In early 2017, the inaugural Samdani Architecture Award invited, through open call, individuals or groups of 3rd and 4th year Bangladeshi Architecture students to propose new models for learning in abandoned urban spaces across Bangladesh, using ecologically sustainable, and locally sourced materials and technology. Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী) Maksudul Karim FIRST PRIZE From 135 registrations, Maksudul Karim’s design, Chhaya Tori (ছায়া তরী), which translates as Shadow Boat, was selected. A Level 3, B.Sc Architecture student at Premier University, Chittagong, Karim’s design utilised traditional Shampan boat building techniques—synonymous with Bangladesh’s fishing communities—bringing traditional rural Bangladeshi construction techniques into the urban environment. Using bamboo as its primary construction material, Chhaya Tori floated above ground level on bamboo supports, covered with a shade (known locally as choi) erected using traditional bamboo inter-weaving techniques, allowing natural light to fall into the internal teaching space. Bangladesh has one of the largest inland waterway networks in the world with nearly 5,000 miles of navigable waters, making boats a vital mode of transportation to the nation. Despite this, the use of traditional boat building methods is in decline in favour of mechanised mass-produced models. “Maksudul Karim's design embraced themes from the origins of the tectonics as the interlacing of materials and fibres proposing a habitable structure. Exploring local materials and techniques he offers experiences based in the generation and superposition of shadows with different sieves that present an organic changing atmosphere.” - Jeannette Plaut, Co-Founder and Director Constructo Karim was awarded the inaugural Samdani Architecture Award during the Dhaka Art Summit's Opening Celebratory Dinner and received funding towards further studies. DHAKA ART SUMMIT 2018 EDUCATION PAVILION On 2 February 2018, Karim’s winning design was unveiled at the heart of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy as the Dhaka Art Summit 2018’s Education Pavilion. Curated by Diana Campbell, the Education Pavilion transformed DAS into a free art school, re-imagining the traditional toolboxes used when considering art-making and artistic practices. This free and alternative art school’s curriculum was led by leading artistic practitioners and educators from institutions including: Goldsmiths University (UK); Yale School of Art (USA); Cornell University (USA); Kalabhavan Santiniketan (India); Harvard, South Asia Institute (USA); Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (Switzerland); Open School East (UK); Council (France); and the FHNW Academy of Art and Design (Basel, Switzerland); among others. Programmed across DAS’s nine-day duration, the Education Pavilion hosted a bilingual, collaborative curriculum, developing a timely and productive discussion about art education in South Asia. Samdani Architecture Award In early 2017, the inaugural Samdani Architecture Award invited, through open call, individuals or groups of 3rd and 4th year Bangladeshi Architecture students to propose new models for learning in abandoned urban spaces across Bangladesh, using ecologically sustainable, and locally sourced materials and technology. Participants were required to design an imaginative and innovative open pavilion, both visually stimulating and architecturally flexible for different functions, including lectures, events and workshops. The winning proposal was selected by an international jury: Aurélien Lemonier (National Museum of the History of Immigration, Paris, France); Jeannette Plaut (Constructo, Santiago de Chile); and Shamshul Wares (Department of Architecture, State University of Bangladesh). “I sense a Threshold: Light to Silence, Silence to Light – an ambiance of inspiration, in which the desire to be, to express, crosses with the possible … Light to Silence, Silence to Light crosses in the sanctuary of art.” - Louis Kahn Just under 20 percent of Bangladesh’s land mass is covered with forest, the largest of which are in the Chittagong Hills, covering around 4,600 square kilometres, and the tidal mangrove forests in the Sundarbans, covering around 6,000 square kilometres. Mimicking the layering of foliage in Bangladesh’s lush forests, the pavilion’s two outer mesh layers create a visual barrier to the outside world. A space for public gatherings, lectures and sharing, inside the pavilion, rays of light push through the outer mesh, creating patterns and shapes that will change with the seasons and time of day. Fouzia Masud Mouri (b. 1996) Ahmad Abdul Wasi (b. 1995) Both level 3, B.s.c Architecture students at the Bangaldesh University of Engineering and Technology To Sense The Unseen, Designed by Team Gaia SECOND PRIZE Dhaka, the capital and largest city in Bangladesh, is a city of diversity. One of the most densely populated cities in the world, crammed with educational institutes, government and private offices, markets, industrial units and residences, it is filled with people from all walks of life and backgrounds. A microcosm of the whole country, The Dot Pavilion encapsulates Dhaka’s diversity, creating a space for the city’s people to meet. An omnidirectional circle, representing the city’s diversity, the pavilion’s main vernacular structure uses bamboo and wood. Maintaining an environmental friendly structure, bamboo will keep the inner environment 3° degrees cooler than outside, while the structures longitudinal cross-section hollows absorb co2. An outer layer of lipids, will protect the bamboo structure from rotting. Rahat Ibna Hasan (b. 1996) Nirupam Bakshi (b. 1996) Md. Khalid Hossain (b. 1996) All Level 3, B.s.c Architecture students at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology The Dot Pavilion, Designed by Team Delta THIRD PRIZE

Privacy Policy The Samdani Art Foundation processes the following personal information: Name Address Telephone number Email address Personal information is kept in the following forms: Computer database Online newsletter software Staff within the organisation who will process personal information are: Administration and communications staff Type of information processed In line with international data protection principles the Samdani Art Foundation will ensure that personal data will: Be obtained fairly and lawfully Be obtained for a specific and lawful purpose Be accurate and kept up to date Not be held longer than necessary Be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects Be subject to appropriate security measures The Personal Data Guardianship Code suggests five key principles of good data governance on which best practice is based. The Samdani Art Foundation will seek to abide by this code in relation to all the personal data it processes, Accountability: those handling personal data follow international data principles to safeguard personal data Visibility: Data subjects should have access to the information about themselves that the Samdani Art Foundation holds. This includes the right to have incorrect personal data corrected and to know who has had access to this data. Consent: The collection and use of personal data must be fair and lawful. Personal data should only be used for the purposes agreed by the data subject. If personal data is to be shared with a third party or used for another purpose, the data subject’s consent should be explicitly obtained. Access: Everyone should have the right to know the roles and groups of people within an organisation who have access to their personal data and who has used this data. Stewardship: Those collecting personal data have a duty of care to protect this data throughout the data life span. Aims of this Policy The Samdani Art Foundation keeps personal data for its vendors, collaborators, funders, and extended network to carry out its day to day operations, to meet its objectives and to comply with legal obligations. The Samdani Art Foundation is committed to ensuring any personal data will be dealt with in line with international standards. Although the Samdani Art Foundation is a Bangladesh based organisation, its contacts and operations are global. To comply with international laws, personal information will be collected and used fairly, stored safely and not disclosed to any other person unlawfully. All members of Samdani Art Foundation staff handling personal data are fully aware of the requirements in accordance with international data protection procedures and follow the policy outlined in this document which highlights the organisation’s key data protection procedures. Definitions Notification As an organisation based in Bangladesh, the Samdani Art Foundation is not required to record our needs for processing personal data on the public register to any international regulatory bodies. As the Samdani Art Foundation operates on a global platform, we have been careful to understand our obligations, and to ensure our policies adhere to international data protection standards. Responsibilities The Data Controller is responsible for: Understanding and communicating obligations put in place by international regulatory bodies Identifying potential problem areas or risks Producing clear and effective procedures All administration staff who process personal information act in line with this policy and international data protection principles. Training and awareness raising about data protection and how it is followed by the Samdani Art Foundation’s staff will take the following forms: On induction: A copy of this policy will be given to new staff Procedures for collecting personal data will be demonstrated to all new staff General training/ awareness raising: Training will be carried out to ensure new staff are clear about the use of personal data Awareness will be made about the miss-use of personal data and its consequences Passwords will be changed when staff leave the employment of the Samdani Art Foundation Training To meet our responsibilities in line with international standards, all the Samdani Art Foundation’s staff will: Ensure any personal data is collected in a fair and lawful way Ensure it is kept safely The Samdani Art Foundation will ensure that: Everyone managing and handling personal information is trained to do so Any disclosure of personal data will be in line with our procedures Queries about handling personal information will be dealt with swiftly and politely Policy Implementation Gathering and checking information Before personal information is collected, we will consider: The minimum personal details required as part of our relationship with the data subject depending on our relationship with them No personal information in hard copy will be kept after it is required and will be securely destroyed after use We will take the following measures to ensure that personal information kept is accurate: Information supplied is checked and recorded No sensitive information is required by the Samdani Art Foundation except for the purposes of visiting artists, speakers or academics. In these cases, passport details will be taken for the purposes of booking flights, and dietary/medical requirements for assisting the comfort of their visit to Bangladesh. None of the aforementioned personal information will be used apart from the exact purpose for which permission was given. Data Security The Samdani Art Foundation will take steps to ensure that personal data is kept secure at all times against unauthorised or unlawful loss or disclosure. The following measures will be taken: Passwords will be changed regularly Passwords will only be issued to regulated and trained staff Data backups will be stored securely and kept away from main data Subject Access Requests Anyone whose personal information we process has the right to know: What information we hold How to gain access to this information How to keep it up to date What we are doing to comply with international data protection standards They also have the right to prevent processing of their personal data in some circumstances and the right to correct, rectify, block or erase information regarded as wrong. Individuals have a right to access certain personal data being kept about them on computer and certain files. Any person wishing to exercise this right should apply by email to info@samdani.com.bd. The following information will be required before access is granted: Name Email address We may also require proof of identity before access is granted. The following forms of ID will be accepted: Photographic ID, such as a passport We will aim to comply with requests for access to personal information as soon as possible but will ensure it is provided within the 30 days from receiving the written request. Review This policy will be reviewed annually to ensure it remains up to date and compliant with international laws. The Samdani Art Foundation is committed to ensuring any personal data collected will be handled in line with international standards. To comply with international law, personal information will be collected and used fairly, stored safely and not disclosed to any other person unlawfully. To meet our responsibilities in line with international standards, all the Samdani Art Foundation’s staff will ensure any personal data is collected in a fair and lawful way and is kept safely. All our staff managing and handling personal information are trained to do so. Any disclosure of personal data will be in line with our procedures and queries about handling personal information will be dealt with swiftly and politely. Samdani Art Foundation Data Protection Policy Statement

ALL PROJECTS The Collective Body Curated by Diana Campbell and Kathryn Weir. Assistant curator: Kehkasha Sabah. Supported by Adam Ondak, Lucia Zubalova, Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Teresa Albor Expressions of community and connections that precede the neoliberal individual and the nation-state are at the heart of The Collective Body, an exhibition that brings together more than thirty collaborative art initiatives. Half of these are from Bangladesh, where the thriving contemporary art ecology is largely carried by artist-led interdisciplinary initiatives that have developed festivals, art spaces, schools and collaborative networks to support their practice in the absence of centrally funded institutions or sources of economic support. Alongside these, artists and collectives have been invited from parallel contexts in order to crystallise discussions pertinent to collaborative practice in Bangladesh, drawing parallels and creating unprecedented forms of exchange of tools and strategies across Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Oceania. The curating process opened articulated conversations from which emerged common interests and preoccupations; these include the transmission of long-standing aesthetic forms, relationships between rural to urban contexts, labour movements across agricultural and industrial domains, climate change and environmental toxicity. An emergent network of initiatives comes together at DAS to address – through puppet shows, concerts, debate, installation, documentation and performance – issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersection of gender, caste and ethnicity. Centred on ideas and contemporary social contexts, the artistic practices represented in The Collective Body are fundamentally engaged in the creation of social tissue and in sharing knowledge. They are both rooted in particular contexts and looking elsewhere in formulations of what decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls ‘cosmopolitan localism’. Artistic experiments around processes of community selfdetermination are gaining strength in the context of the ecological crisis and the widening cracks in the system of extractivist neoliberalism, defined by French sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu over 20 years ago as ‘A program to destroy the collective structures capable of opposing pure market logic’ (Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998). The Collective Body structures a reflection rooted in the dynamics and questions of contemporary art initiatives in Bangladesh but reaching out to multidisciplinary groups of creative practitioners across diverse geographies to highlight the collective processes that may be ignited in the space of freedom that art offers. These processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based artists’ collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country; it is part of UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage list since 2016. This is not a generations old tradition, it is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations (especially children) to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Charupith is a longstanding research and education-based initiative located in southwestern Bangladesh; close to ten thousand young students have graduated from their independent school of fine arts. Rising fundamentalism has threatened the use of masks due to criticism of the figurative nature of the art with resulting security threats to the festival. The presentation in The Collective Body includes a series of masks created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Artist and philosopher Denise Fereira Da Silva speaks of ‘the task of unthinking the world, of releasing it from the grips of the abstract forms of modern representation’ that have supported violent forms of appropriation and extraction in modern juridic and economic systems. She suggests that artistic practice should today be considered ‘a generative locus for engaging in radical reflection on modalities of racial (symbolic) and colonial (juridic) subjugation operating in full force in the global present.’