Hazy memories of going to the beach with Dad, conjured up by grainy video clips. You may have been there recently, and you may have realised that the personal is political, but with disconnects. This is a theme explored in a new exhibition by artist Laisul Hoque.
Hoque entered the spotlight when he won the 2025 East London Art Prize in for An Ode to All the Flavours (2024), an evocative recreation of a Bangladeshi sweet shop he had visited as a child.
His solo installation-based show, The Ground Beneath Me at the Nunnery Gallery, features works that capture a turbulent moment in which individual and national histories intertwined. Over the last year, Hoque spent much of his time in Bangladesh due to his father’s ill health. It was also a momentous period for the country, emerging from the throes of the 2024 revolution which toppled a long-standing dictator.
In Everything I Lived With, the items from Hoque’s sparse bedroom in London are assembled as he remembered them during his absences. Hanging over the bed is a cardboard lampshade in the shape of the debating chamber of the Bangladeshi parliament building. On the surrounding walls are facsimiles of travel tickets to and from Dhaka, their dry bureaucratic language of name, time and destination superimposed over vibrant images recreating the feelings evoked during passages between the two cities.
In an adjacent room a 27-minute excerpt from Hoque’s new film – Legacy of a Heart’s Injury – plays. It weaves in the story of the artist's Bangladeshi-origin friend whose father was killed in 2009 in an episode of political violence, the details of which have only come to light since the recent regime change. Home videos are interspliced with personal narratives to relay two different experiences of loss – one heavily politicised and one largely apolitical.
A lyrical reflection on time and place, Hoque’s work will speak to all for whom fathers and fatherlands are at once left behind and constantly present.
The Ground Beneath Me: Laisul Hoque. Until 12 April. Nunnery Gallery, 181 Bow Road, E3 2SL. Bowarts.org
