2 Channel Sound | Fabric | Plant Pigments | 17 min
Reaching Out, Binding Together,
a group show at the Center for Performance & Research,
as part of Culture Push’s Fellowship for Utopian Practice
June 2023

In 2022, a collaborating artist and I were awarded Culture Push’s Fellowship for Utopian Practice. Our project, A Bāgān in Brooklyn, is an expanded documentary project exploring the inventive gardening practices of Bangladeshi immigrants in NYC.

Every year, hundreds of Bangladeshi homes in neighborhoods like Sunset Park and Kensington in Brooklyn, and Jamaica and Jackson Heights in Queens become lush vegetable gardens full of homegrown, nutritious produce. These urban gardens are a unique part of New York’s landscape, representing knowledge networks that survive cross-continental diasporic migration.

We presented the first iteration of this project at the Center for Performance and Research. The installation featured handmade speakers featuring direct plant imprints of produce commonly grown by the community such as data shak, kalmi shak, pui shak, genda, tulsi, and more. The installation features an excerpt from our growing oral history archive – a 25 year old New Yorker reflects on growing up around his family’s vegetable garden in their home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

If you’d like to listen to the entire audio piece, you can listen in below.