Full Biography

Sunara Begum is a visual artist who lives and works in London. Brought up in the traditions of her native Bangladesh, within culturally and ethnically diverse inner city areas in London, Sunara’s own personal experience is one of profound self-exploration and search for identity.  Being British, Muslim and from an Asian background puts her in a unique position to appreciate the issues surrounding cultural identities and alienation. 

Sunara Begum was born in London (Hackney) in 1984. She was encouraged to pursue the visual arts by her mother who from an early age would recite stories of growing up in the villages of Bangladesh. It is these formative stories that are the cultural axis of her work, together with her own personal experiences of growing up in London.  One of the key motivations in her work has been to extract these cultural memories and visually depict some of these as cameos of a lost past and dying generation.

Sunara is perfectly placed between East and West and her work is predominantly concerned with exploring the relationship between people and their environment.
The emotional perspective of her subjects is often an ever-present element in her work.
Sunara Begum attended Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design where she completed her BA (Hons) Fine Art. Whilst there, she spent much of her time recording various visual projects on both abstract and narrative based subject matter, in order to extract, explore and express her artistic vision, primarily through photography. Sunara’s main interest lies in the visual arts where she likes to explore the different facets of a single art form in detail and then find ways of bringing them together to create a multi layered experience consisting always of more then one dimension.