* Artist-led initiatives such as Trovoa in Brazil, The Hill Group, Kaali, and Shako in Bangladesh, Mata Aho Collective in New Zealand, Thuma in Myanmar, and eleven and ProppaNOW in Australia, among others, have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa, a group of black and nonwhite women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil, the context that has given birth to both Trovoa and Ferreira da Silva’s approaches to blackness. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia (Shako) and South America (Trovoa) for a five-hour tea party within the exhibition’s dedicated discussion space to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions will be published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media. The imperative to ‘unthink the world’ is also linked to what Ferreira Da Silva calls the deep implication of the human and non-human (and of life and non-life) to the collective, fluid, intuitive body and the elements that combine and recombine within it. In terms of the practices of art, where the image ‘reduces the basis of existence to lethal abstraction’ (as Ferreira Da Silva states in the film of 2019, 4Waters: Deep Implication), elemental matter is always more complex than its representation and can provide pathways for artists’ collective radical reflection. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, have been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes our relationship to the earth more complex and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. For DAS, Jatiwangi has explored parallels between the clay-based culturesof Indonesia and Bangladesh. The Vietnamese collective Art Labor brings together agronomy as well as colonial and cultural history to study the circulation of plant species in international markets and the effects of industrial agriculture, notably focussing on Robusta coffee beans (introduced to Vietnam in the French colonial period). Policies of increasing scale and modernising techniques related to the introduction of coffee farming have led to mass deforestation and rapid changes in the lifestyle of local indigenous Jarai community in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. Art Labor collaborates with these communities, from which one of the collective’s members comes, to diversify sources of economic support outside of coffee cultivation and support Jarai culture and farming practices. Also working on community regeneration and seeking food sovereignty through revisiting indigenous agriculture traditions, Calpulli Tecalco works on the outskirts of Mexico City to revive indigenous language and farming techniques, constructing an ecology of knowledge to rethink and defend the use of the land. Adopta Una Milpa is one example of the organisation’s agricultural regeneration projects that reinforces systems of collectivity embedded within Nahuatl language and culture. As opposed to the monoculture of industrial farming, a milpa is a cultivated field where around a dozen crops are planted together – maize, avocados, squash, bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and others – which are nutritionally and environmentally complementary, helping each species to grow and providing complementary proteins to the farmers. Unthinking the world takes place not only through working with unexpected materials but also with unexpected groups historically excluded from serious art production such as children, climate change refugees or those affected by natural disasters, all examples taken from specific art projects included in DAS. Calpulli Tecalco has facilitated The Book Club Incualli Ohtli for over twenty years, introducing several generations of children to Nahuatl language and storytelling and also engaging them in imaginative activities with pictographic representation of their linguistic roots. Storytelling is one of the many ways that an idea can move across generations and be renewed. In Bangladesh, Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together local communities and artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created Hamra to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, Golpota Shobar performs local history and myths surrounding a small village in northwest Bangladesh and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south to north movements of climate change refugees. In 2015, Bangladesh’s neighbouring Nepal was hit by a massive 7.8 Richter scale earthquake, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving 22,000 injured and 3.5 million homeless. The collective ArTree Nepal initiated 12 Bishakh Post Earthquake Community Art Project at Thulo Baysi, Bhaktapur, Nepal which started as an immediate relief initiative and developed into a sixmonth-long collective healing process involving more than 100 artists, community members, researchers, and musicians who created multi-generational interactive programmes, helping to allow the emotional ground of the community to settle in the wake of the trauma. In recent times, an increased awareness of questions of the interdependence of the human community with non-living elements has emerged in the context of climate change and industrial toxicity. Bangladesh is home to one of the largest poisonings of a population in history via arsenic in the groundwater, exacerbated by ill-conceived plans for shallow wells imported by foreign NGOs who sought inexpensive solutions to provide clean drinking water, but whose lack of specific knowledge of the local context instead unleashed enormous harm. When Europe and North America are directly affected by toxicity and freak weather effects that they previously had only read about in places like Bangladesh, their elites no longer quarantined from the sites of contamination and danger, the limits and violence of neoliberalism begin to be broadcast through the system’s own infrastructure. The ‘end of the world as we know it’ is announced as a contemporary crisis without any recognition that this is the culmination of a more than 500-year accelerating history, the effects of which have been long felt by others who the system discounted, by other lifeforms, and by non-life. Artists, as receivers and transmitters of some of the key questions of our time, and particularly those working collectively in contexts historically subjected to violent extractive and colonial forces, have been approaching environmental interdependence in powerful and lateral ways. Made up of architects, remote-sensing geographers and visual culture researchers, INTRPRT investigates underreported environmental crimes known as ecocide (including the case of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh). Their advocacy work, visual culture research, exhibitions and publications work towards making justice approachable in the fight against climate emergency and all forms of ecological impunity through collaborations with lawyers and policy-making bodies. Whereas INRPRT works through the judicial systems of the world, The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) engages scientists and engineers with young people growing up in Ladakh, especially those from rural or disadvantaged backgrounds. This platform equips young Ladakhis with the knowledge, skills, perspective, and confidence to choose and build a sustainable future in a high desert lacking water more every year. Temperatures in the Indian Himalayas are rising as a result of climate change, causing snow from glaciers to melt faster, negatively affecting local communities that rely on springtime meltwater for agriculture. Resulting from two years of experiments at SECMOL Alternative Institute, Ice Stupa was born as a local solution to a local problem, which is now being implemented elsewhere in the region and the world. Ice Stupa is an artificial glacier created by piping an un-useful winter mountain stream down below the frost line, and then cascading it out of a vertical spout in the desert plateau. When gushing water encounters freezing ambient temperatures, it transforms into a conical ice formation with minimal surface area exposed to direct sunlight. The artificial glacier lasts late into the spring, allowing communities extended access to water throughout the season, as opposed to ice, which melts much faster. This is a local solution at a human scale. Particularly in resource and infrastructure-poor contexts, artists work to amplify local initiatives, voices, and materials, even experimenting with alternative economic systems, other approaches to technology and different articulations of scale in political and social intervention in order to generate other sustainable models. The multidisciplinary platform Aman Iwan has developed an action-based research process, combining a research laboratory and the concrete experimentation of a workshop. The realities of diaspora and migration have allowed for a group to come together in Paris of which the members retain connections to many different places. Combining cultural translation and local, rooted knowledge, the platform focusses on cultural heritage preservation and renewal through knowledge transmission. In the installation The Weight of Water commissioned for The Collective Body, one landscape disappears while another appears, using elements inspired by longstanding water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan, where Aman Iwan founding member Feda Wardak works with artisans on reviving and transmitting skills. Wardak says that ‘Water management systems are both indicative of exceptional human know-how enabling settlement and catalysts for the evolution of certain landscapes, sometimes leading to their disappearance.’ Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open membership artist-led initiative Shonimongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Cafe. It continues to host bi-weekly debates and exhibitions and has recently begun publishing newsletters. While initiatives such as Shonimongol Adda push the limits of where a space for art could be located, several artists’ collectives in the exhibition examine the political limits of where their passports allow them to go. The Shelter Promotion Council based in Kolkata and Dhaka’s Britto Arts Trust collaborated in 2014 on Project No Man’s Land, a research and process-based project that brought together twenty-four artists on the borderlines of Dhonitila of Monipur Para in Sunamgonj, Bangladesh and Kalibari village in Cherapunji, India, where they developed installation, performance, sound, photography, and video works on either side of the border. Their activities inspired the border authorities on either side, who in a seemingly unthinkable act, allowed the artists to shed their documents and meet and embrace each other in the zone between the borders. In another border area, issues between Bangladesh and Myanmar have been highly publicised in the wake of the Rohingya crisis, dominating conversations related to these two countries’ relationships, and making it nearly impossible for Burmese citizens to obtain Bangladeshi visas, and viceversa. Two collectives of young female photographers from either country came together in Yangon in 2019 to explore notions of identity, respect, hope, conflict, and resolution through storytelling and photography, a collaboration which culminated in the photo book project Bridging the Naf (the river connecting Bangladesh and Myanmar). Based on their interests and experiences, artists from each country were paired up and took a journey to solve problems, make decisions, and explode stereotypes through the process of artistic exchange. The Burmese artists were denied visas to Bangladesh when it was time for the reciprocal exchange to occur, and The Collective Body is facilitating these collectives to meet in Dhaka for the first time. The Lagos-based platform Invisible Borders has placed political and conceptual border crossing at the heart of their activity of collaborative road trips bringing together photographers, filmmakers and writers from across the African continent. Founder Emeka Okereke speaks to the role that the important and long standing Dhaka photographic and activist initiative Drik (and its school Pathshala) played as a model when he was conceiving Invisible Borders even though there had been no direct contact in Bangladesh. The Collective Body invited Invisible Borders to conceive together with the Drik Network a collaborative road trip taking Bangladesh as a starting point and they decided to focus on the area in the northeast of the country around Sylhet. This landmark trip inscribes itself into long histories of exchanges and solidarities between Africa and Asia and brings into the present their radical imaginaries. The very act of assembling this event’s collective of collectives in Dhaka dissolves borders through bringing initiatives together outside of an international art circuit centred in Europe and North America and tending to involve individuals who can speak ‘art world English’ and are also from countries where visas can be more easily procured. Born from relationships distributed across the global majority world between groups of artists who responded to the challenge to unite in Dhaka, The Collective Body opens a space for public conversations around common interests and preoccupations within reimagined geographies. Some important shared themes include the transmission of long-standing aesthetic forms, relationships between rural and urban contexts, labour movements across agricultural and industrial domains, climate change and environmental toxicity. An emergent network of initiatives comes together at DAS to address – through puppet shows, concerts, screenings, debate, installation, documentation and performance – issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersections of gender, raciality, caste and class in their symbolic and economic dimensions. When art is practised in life, not abstracted to formal dimensions or insular conversations, material approaches come to the fore that recompose and reinforce existing elements. Networks of artists and other producers develop generative spaces and work against the uniformisation of economic and cultural systems and experiment with other futures. * Denise Ferreira Da Silva, In the Raw, e-flux journal #93 , September 2018, at www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw DAS 2020 Collectives Platform Participants Akāliko Founded 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh Jatiwangi Art Factory Founded 2005, Jatiwangi, Indonesia Akāliko means ‘timelessness’ in Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, reflecting the group’s belief that musical forms have always been present in everyday life in society. The promotion of electronic and experimental music is at the heart of Akāliko’s activities and they collaborate with artists and professionals who make digital and sound art. Born out of Dhaka’s electronica scene, the group was originally established in 2012 as an independent music production label set up to address the need for a common platform to promote the work of ‘bedroom’ music producers. They collaborate with like-minded performance artists, writers, choreographers/dancers, communication specialists, psychologists, and, most recently, sound artists, while at the same time maintaining their label. Their compositions are streamed online and can be experienced in this listening station. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, has been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes our relationship to the earth more complex and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. A listening station within the exhibition connects visitors with the sounds this collective creates that emerge from the ground of Indonesia. Through a mini-residency catalyzed by DAS, Akaliko and Jatiwangi explored parallels between the clay-based visual cultures and sonic qualities of Indonesia and Bangladesh. Looking out the window into the garden, visitors could see collaborative instruments created in Bangladesh, which were activated during several jam sessions on the closing three days of DAS from 4–8pm. Jatiwangi’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by the Indonesian Embassy of Bangladesh. Aman Iwan Founded 2015, Paris, France Particularly in resource and infrastructure-poor contexts, artists work to amplify local initiatives, voices, and materials, even experimenting with alternative economic systems, other approaches to technology and different articulations of scale in political and social intervention in order to generate other sustainable models. The multidisciplinary platform Aman Iwan has developed an action-based research process, combining a research laboratory and the concrete experimentation of a workshop. The realities of diaspora and migration have allowed for a group to come together in Paris, with the group’s members still retaining connections to many different places. Combining cultural translation and local, rooted knowledge, the platform focusses on cultural heritage preservation and renewal through knowledge transmission. In the installation ‘The Weight of Water’ commissioned for ‘The Collective Body’, one landscape disappears while another appears, using elements inspired by long standing water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan, where Aman Iwan founding member Feda Wardak works with artisans on reviving and transmitting skills. Wardak says: ‘Water management systems are both indicative of exceptional human know-how enabling settlement and catalysts for the evolution of certain landscapes, sometimes leading to their disappearance.’ Aman Iwan’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Institut Francais and Alliance Française de Dhaka. Art Labor Founded 2012, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Art Labor brings together agronomy as well as colonial and cultural history to study the circulation of plant species in international markets and the effects of industrial agriculture. Each project is considered an experiment to test boundaries of art, in terms of exhibition forms, exhibition venues, the artist’s role, curation limits, and the value and appreciation of art in society. Policies of increasing scale and modernising techniques related to the introduction of coffee farming by French missionaries in the 19th century have led to mass deforestation and rapid changes in the lifestyle of the indigenous Jarai community in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. Art Labor collaborates with this community, from which one of the collective’s members comes, to diversify sources of economic support outside of coffee cultivation and support Jarai culture and farming practices. Visitors can engage with Art Labor inside the ‘Jrai Dew Hammock Café’ at DAS offering Vietnamese-style filter coffee to the public in a style reminiscent of roadside cafes in Vietnam. The title of this pop-up coffee shop draws its inspiration from the Jarai belief that humans are part of a metamorphosis of nature and will eventually become dew that evaporates into the environment, entering a state of non-being, and transforming into particles that fuel new existence. Artpro Founded 2016, Dhaka, Bangladesh Artpro’s projects mobilise artists to work with less visible segments of society, often working to bridge expressions of urban and rural culture. Nakshi Katha: Interwoven Dialogues (2019–2020) exemplifies their collaborative process. This research-based project involved 4 Dhaka based artists and 24 Jamalpur based Nakshi Kantha embroiderers through storytelling workshops. In the Nakshi Kantha tradition, communities (primarily of women) share stories and pass time together embroidering closely linked linear stitches on found fabrics. Bangladesh once had 6 seasons which are depicted in its songs and folk culture, but climate change has reduced this number to 4 or 5 (depending on who you ask). Artpro engaged with the community in Jamalpur to share memories about these seasons, collaborating with the artisans to then stitch these on a saree that was divided into 6 individual panels. The depictions of Boishahk (Summer), the Rainy Season, Autumn, Winter, and Spring are joined by the ‘missing season’ of ‘Late Autumn’ created by the artisans during the first 2 days of DAS. Visitors share memories tied to this lost period of the year and these are memorialized in textile form through the expressions of the artisans. ArTree Nepal Founded 2013, Kathmandu, Nepal In 2015, Bangladesh’s neighbouring Nepal was hit by a massive 7.8 Richter scale earthquake, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving 22,000 injured and 3.5 million homeless. The collective ArTree Nepal initiated ‘12 Bishakh Post Earthquake Community Art Project’ at Thulo Baysi, Bhaktapur, Nepal which started as an immediate relief initiative and developed into a 6-month-long collective healing process involving more than 100 artists, community members, researchers, and musicians who created multi-generational interactive programmes, helping to allow the emotional ground of the community to be remade in the wake of the trauma. Two examples of this healing are represented here through interventions by ArTree members Subas Tamang and Mekh Limbu. ‘Basibiyal’ is the result of storytelling in the aftermath of the disaster. In an abandoned, damaged house, stories of survivors were recorded through an intimate and cathartic mourning process. Conductive ink was used to make ‘screen portraits’ with a video appearing on a screen when a human hand completes the electric circuit. ‘Still Shots from Chal-Ne-Chitrais’ is an animation based on the art of Subina and Suprem, two children who were part of a group encouraged to express their emotions and experiences following the earthquake through drawings. Meticulously traced, re-drawn, and re-traced, their drawings, made over a period of 3 months, are transformed into an animation in which Subina and Suprem themselves narrate their stories and reveal their own coming to terms with what they experienced. ArTree Nepal’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by Contemporary Art of Nepal. Back ART Foundation Founded 2013, Dhaka, Bangladesh Game Time –‘Khela-Ramer Khel’ Project Coordinators: Adil Hasnat, Afsana Hasan Shejuti, Mahmuda Siddika, Sanjid Mahmud. BACK Art refers to the founders’ ‘backpack’ approach to the portability of art and ideas in public spaces. They are particularly interested in rural life and issues related to urbanisation, water systems and climate change. Various projects, including ‘Dhaka Live Art Biennale’ (‘D’LAB’), use performance to explore folklore and long-standing aesthetic forms, seeking ways to locate these within contemporary art practice. Game Time – ‘Khelaram Khel’ is a performative game labyrinth addressing the question ‘Are ghosts real?’and considering shared time and play. It was developed from BACK Art’s Native Myth rural residency project in which they collaborated with local children to create ghost characters used in games later on. Games are widely played in rural areas of Bangladesh by people of different ages. Danguli, Ekka-Dokka/Kut-kut, Saat Chara, Saap Ludo, Ha-Du-Du, Bou Chi and Dariya Banda are very old games in this region that are no-longer common in urban areas. The collective is interested in rewiring and reviving older ways of being together, using contemporary art practice as a vehicle for this. The audience enters a playing area with a design pattern created from children’s drawings to experience and engage with a series of customized games. Britto Arts Trust Founded 2002, Dhaka, Bangladesh Shelter Promotion Council Founded 1986, Kolkata, India Britto Arts Trust (Bangladesh) is one of the oldest artist-led initiatives that is still active in Dhaka, and it aims to encourage critical discourse, research, interaction, diversity, and innovation in art. They provide support and visibility opportunities for artists in a variety of ways, including participation in exchange programmes facilitated by the Triangle Network and other international partners in home and abroad as well as organising exhibitions, residencies, and festivals in Bangladesh. Shelter Promotion Council (India) was established with the objective of promoting the cause of housing and inclusive development of rural and semi-urban areas with special emphasis on the economically weaker section of society. Its members are social activists, architects, engineers, scientists, environmentalists, artists and planners who work together to produce public art festivals addressing socio-political and environmental issues pertinent to north east India. In 2014 as part of ‘Project No Man’s Land’, these two artist led initiatives pushed the political limits of where their passports allowed them to go. This research and process-based project brought together 24 artists on the borderlines of Dhonitila of Monipur Para in Sunamgonj, Bangladesh and Kalibari village in Cherapunji, India, where they developed installation, performance, sound, photography, and video works on either side of the border. Their activities inspired the border authorities on either side, who in a seemingly unthinkable act, allowed the artists to shed their documents and meet and embrace each other in the zone between the borders. Calpulli Tecalco Founded 1990s, San Pedro Atocpan, Mexico Working on community regeneration and food sovereignty, Calpulli Tecalco works on the outskirts of Mexico City to revive indigenous language and farming techniques, constructing an ecology of knowledge to rethink and defend the use of the land. They have facilitated The Book Club Incualli Ohtli for over 20 years, introducing several generations of children to Nahuatl language and storytelling and also engaging them in imaginative activities with pictographic representation of their linguistic roots. Storytelling is one of the many ways that an idea can move across generations and be renewed; several of these stories can be found within these 5 pictographic flags created by the initiative’s founder Fernando Palma. In Mexican native cosmogony, the coordinates axis North-South and East-West is called Nahui Xochitl or Flower of four petals, and when the center or cross road is named, that is the fifth numeral, it is called Macuil Xochitl or Flower five. Interestingly, the