'Meet the Faces” at La Galerie of Alliance Francaise, is the first caricature exhibition of its kind in Bangladesh. The cartoons by Nasreen Sultana Mitu would make even the serious burst out laughing. Mitu has been working professionally since 2006, and is currently assistant editor for Unmad magazine. The exhibit, which began on December 5, ends on December 18, unless extended by popular demand.

Ahsan Habib, Shishir Bhattacharjee and Nurul Kabir were the special guests at the inauguration. About the exhibition, founder editor and publisher of Unmad, Ahsan Habib says, "She began working with us in 2011 with her unorthodox and extraordinary expressions of the human face. Since then she has joined an English daily, mocking and criticising political

leaders. It is an exclusive form of art that goes beyond the limits of pop culture and politics."

Mitu is a lecturer in Education and Research at Rajshahi University. The 30 cartoons, depicting 22 celebrities of Bangladesh, along with the iconic figures of Pablo Neruda, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Dali and Lionel Messi. A self-portrait is included in this amusing string of funny faces. The public

figures are sometimes a subject of laughter, if not derision.

A sample: Actress Babita has got broad and funny with the years. This brings laughter to the populace. So does the large size of singer Runa Laila, who was one petite and angelic by all standards, when she first arrive* in Bangladesh. The likes of artist Ferdousi Priyabhashini and even SM Sultan were not left untouched. The

whiskers of Salvador Dali did look weird and laughable as Mitu has depicted it to be. He does decisively look like a massive moving tree as the cartoonist has depicted her. The artist does not mean to be harsh but face facts as they stand.

The cartoons do not make the figures just laughable. They present the persons as they are, heightening the characters, for instance with their glasses or a pipe, bulging folds on the faces, the monstrous "teep" on the forehead, the lock of hair on the forehead, the darkly painted lips, the broad, bulging girth, the squinted eyes, the balding head, the huge spectacles, a beak-like nose, etc. The cartoonist has picked up special features of the characters and heightened them — as all good cartoonists do with dexterity.