Disappearing into Coloured Patterns: Habiba Nowrose’s Life of Venus

Bangladeshi photographer Habiba Nowrose started developing the series Concealed in 2013. She writes on her website:

“As women, we are often compelled to portray our 'beautiful' selves. In that path to avail beauty we are made to strip off our individuality, stories and traumas. Eventually, we lose ourselves and be one with that fabricated image. We become anonymous even to ourselves and our identities remain concealed.”

The series is a collection of portraits—possibly self-portraits—of the subject(s) whose identities have been concealed with the use of bright, loudly patterned fabrics that cover their faces. These portraits are shot against equally bold and chaotic backgrounds, which lead to an effect of camouflage.

Her second, and larger suite of works, Life of Venus was recently exhibited at the Art Heritage Gallery in New Delhi as a part of a group show titled Mixed Media Musings. Nowrose’s work sits alongside artists who—according to the curatorial note of the exhibition—in their choice of experiential, tactile and resistant mediums, “...create a sense of dissonance and capture the harsh, contradictory realities of daily life.” In this series, Nowrose continues her explorations with portraiture and the use of loud, colourful fabric. Life of Venus extends beyond her personal experience and attempts to create a female ideal persona—in this case, Venus, the goddess of love, beauty, desire, sex, fertility and prosperity—as a protagonist that her audiences can associate with.

At first glance, it is indeed hard to make out the human form within the frame of the image. Every conceivable form of identification is masked—hands in gloves, head wrapped in a scarf, and like her earlier work, face cloaked in a vibrant fabric. Other characters—like the husband, the mother, etc., familiar personas created by Nowrose—help turn the images into everyday scenes of domestic life. In this manner, by moving from single subject images (in her earlier series) to multi-character tableaus, Nowrose extends the narrative of a continued obscuration of the female identity within society, a life stripped of individuality and personhood.

The fabrics that form the aesthetic of Nowrose’s work are a cheap, easily available cotton fabric from Bangladesh called chitkato which she bought from popular local markets. She chose this as a representation of the common woman. Nowrose mentions that while the choice of fabric may have initially been led by an attempt to depict the lower middle-class, it has since evolved in ways that blur these boundaries of class. No longer restricting herself to the fabrics found in these markets, she combined them with materials from her own wardrobe. Nowrose realised that the amalgamation of the different kinds of aesthetics hinted at this blurring of class representation.

Nowrose’s rather complex and elaborate seeming images are almost entirely shot on set with a modest setup. This includes two studio lights placed to achieve the flat lighting that makes background and foreground further indistinguishable. Yet, the heightened visual effect of the images draws the viewer into a fantastical realm that is dreamlike in its colours and objects—painted fruits, gaudily coloured surfaces, shiny bouquets of flowers. This dreamlike vision is simultaneously also frightening because of the faceless forms that we encounter, that disappear into their surroundings.

Despite her use of context-specific details (such as that of the chitkato), the universality of Nowrose’s work comes from the primary feeling of discomfort experienced at the invisibility of the female—who the viewer nearly misses within the image. The burst of colour and the seeming vibrance of the images creates a dissonance with the lived realities of several women across the world. Ultimately, Nowrose’s work offers an accessible yet threateningly grim depiction of reality through superficially bright tableaus.

All works by Habiba Nowrose.