From the legacy of 20th-century independence movements to recent uprisings, visual culture has always shaped South Asia’s political memory. Here are four contemporary Bangladeshi artists redefining resistance, identity, and diasporic imagination in the nation today, simultaneosly archiving the July 2024 Revolution and imagining its futures.
“The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.”Toni Cade Bambara
From the revolutionary woodcuts that circulated throughout Soviet Russia to the murals that romanticised liberation across Latin America in the 20th century, the visual arts have always been among the most honest documents of a society’s inner life. It registers what official record-keepers often refuse: grief, desire, the quotidian textures of survival, the particular quality of light before and after a rupture.
Bangladesh, too, is an example of this phenomenon. The language movement of 1952, culminating in the establishment of Ekushey February as a day of national mourning and pride, was as much a visual event as a political one: its iconography of blood on the streets and flowers at the Shaheed Minar entered the collective consciousness in ways no policy document could. The Liberation War of 1971 produced its own visual inheritance: the propaganda posters, the mass grave photographs, the sketches made in exile. More recently, the July 2024 uprising reminded the world once again that in moments of collective defiance, an image circulating on a phone screen can serve as both a barricade and a banner.
The four visual artists featured here are inheritors of this tradition, and, in their own ways, its restless interrogators. Working across illustration, collage, printmaking, and digital media, they move between Dhaka, Toronto, Michigan, and an entire nation’s collective cultural memory, treating the visual field as a site of both resistance and tenderness. They are not making art about Bangladesh so much as making art from the conditions Bangladesh has shaped in them: Dhaka’s beautiful chaos, the weight of political formation, the longing that diasporic distance manufactures, and the stubborn, ongoing project of imagining otherwise.
These are four Bangladeshi artists you should be following right now:
Istela is a Dhaka-based graphic designer and illustrator who began designing layouts for her school newspaper before graduating from the Visual Arts Programme at Assumption University in Thailand. She joined the Dhaka Tribune as a graphic designer in 2012 and has since worked across cafés and independent brands. Drawing from her experience as a woman navigating the city, societal norms, and matters of the heart, she seeks out beauty and humour in Dhaka’s chaos. Her digital illustrations are direct and playful, while her mixed media collage practice — built from paint, pencil, found paper, and xerox transfers — navigates memory, distance, and longing. She also uses Bangla typography in contemporary and experimental ways. Follow @istelaillustrated on Instagram.
Debashish Chakrabarty is a Bangladeshi visual artist and author currently based in Michigan, USA, whose work intersects art, science, and social inquiry. A graduate of Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, his visual arts practice examines power structures, state mechanisms, and civil imagination through optical, photographic, and drawing techniques. Nominated for the British Journal of Photography’s 'Ones to Watch', Debashish is known for an expansive definition of photography, constantly testing the medium’s limits. During Bangladesh’s July 2024 uprising, his politically charged posters went viral across social media and became a defining visual language of the resistance movement. His work has been shown at the Delhi Photo Festival, Chobi Mela, and venues across Berlin, New York, and Cambridge. Follow @debashish.chakrabarty on Instagram.
Farah Khandaker is a digital artist based in Toronto with a passion for bold colours, surrealism, and nostalgia. Originally from Bangladesh, she moved to Toronto and completed a degree in Advertising and Art Direction, followed by an internship in marketing and creative production. Her practice spans illustration, surface pattern design, typography, and art direction, with project credits including children’s books, editorials, and character design. Follow @fkhart on Instagram.
Lamees Rahman is a Bangladeshi artist working at the intersection of printmaking and digital media. Drawing on diverse source materials — such as news articles, emails, photographs, and fragments of text — she abstracts information through cycles of visual and digital translation, reducing political manifestos, patterns, and data into dots, lines, and layered assemblages that render their origins illegible. Her large-scale prints, projections, and moving images bring disparate elements of the sociocultural and digital world into a shared landscape, where anything can become anything. In resisting information overload and the hierarchies that make it polarising, Rahman positions her practice as an act of neutralisation, offering alternate realities to be experienced rather than decoded. Follow @lamees.art on Instagram.
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