On a humid Friday afternoon in Korail, the narrow lanes around Ershad Maath were crowded as usual. At 3 pm, inside Machan Community Centre, Ronger Golpo: Stories in Colour opened with paintings covering the walls and visitors moving through the exhibition.

The works were made by artists from Korail, drawing largely on the places, people and experiences around them. For a few hours, the community became the subject of its own exhibition, seen through the eyes of those who live there.

Bordering the affluent neighbourhoods of Gulshan and Banani, Korail is Dhaka’s largest informal settlement, home to more than 100,000 low-income residents. Its dense network of lanes contains homes, grocery stalls, tea shops, food vendors and other small businesses that sustain everyday life.

At Ershad Maath, Machan operates as a community-run cultural and creative space, particularly for women and children. It provides a place for residents to gather, work on art and other creative projects, and share their experiences.

It was here that Ronger Golpo, presented by Dhaka Beat Magazine, Ghee Studio and Machan, brought artists from Korail together with German artist Tamara Nuttbohm, also known as AVE, for an exhibition rooted in the community and its everyday surroundings.

The exhibition did not treat Korail as a backdrop. Instead, it allowed the people who live there to become interpreters of their own surroundings.

The exhibition itself came together almost overnight for Tamara. A friend involved in organising the event noticed the empty walls at Machan and asked whether she would bring some of her paintings and help bring colour into the space.

“I used to teach art in Germany for some kids,” she told Daily Waadaa. “So she asked me if I would like to come on board, to bring some of my paintings, to bring some colour in and support her basically in the day-to-day.”

Tamara has lived in Bangladesh for around a decade and comes from a garment industry background. She has painted throughout her life, but working as a freelancer has given her more time to return to the practice. Her paintings are drawn to a contradiction she sees around her...the coexistence of disorder and beauty.

“For me, it’s a lot about the underlying chaos that is sometimes here, but there’s still beauty in it,” she said. “You see a lot of chaos, you see a lot of imperfection, but in the end, I really love Bangladesh and I always find beautiful parts in it as well.”

That tension runs through her work. Elements resembling scars and disruptions appear alongside attempts to find colour and beauty within them. Having exhibited in Germany, Ronger Golpo marked her first exhibition in Bangladesh and her first visit to Machan.

The children’s art camp held alongside the event particularly stayed with her. At first, she noticed the children looking for direction, unsure of what was expected of them. Gradually, they began to experiment on their own.

“At the beginning they were a little bit hesitant because it looked like they were searching for some guidance on how to do it,” she said. “But I felt that with time they loosened up a little bit.”

“They started becoming a bit more independent and trying out things, which I found very beautiful,” she added.

That movement from hesitation to independence also seemed to echo the larger idea behind the exhibition: broadening the space for art and culture beyond the institutions and communities where such activities are traditionally concentrated.

For Daniel Afzalur Rahman, the director of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and one of the organisers behind the event, this was central to the idea.

“I feel that cultural events have not flourished in the same way in the last 20 to 30 years in Bangladesh,” he said. “And it can be seen that it is for a certain segment of society, not for everyone. Art and culture should not be limited to the gatekeeper community.”

The event grew from an attempt to challenge that separation. Daniel approached friends and organisations including Dhaka Beat Magazine, creative studio Ghee and architecture firm Paraa, which was involved in creating Machan.

Rather than taking a cultural programme to an established venue, they chose to bring it into a community space in Korail.

“I decided to do it to break that barrier,” Daniel told Waadaa. “Why do you only perform from a certain segment in Bangladesh? A dance event, a music event. Why do you only represent a part of society?”

Although Daniel attended in his capacity as director of Shilpakala Academy, he emphasised that Ronger Golpo was not a Shilpakala Academy programme. Machan, he noted, has its own identity and purpose, an important distinction that is crucial to the people who run the centre.

Artist Halima Akhtar draws directly from life in Korail. Her work in the exhibition reflects some of the community’s everyday concerns, including the recurring threat of fires, loose electrical wires and unsafe conditions. One piece places these elements alongside the portrait of a local girl.

A self-taught artist, Halima paints in her spare time, often spending three or four days completing a single piece.

“The intention is not simply to bring culture into the community, but to make sure the community itself shapes what takes place there,” she said.

“In Machan’s events, the people from Korail are given priority; with their thoughts, concerns and stories forming an important part of the activities,” she added.

That philosophy is visible in Ronger Golpo. The artworks do not present Korail from a distant vantage point. They emerge from the everyday lives of people who know its streets, buildings and anxieties intimately.

Ahsan Habib, a first-year student at Dhaka Art College and a Machan volunteer, used his work to explore gender equality. One of his pieces depicts a figure whose body does not clearly identify the person as male or female, combining male and female faces with gender symbols to question the boundaries through which identity is often understood.

Then there is Hanufa, a class 10 student who turns her own surroundings into subjects. Through her paintings, she is attempting to capture scenes from Korail while imagining a future in which she can continue studying art and become an artist herself.

Fashion design is among the areas that interest her, Hanufa told Waadaa.

The work of the Korail artists also resonated with Tamara. She was particularly drawn to paintings depicting buildings and colourful houses, subjects that overlap with her own interest in the architecture and visual character of Bangladesh.

In that exchange, the exhibition became something larger than a collection of paintings.

There was the visiting artist looking at Bangladesh through years of familiarity and distance. There were young artists looking at Korail from within, transforming its buildings, dangers, people and questions into colour and form.

And there were children discovering, perhaps for the first time, that they did not need to wait for someone else to tell them what their art should look like.

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