Untangling the knotted threads of history, auto-critique, and narrativity which he and his family lived through in the cities and villages of Bengal, East Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Europe, Zaman and his collaborators propose a new addition to their Saturn series: Echo, Saturn (I). Using the idioms of post-conceptual art and set in a porous site of exposed exterior spaces and the shadows of dim interiors, the historian recasts a letter he wrote to his future wife, Mita, during a sleepless night in an old hotel in Rajshahi in 1980. This reframing spreads over multiple levels, rooms, hallways, and exhibitory infrastructures. Working through the motif of the near-double, of repetition producing difference, he unfurls a haunted pattern for both sensing and recall which draws the receiver into a field filled with unstable epistemic forms.

Dr. Shahidul Zaman is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of General Education at the University of Liberal Arts in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He completed his PhD in  history at the University of Rochester in 1986, exploring the interplay of the  spiritual and the administrative in the relations of power and identity between the elites and their charges in Eastern India, between 1918 and 1950. He has published widely in journals throughout Europe and the United States, including the Journal of Asian Studies, History and Theory, and the New Left Review. He was born in Rajshahi, in then East Pakistan, in 1959, and lives and works between Dhaka, Bangladesh, and Amsterdam, the Netherlands.