Bow Arts speaks with Laisul Hoque, reflecting on his East London Art Prize winning installation ‘An Ode to All the Flavours‘, his making process and his upcoming solo show at the Nunnery Gallery in 2026.
Can you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your practice?
I’m Laisul Hoque. I was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh and now I live and work in London. I have a practice that explores autotheory through an interdisciplinary approach.
Your installation, ‘An Ode to All the Flavours, featured in the East London Art Prize shortlist exhibition from January to April this year. What did you discover from having the installation in the Nunnery Gallery over that time?
I had shown this work before it was shortlisted for the ELAP shortlist exhibition, but it was often met with a sense of reluctance from art institutions when it came to logistics and maintenance.
This was the longest period the work has ever been hosted, and I think it was important for me to witness that. It was important to show that it was possible.
There are large Bangladeshi migrant communities in all major cities across the Global North and the Gulf region, despite the jurisdiction Bangladeshis face in terms of global mobility.
Laisul Hoque, ‘An Ode to All the Flavours’. Image credit: Fatima Yasmin
These communities carry stories of sheer resilience and perseverance, and they all come with Bengali sweet shops. People buy sweets in the forerun of festivals, in remembrance of joyful moments, or simply to satisfy a craving. They all host the elements to make my father’s favourite childhood snack, but that combination, most likely they have never tried themselves. It usually ends up being a good conversation starter when I share my story of discovery of the snack with them and when they try it as well.
Oitij-jo is an east London–based arts organisation that supports Bengali and British-Bengali artists and cultural workers. It’s the only organisation that made me believe in what I do, gave me a sense of community, and supported me in pursuing a career in the arts when I came to London.
Oitij-jo Kitchen is a food and catering social enterprise based in east London, working with local Bengali women to help them achieve financial independence and autonomy from entrenched patriarchal systems, drawing on their existing skills of cooking in domestic environments. Artists and facilitators involved with Oitij-jo have led various workshops and training sessions to foster a sense of infrastructural care within the community around the kitchen.
I’m not a very skillful person, but I wanted to give back to the community that continues to help me. When the work was selected to be installed at Nunnery Gallery for three months, the gallery became a paid retainer client for the duration of the exhibition, commissioning Oitij-jo Kitchen to prepare fresh food for the work daily.
The work through which I wanted to start a conversation around hegemonic masculinity, and the effects of the existing patriarchal system, through the process of exhibiting, ended up supporting women working to seek financial freedom and autonomy from entrenched patriarchal systems.
Installation view of An Ode to All the Flavours at Nunnery Gallery. Image Credit: Rob Harris.
Can you talk about a process that’s essential to your art practice?
Having the time, capacity, and space to long, yearn and daydream.
What are you working on now?
I’m caring for my father, who is battling cancer. I’ve learnt to drive, and I’ve been driving him to the hospital every day. I sit with him in waiting rooms, keeping him company as we wait to be called. I stay with him in the hospital daycare while he receives his chemotherapy. I’m working on being a helpful son, a useful one. But my mind often wonders, and I end up daydreaming of a world elsewhere.
Images from Laisul Hoque’s phone photo library while waiting.
Finally, congratulations on your upcoming exhibition! Can you tell us more about it?
Thank you!
When I first moved to London, I found myself in a position where I had very little context or lived experience to respond to my surrounding environment. Thus I ended up relying heavily on memory, on how I used to remember things, to make my work, sometimes manifesting those memories in real life. I suppose that, too, is a form of archive: the memories that sit in our minds but have no physical footing.
Screening view of The Purpose Was to Document the Other Side at London’s Piccadilly Circus as part of CIRCA Prize 2024, Image: Ayushi Channawar.
Now that I am back in Dhaka, caring for my father, I find myself sifting through my family archive. I notice that it begins with a few sparse photographs of my grandparents, followed by many of my father in his early adult life, then many of my mother in hers, and then photographs of their marriage. At some point, my brother and I enter the frame. But suddenly, in the early 2000s, the photographs stop altogether. From then on, what remains are x-ray scans, CT scans, MRIs, doctor’s reports, countless reports, all tucked away in the same trunk.
A part of me knows why this happened. The logical part of me recognizes that, at some point, people shifted from analogue photography to digital, drawn by the promise of convenience and immediacy. The practice of finishing a roll of film, developing, scanning, printing, and having to store images in photo albums went out of fashion making way for digital cameras designed with planned obsolescence. The photographs remained on memory cards, corrupted hard drives, or computers that no longer work. Most of the photos we take now live on our phones, in various cloud storages, or in the phone’s memory itself. As I sift through these images, I wonder if I would be comfortable leaving my personal phone library open to the next of kin. What, then, becomes of the familial archive? Alongside that, medical scans are also images, images of the inside of us. They evoke a sense of intimacy, something different from what photographs evoke in us.
Perhaps the language of memory is changing. Perhaps it has always changed across generations. Before photographs, there was the habit of exchanging long, descriptive letters, which lived on as the language of memory of that time. Later, voice recorders and cassette tapes appeared, and suddenly voice and sound became the language of memory. Then came photographs, and they still exist, though often in forms now inaccessible to me. From text, to sound, to images, to something beyond images, perhaps the language of memory in the contemporary moment is shifting again. It is shifting into something I may not fully understand.
As I look through my family’s photographs, I also notice how the settings and contexts of these images are shaped by national and international events, by the local and global politics of their time. I’m trying to understand my father and the world that shaped him. And in turn the world that shaped me as well.
Images from Laisul Hoque’s family archive.
About Laisul Hoque
Laisul Hoque is a London-based artist whose practice explores autotheory through an interdisciplinary approach. Drawing from memory and lived experience, he reflects on microhistories and their connections to larger global narratives.
Instagram: laisulhoque
Website: Laisul Hoque