Moon Rahman is a freelance artist from Bangladesh who paints her thoughts and inner fears onto canvas. She was unaware of her artistic talents until 2004 when she began experimenting with leftover paints while her husband was away. Her works depict biomorphic forms and everyday objects composed in a way that evokes hidden violence and fear. Living in Dhaka exposed her to many unknown faces and facts that may have influenced her disturbing aesthetic. Though largely self-taught, her pieces possess a quality that engages contemporary viewers in a spiritual dialogue about humanity's unsettling fears within the universe.

1. Veiled violence in dwelled periphery
by Kehkasha Sabah, Freelance Artist and Curator
All art is representational -in that sense it represents real things and real events, some of which exist in
the physical dimension, while others exist in the dimension of thought. Artist Moon Rahman likely to
represent her dimension of thoughts, as we know from her own affirmation -"I paint the way to have in
order to give my thoughts a life itself. This playing with thoughts surprises and completes me.” And her
contemplation of creating such poetic works, surprises us as well.
As far from investigation, she was born in Dawlatpur, Feni at 1975, completed her HSC from there, got
married in 90s and moved to Dhaka with her artist husband around 2000, meanwhile she became a
mother of two children. She starts to living in Dhaka as a traditional Muslim housewife, while she was
totally unaware of the excitement of creating artworks. She knew she likes to paint but never got
courageous enough to take that seriously. Initially in 2004, she took this challenge as a secret mission
when her husband went to Italy and she started to draw with the leftover printing colors of her
husband's studio. But gradually from 2008 her hobby became a passion for making images. It is
assumable that, coherently all these years she had immersed her husband's few techniques, which
contented her works profoundly. At 2013 she started to show her works through social media. From
there she had chosen to participate in our previous curatorial exhibition 'Celebrated Violence 1' at 2014
and 2015 she participated in Kibria Print Fair. Other than these she don't have any participation in art
exhibitions and she hardly informed about professional art scenario. But remarkably her works doesn't
show any touch of unprofessionalism, naivety or any gender prejudices. Rather the quality of her works
well sufficient to our contemporary taste and the elements she chooses have a social discursive
excellence.

2. In her most of the early original works, I can feel a process of autonomy like abstract expressionism,
where she spreads various color with plenty of water in canvas/paper surface to evolve with each other.
Again this is not a proper autonomy as she seems very well controlled to create some identical watery
blotting biomorphic forms out of this process and with a mastery she draw simple few dots or small line
over them and those forms became known to us- likely to a vaporous face of human or animal, fish,
birds or insects. Possibly this predominance use of a biomorphic forms reflects her inner paranoiac
imagery of something uncanny or rotted within.
Her recent works grasp with technique of Etching and Aquatint amid some heavily blotted color and
materials. Here I can also see her dexterity with extreme contrasted images using bold white with
balanced blackish colors. In here she also uses her biomorphic forms with some identifiable objects, like-
kitchen tools, domestic elements, boat, rikshaw, birds, trees and lots of portraits, with a playful
abstraction. As if she focus on the visible content of everyday to create her visual journals and assemble
these objects with her thoughtful psychological dialogue and turn them into a two-dimensional
abstraction or non-objectivity.
" Non-objective art creates alongside the real world a new world which has nothing to do externally with
reality. It is subordinate internally to cosmic laws"- these words from Kandinsky helps me to understand
why exactly Moon's images has nothing to do with the apparent reality, rather she places those simple
everyday objects in a special compositional way where they are capable to evoke shivering violence in
our senses. When she was asked about these formal arrangements, she replied, "I investigate the
relationship of our hidden fear to nature, environment, community, family and self."
Now what's her hidden fear? May be living in a mega city like Dhaka creates some uncomfortable
situation for her as she has to experience lots of unknown faces and unpleasant facts every day. And
also as a housewife, her most of the time passes roaming around in domestic periphery with
newspaper and television. Perhaps these sources informed her about the violence around us, which has
shifted her whole thinking topography and aesthetical taste that way. I don't know what might be the
right answer but what I know from her images, with those bold lines and dynamic composition have the
ability to turn her objects in a veiled horrific subjectivity. As if her intention in life and art making is to
enter into a spiritual, psychological dialogue with the natural world, through which the unify fear of
human body, mind, and soul is revealed as a process of our unnerving universe.