Ohida Khandakar

Ohida Khandakar is a contemporary artist whose work navigates the complexities of cultural identity, socio-political hierarchies and the constructs of everyday life in rural Bengal. Born into a lower-middle-class Muslim family, she studies the interplay of intersecting identities through a lens shaped by personal experience and informed by historical context. Dream Your Museum (2022) interrogates notions of capital and class privilege and challenges surviving colonial frameworks that continue to exclude marginalised voices from archival spaces. Inspired by her uncle’s compulsive hoarding, Ohida creates a condensed reflection of his eclectic collection and provokes important questions as to what signifies a ‘museum worthy’ artefact. The dialogue ignited by Dream Your Museum reveals the struggles of society riddled with sectarian violence and cultural divergence. Ohida employs elements of miniature painting, Islamic architecture and Arabic calligraphy in her work, a nod to her own identity as a Muslim woman combined with broader commentary on gender and society. She continues to critically and creatively examine modernism within South Asian traditions and urges viewers to reconsider the meanings attached to everyday objects and experiences 

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