Artist Talk: Dipa-Mahbuba-Yasmin When Speech is Forced Down, Art Must speak

Dipa-Mahbuba-Yasmin

Dipa’s work is an insistent act of presence—queer presence—within the painted pulse of Bangladesh. In an ongoing collaboration with Bangladeshi folk painters, Dipa enters the world of rickshaw, truck, and cinema banner painting—not as an intruder, but as a conspirator. It begins with sketches or digital compositions—sometimes carefully proportioned, sometimes deliberately askew—and passed  on to the hands of folk masters whose disregard for academic rules reshapes them into something alive, imperfect, and undeniably ours.

This is shared authorship: Dipa’s vision dissolving into theirs, theirs into Dipa’s, until no single hand can claim the whole. It is storytelling carried on wheels, walls, and wind—rooted in a heritage that has long celebrated the heroic man, the heterosexual couple, the nationalist epic, the mythical grandeur wrapped in lavish floral borders.

But heritage, too, can be haunted by its absences. UNESCO may have honored these moving galleries for their craftsmanship, yet in their history, queer bodies and queer love have been erased. Dipa’s work insists on their return. Non-binary figures, trans embodiments, queer lovers, gender-fluid divinities, and the intimacies of queer resilience are placed into a tradition that once denied them.

This is not mere substitution—it is a queer and decolonial reclamation. Dipa claims the “imperfection” of disproportion as a site of freedom; and claims distortion as a mirror that reflects us truer than symmetry ever could. In the hands of painters unshackled from Western ideals, queer bodies find their rightful place—radiant, uncontained, unapologetic.

Folk art is not a museum relic. It is a breathing, evolving language. And in this language, Dipa chooses to write us back in—so that the roads of Bangladesh may carry not just goods and passengers, but our stories, our joy, and our unerasable beauty.