numeral Maquil Xochitl is the name of ‘creation’ and it was attributed also to be the artist. This was common practice among the Aztecs, who spoke Nahuatl, and among the Mayan peoples. Incidentally, the Nahuatl language is the second most important after Spanish in Mexico. These flags orient us in another way of seeing and experiencing the world. Charupith Founded 1985, Jessore, Bangladesh Many processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change in society yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country. This is not a generations old tradition. It is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Close to 10,000 young students have graduated from Charupith’s independent school of fine arts. This series of masks was created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Charupith led mask-making workshops for Dhaka school children on the children’s days of DAS. Drik, Pathshala, and Chobi Mela Drik: Founded 1989, Dhaka, Bangladesh Pathshala: Founded 1998, Dhaka, Bangladesh Chobi Mela: Founded 2000, Dhaka, Bangladesh Invisible Borders Founded 2009, Lagos, Nigeria Invisible Borders investigates the spectrum of knowledge and artistic practices that may be generated by the process of a road trip. Through collective journeys of photographers, videographers, and writers, Invisible Borders conducts research into possible artistic responses to the unexpected. Founder Emeka Okereke comments: “In a world obsessed with artefacts — the physical, final object — as the preferred artistic outcomes, Invisible Borders shifts the gaze to the never-ending, evolutive nature of process. The work produced by the participating artists are precipitates of aesthetic experiences that are ephemeral but contain the seeds of further conversations. The artist’s presence on the road is as important as the work that commences from that presence’’. The resulting works combine photographs, texts, and video to present the critical inquiries of the travellers, their daily journals, and the voices of those met along the way. In a discussion with the curators of the Collective Body, Okereke spoke to the inspiration that the important and long-standing Dhaka photographic and activist initiative Drik (and its school Pathshala) played as a model when he was conceiving Invisible Borders even though there had been no direct contact in Bangladesh. Drik is an independent media organisation committed to challenging social inequality. It specialises in providing state of the art media and communication products for a local and global audience. Establishing its own identity through images and words, it defies the stereotypes created by western media and is a vibrant source of creative energy that refuses to be stifled. Part of the Drik network, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute is a path-breaking school of photography in South Asia. The vision of the institute is to enable an independent, responsible, and creative media industry that contributes to a just and equitable society. Its photography biennial, Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography has become a global platform that brings the world to Bangladesh (as opposed to taking Bangladeshi students to global festivals). This landmark trip inscribes itself into long histories of exchanges and solidarities between Africa and Asia and brings into the present their radical imaginaries. Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation. Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts Founded 2001, Balia, Bangladesh Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together diverse members of their neighbourhood as well as artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created ‘Hamra’ to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, ‘Golpota Shobar’ performs local history and myths surrounding a small village and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south to north movements of climate change refugees. ‘Golpota Shobar’ was realized in collaboration with Jolputul Puppet Studio and was performed inside Taloi Havini’s ‘Reclamation’ installation at 4pm on 7, 8, 9, 14, and 15 February. There were periodic interventions within the puppet theatre in this amoeba. The children also ran theatre workshops with Dhaka-based children during the DAS school days, performing the results of their workshop from 12:45–1:15pm on 11 and 13 February. Hill Artists’ Group Founded 1992, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh The Hill Artists’ Group is based in 3 districts along Bangladesh’s south eastern border with India and Myanmar known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Home to 11 distinct indigenous groups with different languages and cultures, the region is under the control of the Bangladeshi army. In this highly militarised environment, many indigenous people are reluctant to be visible in public space. The Hill Artists’ Group organises exhibitions and also art camps for artists and young people, underlining the need for solidarity across the 11 ethnic communities to preserve their diversity of cultures and languages within a Bengali majority country. Their project for DAS was developed through a workshop with Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez on the methodologies of SÖI (a public mural project in Lima, Peru with the Amazonian community Shipibo-Conibo). The Hill Artists’ Group identified a key shared practice of ‘jhum’ cultivation, also known as ‘slash and burn agriculture’, where crops are planted on land first cleared of trees and vegetation that are burnt on the spot. The soil contains potassium from the burnt plant materials which increases the nutrient content of the soil. The place of cultivation shifts annually, and every year indigenous farmers raise temporary houses in the mountain forests for months known as ‘Jhum Houses.’ This mural of a Jhum House weaves together textile patterns from the 11 communities, identified by different members of the Hill Artists’ Group as a statement of togetherness. INTRPRT Founded 2016, London, UK Made up of architects, remote-sensing geographers and visual culture researchers, INTRPRT investigates underreported environmental crimes known as ecocide (including the case of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh’s groundwater). Their advocacy work, visual culture research, exhibitions and publications work towards making justice approachable in the fight against climate emergency and all forms of ecological impunity through collaborations with lawyers and policy-making bodies. INTRPRT presents a temporary, mobile, research office organized into 3 informal sections. 1) A graphic system focused on original, archival, media and legal research into the genealogies of ecocide and more widely speaking, the presentation of the environment as a subject of international criminal law. 2) Methods and casework with a focus on its extraction and climate justice work, its innovative use of software, interactive mapping and remote sensing techniques such as data-intensive satellite imagery analysis. 3) Advocacy work, both in its legal and environmental justice contexts. This presentation is part of an ongoing collaboration between DAS and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. INTRPRT’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Jog Art Space Founded 2012, Chittagong, Bangladesh ruangrupa Founded 2000, Jakarta, Indonesia Jog Art Space is based in Chattogram, in south eastern Bangladesh. Unlike Dhaka, Chattogram has no commercial galleries and no network of contemporary art collectors, leaving artists to find alternative ways to sustain themselves. Jog Art Space provides the local visual arts community with mentoring support, exhibition opportunities, platforms for exchange and discussion, and access to international artistic exchange programmes. Some members of the group are teachers at the Institute of Fine Arts and see themselves as a bridge to experimental ways of working outside the confines of the academy, thus the name Jog, which translates as ‘connect.’ They advocate taking art out of the gallery, and into public spaces, which they refer to as ‘the emancipation of art.’ Since its establishment in Jakarta in 2000, ruangrupa has founded a video art festival, an online newspaper, music festivals, a library, a radio station, and an art school, among numerous other projects. ruangrupa also create installation works and other devices to investigate how the population of a city of more than 10 million people and lacking in infrastructure can appropriate the public space. ’Ruang‘ means ’space‘ in Sanskrit and Bahasa Indonesia, and ‘rupa’ means ’visual form‘. The collective includes artists, curators, architects, and writers, varying in number from 6 to 50 according to the project. Through programmes and interventions in urban space, ruangrupa exposes how knowledge is produced and shared through informal social situations — in line with their motto ‘Don’t make art, make friends’. Gerobak Cinema was a mobile rickshaw screening station created through a collaboration between Jog and ruangrupa. It produced screening sessions at various spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy on 14 February, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment was collaboratively designed by artists, designers, and IT technicians, and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos or selected Bangladeshi films. Jothashilpa Founded 2016, Bangladesh Jothashilpa is a centre for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself ‘a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language.’ The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society which emerges from everyday life. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. Through their research and making processes, they collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary and Master Artist of Cinema Banner Painting Mohammad Shoaib and his disciples to realise a timeline that contains exhibitions about collectivity within, grounding us in solidarities of the past and imagining solidarities of the future. Artists involved in this project: Mohammad Shoaib, Shawon Akand, Didarul Dipu, S. M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Hamayet Himu, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim. Kaali Founded 2018, Dhaka, Bangladesh Thuma Founded 2017, Yangon, Myanmar Issues between Bangladesh and Myanmar have been highly publicised in the wake of the Rohingya crisis, dominating conversations related to these two countries’ relationships, and making it nearly impossible for Myanmar citizens to obtain Bangladeshi visas, and vice- versa. Two collectives of young female photographers from either country came together in Yangon in 2019 to explore notions of identity, respect, hope, conflict, and resolution through storytelling and photography, a collaboration which culminated in the photo book project ‘Bridging the Naf ‘(the river connecting Bangladesh and Myanmar). Based on their interests and experiences, artists from each country were paired up and took a journey to solve problems, make decisions, and explode stereotypes through the process of artistic exchange. The Myanmar artists were denied visas to Bangladesh when it was time for the reciprocal exchange to occur, and DAS is facilitating these collectives to meet, for the first time, in Bangladesh. Both collectives realise the difficulties facing female photographers in both Bangladesh and Myanmar; coming together provides them the agency to claim space in their respective art scenes. They share postcards with images and text inspired by their cross-border experience for visitors to bring home. Mata Aho Collective Founded 2012, Aotearoa Ko te moteatea te mataaho ki te pa o te hinengaro Māori. The moteatea is the window to the foresight of Māori. Moteatea are songs rich with metaphor that play important roles within Māori communities. Often sung to support or contest a speech, an action or gesture, moteatea are a documentation of history; a way to uplift or lament ancestors, events and places, transferred through many generations. Mata Aho Collective’s time at DAS 2020 will focus on learning a specific form of moteatea called pātere. Composed by women, these fast, vigorous chants recount kinship connections and plot a journey of significant landmarks. Mata Aho will spend time in wānanga each day learning a pātere composed for them that recounts the whakapapa (layers of genealogy) of their artworks they have created together since 2012. Mata Aho’s presentation at DAS was made possible through the generous support of Creative New Zealand. Pangrok Sulap Collective Founded 2010, Ranau Sabah, Malaysia Pangrok Sulap are a collective based in Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, consisting of indigenous Dusun and Murut artists, musicians and social activists who are dedicated to empowering rural communities through art. Membership is fluid and participation open, and their name expresses their make-up, locality and orientation: Pangrok means punk rock, and Sulap is a hut used as a resting place by Sabahan farmers. Pangrok Sulap has no permanent members as it is ‘willing to welcome anyone who wants to contribute’. Their ethos is conveyed by the slogan ‘Jangan Beli, Bikin Sendiri’: ‘Don’t buy, do it yourself’. The group came together to conduct charity work in rural schools, orphanages and homes for the disabled. Working primarily with wood-cut printmaking, they create works that are impressive in scale and seductive in detail, depicting narratives relating to pertinent issues in Sabah. The group has consistently fought against censorship, worked to spread awareness of Sabah’s endangered rainforests, and promoted the power of the arts to empower. Shako Founded 2003, Dhaka, Bangladesh National Trovoa Founded 2019, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Several artist-led initiatives have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa, a group of black and non-white women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Shako – Women Artists Association of Bangladesh – for women and by women – believes art can play a role in healing society. It raises funds for individuals, male and female, who are unwell or in need of medical treatment; uses art to encourage physically or mentally challenged people; and promotes female artists and helps them develop skills. A ‘shako’ is a temporary bamboo bridge, built to make it possible to cross rivers and streams, an apt metaphor for Shako’s work connecting talented female artists to vulnerable communities. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together these two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia and South America for a 5-hour tea party to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions were published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media, following #darkeningthoughts . Shako also ran a workshop on black empowerment on 13 February from 4–6pm in the 4th floor workshop area. Shoni Mongol Adda Founded 2016, Bangladesh Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open-membership artist-led initiative Shoni Mongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Café, and which is walking distance from the DAS venue. Here, the collective presents a new question every day at DAS in a sign-based format for the audience to consider and debate in addas organised in the discussion area of this amoeba form. It also invited visitors to join them for addas at Kamor Cafe on 8 February and 11 February and hosted artistic delegations from Nepal and Australia. Uronto Founded in 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh Uronto is an artists’ community that reconnects with lost memories of forgotten places through interdisciplinary contemporary artistic interventions. They create opportunities to connect to cultural histories through coexisting and co-creating, gaining access to memories that inspire creative workers and empower current generations with knowledge. The Uronto Residential Art Exchange Programme is one of the major yearly initiatives of Uronto, which involves interactive pop-up residencies and workshops at sites that are mostly abandoned and soon-to-be demolished heritage buildings in rural areas. Uronto believes that if we lose a heritage building we lose a part of our sense of belonging. Each iteration takes place in a new location, explores a new community, and brings together a new group of local and international artists from different backgrounds, including visual artists, writers, musicians, storytellers, architects, poets, engineers, and so on. Operating as a ‘site-responsive’ art exchange programme, ten to fifteen creative practitioners are convened through an international open-call. The participants live in the surroundings of these structures, fully immersed in day-to-day life, for a week to ten days, exploring oral history through the community. The process culminates in an ‘Open Studio Day.’ Since 2012, through nine iterations, Uronto has brought together over a hundred artists of various creative orientations from more than nine countries making work at nearly a dozen soon-to-be-lost architectural structures/palaces in Bangladesh. Uronto mediates between local and international artists, rural and urban inhabitants, as well as conventional and experimental creative disciplines. Through shared experiences and storytelling, they have created an archive (available on their website) of lost narratives. Their work is a collaboration that both cherishes old narratives and creates new ones, resulting in a greater appreciation of the chosen sites.

