Dhaka Night
By Shebonti Khandaker
On view at the Trinity Square Video vitrine (main hallway, 401 Richmond St W, Toronto)
October 18 – November 18
Silent installation — full sound version accessible via QR code on site.
The City After Dark
Dhaka Night is a tactile, filmic meditation on the pulse of the city after dark — a choreography of light, movement, and memory. Shot on Super 8, the work unfolds in grain and glow: night markets shimmer with fruit and fish, neon signs bleed into shadows, and the air hums with motion.
Through the flicker of analog film, Dhaka Night transforms the mundane into the mythic. Each frame blurs gestures and breathes texture, evoking a dreamlike temporality where the familiar becomes spectral. The work sits between documentary and reverie — an index of urban intimacy rendered through a soft haze of nostalgia and noise.
A Layered Portrait of Place
Presented in the vitrine at Trinity Square Video, the piece invites close looking. Its compressed scale mirrors the density of Dhaka itself — a city in constant flux. Buildings rise and fall, people dart through riverine streets, and spaces seem to shift and rearrange overnight.
Within this rhythm, Dhaka Night explores the uncanny textures of the urban night: trees strung with wedding lights, markets laden with fish and fruit, streets thrumming with motion and breath. The work’s silence in the vitrine space heightens its tactility — inviting viewers to experience the full soundscape through a QR code, layering sound, memory, and place across physical and digital space.
About the Artist
Shebonti Khandaker is a Bangladeshi writer, photographer, and filmmaker. Her practice is deeply informed by her upbringing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and her academic background in Cognitive Science, History, and Material Cultures & Semiotics from the University of Toronto.
Her art explores embodiment, cultural inheritance, and femininity, shaped by an ongoing inquiry into the intersections of technology, identity, and the visual image. Through portraiture and street photography, she challenges conventional relationships between subject and viewer, questioning societal ideals of gender while imbuing her images with tenderness, intimacy, and complexity.
Trinity Square Video Vitrine — Main hallway, 401 Richmond St W, Toronto
October 18 – November 18
Silent installation — Full sound version available via QR code on site.
Shebonti Khandaker is a Bangladeshi writer, photographer, and filmmaker with an undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science, History, and Material Cultures & Semiotics from the University of Toronto. Her art is informed by her upbringing in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and explores themes of embodiment, cultural inheritance, and femininity. It is equally shaped by her academic pursuits at the intersections of technology, identity, and the visual image. Through her portrait and street photography, Shebonti seeks to challenge conventional subject–viewer relationships, question societal ideals of gender, and imbue her images with tenderness and intimacy.
Founded in 1971, it is one of Canada’s first artist-run centres and its oldest media arts centre. We are a not-for-profit, charitable organization.
For 50 years, Trinity Square has been a champion of media arts practices. Our activities are guided by a goal to increase our members’ and audiences’ understanding and imagination of what media arts practices can be. Trinity Square strives to create supportive environments, encouraging artistic and curatorial experimentation that challenge medium specificity through education, production and presentation supports.
As video-based practices have become increasingly present across disciplines, Trinity Square engages artists and curators in critical investigations into the changing conditions of perception, materiality and the virtual. We consider all of our artistic activities and structures through a process of critical self-reflection, continuously evaluating the ethical positioning of our programming, jury structures, inter-organizational relationships, et cetera. In addition to holding aesthetic worth in its own right, our artistic programming extends our education and production activities in order to generate new knowledges.
Trinity Square’s programming is guided by three priorities: 1) promoting an expanded definition of media arts; 2) promoting the meaningful engagement of diverse voices in all levels of our operations; and 3) supporting and nurturing the production of new works by artists and curators. Our membership represents the diversity of the city and honours the original mandate of the organization—seeking to reduce barriers to access related to race, gender, sexual orientation, and socio- economic and physical ability.
