The Space Between Her Breath – Faeid Hassan
The Space Between Her Breath
Faeid Hassan
Faeid Hassan is a Bengali-American artist based in New York City, working across painting, video, photography, sculptures, and mixed-media installations. Currently pursuing a B.A. in Architecture & the Built Environment and Art—with a minor in Business—at the College of Arts and Sciences, his practice lives at the intersection of form and feeling, structure and storytelling.
Hassan’s works are deeply rooted in personal memory, diasporic identity, and cultural inheritance. Drawing from his upbringing in Bangladesh and his experience navigating multiple geographies, he explores themes of displacement, nostalgia, and the passing of time. His background in architecture informs his sensitivity to space—not just as a physical reality, but as a container of memory, loss, and longing. His pieces often unfold like reverent gestures toward the past, weaving together history with the echoes of inherited cultural rituals, while leaving space for viewers to interpret the works on their own terms. Rather than demanding resolution, his works invite reflection—a soft return to the liminal spaces between presence and absence, past and present, here and elsewhere.
Hassan has curated and exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts’ exhibition What We Call Home, was awarded the Haney Medal from the School Art League, and received the Buchanan Fellowship with the Vanderbilt Museum of Art in 2022. His art is an intimate excavation—a search for what remains, what lingers, and what might still be carried forward.
About this installation:
The Space Between Her Breath is a deeply personal exploration of love, fragility, and memory—born from the years I spent watching my mother slip in and out of illness during my childhood in Bangladesh. She was my whole world, my best friend, and in many ways, the center of my sense of safety. Her laughter, her lullabies, the way she moved through a room—these became the quiet architecture of my life. But between those sounds, there was always a stillness. A fear. A space where I wasn’t sure if she would still be there when I looked again. My installation lives inside that space.At the center of the work are Tepa Putul—traditional Bengali clay dolls my mother and I used to buy at local fairs. Each one in the installation represents a year of my life. The glazed, colorful dolls embody moments of joy and resilience. The unglazed, deformed ones hold the years marked by fear, hospital visits, and silence. When she couldn’t play with me anymore, I held those dolls alone, tracing the edges of our shared joy in their tiny, fragile forms.
They now sit on a circular, tiered pedestal, mapping the shape of time—how it loops, how it rises and falls. Surrounding them, hand-crafted Alpona brings our culture to the floor itself, rooting these memories in the land that made them. Beneath the pedestal and in parts of it, I’ve layered hay—a material at once humble and vital, used in rural Bengal for rest, ritual, and rebirth. The hay grounds the installation in the quiet textures of village life, evoking the way softness and fragility live in tandem. Above all, the space is filled with the sound of my mother’s lullabies, softly playing through hidden speakers. Her voice becomes the air, the presence, and the rhythm.
Born from a personal narrative, The Space Between Her Breath also gestures toward a universal experience of care and loss, heritage and the bonds that shape us. This is not only a tribute to my mother, but a meditation on the breath between presence and absence. On what it means to hold someone or something close, even as they begin to fade. It is about what survives in memory, in ritual, in the quiet space where love continues to live—even after the breath is gone.
The installation:
