Exploring Urban Duality: Dhaka Meets New York
In this mixed-media work, I bring together and juxtapose two worlds: New York and Dhaka. The woman on the right is removed from her original street environment and placed within the urban space shared with the other woman in New York. Painted graphic interventions act as a visual thread, binding the separate photographic sources into a single, unified image.
I use the blurred New York backdrop to evoke the experience of modern urban life: its speed, crowds and transience, and the difficulty of capturing any single moment with certainty.
The work collapses geographical distance. Although the two women are separated by thousands of miles and distinct cultural contexts, they inhabit the same urban space within the finished image. This creates a form of visual globalisation, in which New York’s commercial spectacle and Dhaka’s street economy become part of a shared visual experience.
The work invites us to consider what distinguishes one place from another, and what connects them: movement, labour, commerce, crowds, advertising, transportation and the fleeting encounters between strangers. The resulting image suggests an almost dreamlike vision of the city, in which different places and moments in time coexist.
Through this process, I seek to transform documentary material into a meditation on movement, labour, urban life and the connections between seemingly distant cultures. Rather than treating photographic realism as sacrosanct, I use it as a point of departure, allowing the creative process to reshape, reinterpret and ultimately transcend the original sources.
