Words in the wind is Bangladeshi artist Najmun Nahar Keya’s (b. 1980) third and highly anticipated solo exhibition at Aicon Contemporary. The exhibition brings together new works across drawing, installation, and mixed media that reflect Keya’s continued exploration of memory, language, and the transience of lived experience.
At once poetic and deeply grounded in material practice, Keya’s work navigates the delicate spaces between what is remembered and what slips away—what is spoken and what is left unsaid. Her artistic language is shaped by a sensitivity to the ephemeral: paper, thread, found materials, and mark-making become vessels for holding the weight of personal and collective histories. The works in Words in the Wind evoke a tension between presence and absence, resilience and fragility, forming an emotional cartography that resists definitive meaning.
Keya’s practice is anchored in a commitment to slow observation and the subtle power of repetition. Through layered textures and quiet gestures, she creates immersive environments that ask viewers to pause, to look closely, and to consider the spaces between. Her installations suggest moments suspended in time—echoes of conversations, memories half-formed, stories passed down and reimagined. In doing so, she opens a space where absence becomes not emptiness, but potential: a site for reflection, reverence, and renewal.
The exhibition’s title, Words in the wind, speaks to the artist’s interest in how language—like memory—is often fleeting, fragile, and contingent. In Keya’s hands, words become metaphor, scattered across surfaces and suspended in silence. Yet within that scattering lies a profound emotional resonance, a recognition of how we carry and lose meaning in equal measure.
With Words in the wind, Keya offers a powerful meditation on impermanence and presence, marking another significant chapter in her evolving artistic journey.