Democrazy: Line to Nowhere!

‘Democrazy: Line to Nowhere!’ is the recent work from my ongoing drawing series ‘Demo-crazy’, which emerged from restless political situations, strategy, and its culminations all over the map. These conflicts have strong symbolic influence on the rationally-constructed lives around us. Although we look safe within the walls of our homes, wars and struggles and upheavals continue to reach us through newspapers, television, and the Internet.

This body of work represents political structures, imbalances, system-loss, war and its legacy, how it permeates all aspects of contemporary society and life. I create drawings and images that reference the ongoing duality of life and politics without precluding hope. In brief, I create drawings that portray metaphoric symbols and happenings of our time and social structures. The word: ‘Democrazy’ is a representation of capitalist political craziness and its consequences. The material I have used to develop this series include acrylic, pen, and ink on archival paper.

Jewel A Rob is a practicing visual artist and independent curator who lives in Dhaka. Jewel completed his MFA on drawing and painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dhaka university. After completing his Masters, he began experimenting in the multi-disciplinary medium. Some of these projects occasionally consist of multiple works in a range of different media, and group around specific themes and meanings.

Jewel began depicting personal experiences ranging from socio-economic issues to political crisis, food politics, genocide and social movements through the lens of magic realism. Stories of small things inspire him, it teaches him to look for an object’s inner meaning; at this phase of his work, his research-based projects relate mostly to urban crisis, local and native mythologies. More recently, Jewel has begun working on South Asian history and legacies, his last few projects explored war and its after effects, massacres, genocide, and human rights.