marked by various sacrifices that have, and will continue to, drive seemingly necessary transitions across all sectors.

The frameworks of portrayals of gender-based violence in our local productions have been birthed from the need to give voice to the oppressed Biranganas (war heroines)—as portrayed through several films or dramas throughout the years.

The arduous journey of Tamzid Islam Zarir, an ardent Shah Rukh Khan fan, reached its culmination this year during the SRK Day event on November 2. His story, as the current organising secretary of the devoted SRK fan club SRK Bangladesh CFC, gained significant attention earlier this month when he met the Bollywood icon alongside 400 to 450 other fans on the occasion of King Khan’s birthday.

As I stepped into the Central Shaheed Minar late in the afternoon, I was greeted with the jovial and embracing atmosphere of feminists from all corners of the city— and perhaps even beyond. Most were decked out in orange and red sarees, seemingly in line with a theme for the day. Some were even in work mode, going live on social media platforms to share updates on behalf of their organisations.

The intrinsically intricate nooks and crevices of the realities of living with mental health disorders can very well be deemed as being only ever harsher than those represented in media. Even the churning and voicing of these complexities via books or writing can only do so much to make people perceive mental health disorders for what they are. However, when push comes to shove, representations of psychological disorders in any form can mean a further step taken to bring awareness to them — and Bangladeshi projects seem to have touched upon two rather specific ways to represent them.

In all honesty, the filming of the hazed-up and sluggish diplopia, magnified mercilessly by the strong presence of hallucinatory colours resembling questionable club joints and sounds that first seep in vaguely until the individual under the influence, begins hearing properly — has become trite. The fact that an aware audience is easily able to predict the cueing in of an unnecessary drug-addled montage in a project that does not even necessitate such an addition has also become dulling — so much so that I instantly and almost mindlessly give way to a bout of onomatopoeia of disdain.