I Have Been Here Before

‘I have been here before’ is a multi-layer book project exploring my memories of Bangladesh through family portraits with landscapes, places, objects, poetry and texts. The individual and collective memories and displacement are weaved together. This is also the perception of separation and connection. 

I am looking back on my memories. Memories that stay with me in my dreams and consciousness, and those that almost fade. Sometimes, a memory is a lifetime through objects. Memory of the texture and of the ink. Memory of a letter from home… and… the feeling that I am home. Sometimes it is just the memory of the melancholy of the landscape and the mood. The fog blanket that envelopes from all corners and hangs over with enormous grey skies. 

I look for and try to reconstruct the eternal passage of time that belonged to me, a sense of the invisible bond connecting my past and my future.

It is the culmination of years of gathering, digesting, and distilling experience spanning across the globe from Bangladesh to the USA, and fleeting moments of connection with persons, places, objects and my Inner voice.

Light suffuses the images, illuminating the mundane. The overlapping light and color portraying the time and place lost. Life unfolds and new memories are made. 

The places I lived in, the homes I left behind. 

This is how I keep places within once I move. 

This is an ode to the unbearable weight of both absence and presence.