Attachments from Time: Lens and Gender in Tayeba Begum Lipi’s Practice

For Dhaka-based artist, Tayeba Begum Lipi, the various mediums she uses in her expansive practice have been a translation of her lived experiences. Known for her sculptural works with materials such as steel razor blades and safety pins; Lipi’s practice—which includes paintings, prints, video and photography—delves into the depths of family, womanhood and personal histories. By recollecting the shape of everyday objects and dreams, the artist builds a narrative of time spanning incidents from her childhood—such as growing up in a joint family, the available education systems as well as the expectations society places on young girls. While the artist’s works in an autobiographical mode and performs with her own body, the intention is to highlight the position of women by opting to look at societal role play through a gendered lens.

In this interview, Lipi reflects on her early experiments with the lens and the making of Little Learner (2008), one of her first video works. Through this, the artist explores the pressures imposed on a girl child to learn religious texts in various languages, in order to meet the constructed needs for acceptance by society. Lipi also delves into her own histories by retracing the occupation and use of spaces through memories in No One Home (2015), a two-channel video made in her family house. She further confronts the difficulty of accepting one’s body as it changes with age—especially for a woman—in her most recent comparative video and photography work, This is What I Look(ed) Like (2019). In navigating privacy, womanhood and the performance of the body through her practice, family and shared spaces root the artist to her memories—as they are remembered, documented and carried forward as residues into the future.

^{(Featured Image: This is What I Look(ed) Like. Tayeba Begum Lipi. Dhaka, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.)}

Interview taken on 09 August 2021

All images featured in the video are works by Tayeba Begum Lipi. Dhaka, 2008–2019. Images courtesy of the artist.