OITIJ-JO Collective: TUFAN

OITIJ-JO Collective is dedicated to celebrating Bengali arts and crafts while fostering a sense of community, collaboration, and engagement. Operating out of Tower Hamlets, the organisation focuses on supporting underemployed women, particularly from the British Bangladeshi community, by providing valuable training and creative opportunities. 

OITIJ-JO’s Key areas of work are: 

OITIJ-JO Arts & Crafts 

OITIJ-JO Kitchen 

OITIJ-JO Design Studios 

Strategic Engagement 

‘YOU CANNOT BE WHAT YOU CANNOT SEE’ Marian Wright Edelman.  

OITIJ-JO was established to enable the British Bangladeshi diaspora to shape their own narrative within UK’s highly lucrative and influential creative sector. A key focus of the organisation is to prioritise the inclusion of British Bangladeshi, South Asian, and global majority creative practitioners in its projects and initiatives. 

OITIJ-JO Art Space, Poplar, activated in early June will be showcasing additional roster of short films from Bangladesh and host artists and DJs throughout the summer. Join us. 

oitij-jo.org 

@oitij_jo 

Rukia Begum is a British-Bangladeshi fashion and textile designer whose work blends bold surface design with cultural narrative. A graduate of the University of the Arts London, she specialises in print, pattern, and material exploration, creating pieces that reflect identity, heritage, and memory. 

Her collections have been showcased on Not Just A Label, the global platform for emerging fashion talent, where her silk-printed garments and textile works express a strong visual language rooted in colour, texture, and storytelling. Inspired by journeys between London and Bangladesh, her practice often explores themes of migration, femininity, landscape, and belonging. 

Alongside her design practice, Begum is an experienced educator and creative leader. She currently leads an Art & Design department in East London, where she shapes curriculum, mentors emerging creatives, and champions textile design as both craft and contemporary art. Her leadership allows her to bridge industry practice with education, nurturing the next generation of designers while continuing to evolve her own artistic voice. 

Working across fashion, weaving, and textile art, Begum’s work is tactile, expressive, and deeply personal — grounded in craftsmanship and driven by narrative. 

@ruk_iiiia 

Puer Deorum balances negotiations between weight and ephemerality, and the scope of mortality. Referencing psycho/socio political geographies, they question ideas around the experience of time. Teasing temporalities through endurance and duration, amplifying (inter)personal experiences through dream sequences, interpretive actions, and incantations of love.   

As an interdisciplinary artist, their work stems from a foundation of thinking through the body through performance, installation and image-making. Moving between disciplines, in order to evoke the sensorial, drawing from emotional landscapes and responding to site through documenting the covert in the everyday. They layer memories to create cartographies, serving as undercurrents to the imagining of alternative futures, parallel worlds and co-existing timelines.  

Selected sharings of their art include: Whitechapel Gallery (UK), Serendipity Arts Festival (India), Les Urbaines (Switzerland) and Hugo Boss (UK). They curated and produced multi-media festival ELO MELO, in London across Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Hall with Oitij-jo Collective. Notable talks and panel discussions in the UK include Serpentine Gallery, Tate Modern, and Glastonbury Festival. They are a participant in La Becque’s Principal Residency Programme (Switzerland, 2026). 

@puer_deorum 

Laisul Hoque is a London-based artist, born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, working across installation and film. His practice explores autobiographical histories and their intersections with broader political, cultural, and emotional landscapes, often realised through sculpture, installation, and forms of expanded storytelling. 

He was a finalist for the CIRCA Prize 2024 and is the winner of the East London Art Prize 2025. 

After studying literature in Dhaka, Hoque completed an MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophy at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. His work has been presented at the Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican Centre, Experimenta India, and Alliance Française de Dhaka. 

laisulhoque.com / @laisulhoque 

Jannat Hussain is an interdisciplinary artist and creative facilitator. Her practice orientates the space between introspective realities and outward expression, where close observation of the self and interpersonal dynamics translates into highly emotive responses. 

Her work is experiential, operating on the erudition of feeling. It consists of extrapolating sentimental moments in her life that are worthy of rendering, to map her emotional landscape. Jannat’s current concerns lie in using the material and cultural attributes of sculpture and performance art to unpack various forms of intimacy, tracing how vulnerability and connection manifest within personal and collective experiences. 

The tactile qualities of clay and the transformative effects of nature on land currently serve as anchoring points in her practice, emphasising the role of memory in honouring relationships when investigating the broader dimensions of intimacy. 

She is currently the Creative Programme Coordinator for Arts Network, an arts and mental health charity. Selected exhibitions include Tate Britain, The V&A, The Albany Theatre, Cooke Latham Gallery & FILET.  

jannathussain.com / @heebiejabi 

Shumaiya Khan’s practice is informed by reoccurring instinctual forms received via symbiotic and somatic release. Often referencing a mirroring between the metaphysical and physical human bodies, as well as concealed landscapes such as the inner depths of forests, caves, flesh, veins and quarries. Pieces often embody hidden elemental surfaces or entities, often bodily shaped and height. Forms and environment which appear grow, erode or age. She builds out these internal worlds to interact with our external realms. Works produced with oil, salt, ceramic, and textile. Her practice is both research and physical, hands-on process.   

Paintings and sculptures emerge through repeated layering, washing away, rebuilding oil paint mixed with salt; creating visceral, full-bodied, and textured surfaces. The resulting works are installed as immersive environments, combining stretched and folded paintings, suspended with ribbons or supported by treated wood structures, alongside ceramic sculptures.  

Explorations within feminine origin ancient mythologies, mysticism and animism, consider her past self’s journey within spiritual realms, affecting her everyday position on the current socio-political landscape the feminine she finds herself in. Personal release of facades inherited from industrialised patriarchal worlds, content on upholding external accolades over the human care and condition. 

shumaiyakhan.com / @ ____shumii 

Rezia Wahid MBE is a British Bangladeshi textile artist and doctoral researcher whose work explores intersection of weaving with delicate fine natural yarns which seek to evoke light and air, performance, and cultural narratives.  

Wahid is currently involved with her practice-led PhD research, titled Thread of Fate: Text as Textiles and Performance, where she is investigating the multiple languages of textiles, examining how threads can embody stories, memory, identities, and rituals across cultures. Central to her inquiry is challenging and untangling colonial legacies within the Jamdani textile traditions of Bangladesh. Her work reflects themes of heritage, migration, decolonial thought, and interconnectedness, positioning textiles as a medium of dialogue between materiality and meaning. 

reziawahid.com / @reziawahid1 

Anisah Yaminah is a textile designer, specialising in weave as a medium to visually narrate stories of nostalgic feelings, memories and childhood moments. Family albums, objects and clothes are archival pieces of work that are important to her research as they are ways to translate stories in woven textiles. Blending her Bangladeshi heritage and London roots together plays a significant part in her creative practice as they inform her narrative as well as colour, patterns and materials. Growing up in London, surrounded by different cultures has led her to interweave themes of identity, land and home which is reflective in the primary research she gathers. This personal approach to her work lets others see how she uses weave as a tool to explore her identity. 

@anisahyaminah