Najmun Nahar Keya | Words in the Wind - - Exhibitions

Untitled, 2025

Photography print on archival paper, gold leaf

32h x 40w in

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.

Poetic and deeply rooted in materiality, 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 the ephemeral: paper, thread, found materials, and mark-making hold 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.

Symphony of Words, 2024

Tangail Sari, cotton, thread, steel frame

60h x 60w in

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.

Spell Song (detail), 2019-2020

Tangail sari, cotton, thread

Dimensions variable

Najmun Nahar Keya received her BFA and MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Dhaka, as well as an MFA in Drawing and Painting from Tokyo University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, France and other countries. She has participated in several artist residency programs. In 2006 and 2007, Keya received a fellowship from the Aminul Islam Trust. In 2018, she won the Charles Wallace Fellowship in the UK and received an honorable mention at the 18th Asian Art Biennale. Keya was formally a member of the Britto Arts Trust, the first non-profit artist run organization in Bangladesh since 2008. She was previously an artist fellow at Harvard University’s Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.

The artist lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh.