a r t

tea
with
turner

In this series of works, nature, events of time and history are celebrated. This is meant to be an experiment in collaborating with rain as co-artist, especially the summer rain that poured to the ground of Vancouver, Canada when the artist first relocated to this new biome. This project also means to understand and explore the metaphor of rain as an entity in the current and ongoing explicit oppression of the Middle East by the wider West.

Muse one: Tea,

A social glue and value of many brown cultures, especially for Bangladeshis—connection to a nation that Sujon constantly questions through his hybrid self, in hopes of understanding his found yet lost identity. This time exploring through co-creating with nature: the sun, the rain, wind and temparature.

Muse two: J.M.W Turner

Just a Maker of Wigs. A play and a poem of love. A white man with oil skills. Creating the romance of weather and waves. Not only is he one of Sujon’s cherished artists, but this expereiment was a game of re-narrating the history of modern humans in the global age, and the suffering of the curse by mother earth due partly to the extraction of oil as material. Turner being the listener with romance.

At home

Process

sight

oil on wood.
10 in x 10 in

The nights of oil, morns of waves.
Days of coal

Hair from your father,
Tea from mine,

Welcome to my love letter

Ever since you died oil took over,
Your oil of gloom,
In gloom we paint mother earth
Skin of yours,
Staining linens with dripping blood,
blood of children, only few days old
The brown blood they wash off,
Tea it becomes,
Becomes art

Art of rain, the artist
The artist pours like American bombs on Gaza,
It floods with more blood, more tea it makes,
More brown bodies tanning,
like dried tea leaves under the northern sun

Oil at distance so we make tea
The tent gets even colder
So we kept mixing and stirring
Once you hear the smog, it’s ready
The tea is warm now, take a sip

Sip slow

It will be the last brown sip