Najmun Nahar Keya | Words in the Wind - - Exhibitions

Untitled, 2025

Photography print on archival paper, gold leaf

32"x40"

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.

Symphony of Words, 2024

Tangail Sari, cotton, thread, steel frame

60"x60"

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, 2019-20

Tangail Sari, cotton, thread

Najmun Nahar Keya received her BFA and MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Dhaka and also 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 also participated in several artist residency programs. In 2006 and 2007, Keya received a fellowship from the Aminul Islam Trust. In 2010, she won the Grand award in Young painters exhibition, organized by Berger paints Bangladesh limited. In 2018 she won the Charles Wallace Fellowship in the UK and received an Honorable mention award 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 has been an artist fellow at Harvard University’s Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute.

The artist lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh.