Artudio International Artist Residency | March 2026
Artudio International Artists Residency is pleased to announce Shamim Ahmed Chowdhury and Lamia Azad as resident artists for March 2026. Working as an artist duo from Bangladesh, their residency will focus on collaborative, research-led, and philosophically grounded artistic inquiry.
About the Artists
Lamia Azad is a Bangladeshi visual artist whose practice engages deeply with urban topography, traditional folk culture, and indigenous art forms. Trained in Fine Arts at the University of Development Alternative, with an academic grounding in printmaking and painting, her practice has evolved through sustained studio exploration and exhibition-based engagement.
Working primarily through printmaking and painting, Lamia constructs layered visual narratives that resemble fragmented cartographies. Urban grids dissolve into organic patterns, architectural structures merge with folk ornamentation, and traditional motifs surface like buried traces. Her materially dense surfaces—shaped through texture, repetition, and hand-worked processes—evoke ideas of excavation, erosion, and memory. Earth-toned palettes referencing soil, brick dust, riverbanks, and weathered walls form a recurring visual language through which she reflects on displacement, fluidity, and landscape as an archive of lived experience. Her work has been exhibited widely in Bangladesh and internationally.
Shamim Ahmed Chowdhury is a visual storyteller whose multidisciplinary practice explores cultural heritage, nature, and human experience. Working across drawing, painting, paper craft, illustration, and text, his work investigates the fragile intersections between tradition and modernity while bringing attention to overlooked narratives and symbolic forms.
Central to Chowdhury’s practice is the idea of the natural world as a living archive—an embodied carrier of collective memory and cultural wisdom. Through reinterpreting inherited symbols within contemporary visual languages, he reflects on themes of identity, loss, environmental displacement, and historical erasure. His works foster a quiet yet critical dialogue between the visible and the invisible, the remembered and the forgotten, offering contemplative spaces for reflection, connection, and renewal.
Residency Focus
During their residency at Artudio, Shamim Ahmed Chowdhury and Lamia Azad will work collaboratively, bringing together their distinct yet complementary practices into a shared, storytelling-based and philosophical inquiry. Their collaboration will explore how memory, landscape, cultural symbols, and material processes can function as narrative devices—bridging personal experience with collective histories.
The residency will emphasize research, experimentation, and exchange, situating their practice within the local context while remaining attentive to broader regional and global dialogues around culture, displacement, and identity.