OMAR CHOWDHURY

Omar Chowdhury is an artist and filmmaker working across film, installation, performance, sound, writing and parafiction. Based between Brussels and Dhaka, his works assemble historical research, contested testimony, architecture, images and institutional procedures into situations that do not simply represent systems of power but make them perform. Documents become unreliable, authority shifts between participants, and the artist’s own role remains visible: filmmaker, witness, organiser, interloper and implicated author. His moving-image works often begin with a disputed encounter or inherited history. BAN♡ITS turns a collaboration with men living around Bangladesh’s eastern borderlands—and their self-mythology, political claims and theatricality—back onto the art system that arrives to film them. Janus Tussle reconstructs the aftermath of a failed antiquities exhibition between Dhaka and Paris through two visually and aurally concealed, conflicting sources. Earlier works include Augustijn, a portrait and negotiation with a young Flemish convert to Islam; Memoirs of Saturn, part of the suppressed Age of Saturn exhibition; and the durational spiritual and landscape works gathered in Ways and Means. Chowdhury’s work has been presented at Busan Biennale, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, Beursschouwburg, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, De Appel, the Rijksakademie, Netwerk Aalst, Dhaka Art Summit and 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art. BAN♡ITS received the New Cinema Award at Berwick in 2025. He was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in 2018–19 and a laureate of the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in 2016–17.