ALL PROJECTS Volcano Extravaganza | Total Anastrophes Curated by Milovan Farronato With Runa Islam as Artistic Leader Within the frame of the Fiorucci Art Trust (whose stated aim is to ‘collect’ or promote art experiences), Total Anastrophes reimagined the 8th edition of the annual Volcano Extravaganza in Dhaka. Instead of engaging with Stromboli’s landscape and the talisman of its active volcano, the programme transformed the inside of the Shilpakala Academy’s Auditorium into the inner echo chamber of an active volcano. Performative interventions evoked themes of isolation and distance; memory and mysticism; cosmic energy and the violence of nature; improvisation and theatre. On the occasion of its 8th edition, the Volcano Extravaganza — the annual festival of contemporary arts conceived and produced by London-based non-profit institution, the Fiorucci Art Trust — erupted away from its volcanic centre in Stromboli. Taking the empirical and ephemeral experiences collected on the island, the Fiorucci Art Trust migrated the knowledge, the collaborations, the artists, the talks, the volcanic activities: the mind as a volcano and the emotional body with Total Anastrophes. The Artistic Leader was Bangladeshi-born, London-based artist Runa Islam, while the festival was curated, as per tradition, by Milovan Farronato. The participants included Cecilia Bengolea, Alex Cecchetti, Patrizio Di Massimo, Haroon Mirza, Tobias Putrih, Osman Yousefzada (OSMAN)- all figures belonging to the astral orbit of the Trust. After DAS 2018, the Volcano Extravaganza will move back to Stromboli, completing its own anastrophe in July 2018. Total Anastrophes is a figure of speech, a form of poetic license to indicate that something has been taken and moved away, in order to emphasise something else. An alteration of the typical order which might look like a mistake, a transmutation gone wrong: yet anastrophes have the gift to metamorphose a regular sentence into a re-energised version of itself, opening space for chaos, and creation. Away from Iddu (him), as the locals call the volcano of Stromboli, the intention of Fiorucci Art Trust was to create a collective experience. To orchestrate an adequate environment to celebrate self-reflection, remembrance, personal and collective latent memories, as the Trust gazed into its history, and to the many collaborations which have helped characterise it. The auditorium was turned into a theatre inside of a volcano, into an echo-chamber pervaded by sounds and moans, magmatic hertz, vibrations: frequencies of a harmonious language inside a unique cradle for performances, where voices were born from inscrutable sources and latent memories evoked. Visitors were greeted by slowed movements, reverberations and distorted sounds. The echo chamber was inhabited by mobile architectural structures conceived by Tobias Putrih in dialogue with visual imagery and motifs by Runa Islam, acting simultaneously as diaphragms and screens, altering the space to dissolve the border between spectatorship and performers. Moreover, the same drapes of fabrics and textiles hanging from the mobiles became subjects for OSMAN to perform tailoring cutouts and create new designs on the spot, together with local seamstresses, as in a workshop. Re-contextualising both earlier and new performances from their bodies of work, live interventions by Alex Cecchetti and Patrizio Di Massimo were the voice of the echo-chamber. Cecilia Bengolea also drew from her own production history, to trigger and improvise movements and action in the space, through old and new choreographies. Haroon Mirza orchestrated a soundscape for the auditorium: an environment where a distorted sonority synchronised with a visual choreography of LEDs danced in conjunction with his own footage of Stromboli. Audiovisual contributions by Alec Curtis, Anna Boughighian, Roberto Cuoghi, Joana Escoval, Chiara Fumai, Liliana Moro, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Mathilde Rosier, among others, alternatively intervened in the landscape.

ALL PROJECTS বন্যা (Bonna) DAS 2023 is told through the voice of বন্যা (Bonna), a character who speaks from Bangladesh to the world. She is a bold young girl who expresses her dynamic personality fearlessly, refusing to be silenced by her brothers, uncles, or forefathers. Bonna is a common name in Bangladesh, and it also means ‘flood.’ In Bangladesh, a flood does not simply translate into a singular connotation of “disaster.” The DAS concept of বন্যা (Bonna) challenges binaries - between necessity and excess, between regeneration and disaster, between adult and child, between male and female. DAS 2023 invokes and interpretsবন্যা (Bonna) as a complex symbol-system, which is indigenous, personal and at once universal, an embodied non-human reversal of how storms, cyclones, tsunamis, stars, and all environmental crises and “discoveries” are named. বন্যা (Bonna),the young girl, is an activating creative force who offers us an invitation to join her in sharing stories and asking questions. She asks why the words for weather are gendered, what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be…why her namesake has been deployed as a weapon against indigenous people for centuries across the continents. She is filled with wonder when she sees that the traces of her physical growth and traces of floods are measured with similar horizontal lines marked vertically on a wall. She wonders if her name might mean something different now, as the floods she encounters in traditional as well as modern forms of artistic expression are very different from the ones she witnesses outside with her own eyes today. “বন্যা (Bonna)” is joined by over 1,200 Bangladeshi children who made artistic contributions to the exhibition as part of the production process and education programming of DAS 2023. As with the movement of peoples and ideas, languages travel too, often embedded in songs and stories from which we can try to trace their point of origin. DAS 2023 considers the ways in which humans form, inherit, and establish vocabularies to understand the world around us, and the mistranslations that can ensue when we try to apply singular terms to unfamiliar contexts. The same word can migrate from positive to negative connotations and back depending on how and where it travels. Weather and water are shapers of history and culture, as well as being metaphors for life in general. The aim is to see past the limits of translation which can be incapable of conveying the different ways we negotiate the world, while opening new channels for transcultural empathy. How do you tell the story of multiple crises, while facilitating hope? Storms have eyes and eyes have storms. We can be flooded with emotions, yet reduced to singular drops of tears. We give storms human names; we describe human emotions using terms that are also applied to weather. Extreme weather and the absence of state management was the tipping point for Bangladeshis to declare independence in 1971 and fight for the right to express themselves in their own language. As the Ghanaian-Scottish designer, thinker and educator Lesley Lokko insightfully points out, “When you are in the eye of the storm, this is often the right point to push for maximum change.” For millennia, humans have invoked their minds and bodies through prayers, rituals, songs, and dances to summon rain from the sky. Bonna is now learning that humans with power are not only filling the earth with genetically modified seeds, but also now seeding the sky with clouds. During Bengali New Year, Bangladeshi people sing a song written by Rabindranath Tagore, Esho hey Boishakh, which calls upon the first month of summer to bring storms to wash away any residue of ugliness from the previous year. When considering this, and the traditional ways of coping and celebrating polar forces, we must acknowledge that climate change is accelerating and causing even more dramatic events, often beyond the capacity of even the most resilient people’s ability to survive. Climate change is not unidirectional. It is a systemic and episodic transformation of ecologies, systems and structures over time. While these same conditions once historically evolved to be considered as protective, today they are fragile, imbalanced and precarious at multiple scales. DAS 2023, in collaboration with its artists and curators, presents the work of organizations from across the country who are realizing the capacity for more meaningful, just, and beautiful forms of life in situations some may misguidedly see as “hopeless.” Bonna is the overarching narrative of DAS 2023; made up of works of art that tell a story across the venue of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, also containing chapters within it which are complete exhibitions in themselves: Very Small Feelings; Samdani Art Award; To Enter the Sky; and Duality, which are also part of Bonna and are told through the voice of guest curators in dialogue with Chief Curator Diana Campbell, Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Curator and Swilin Haque, Curatorial Assistant. ARTISTS: LOCATION: GROUND FLOOR Joydeb Roaja Submerged dream 8 (জলমগ্ন স্বপ্ন ৮), 2022-2023 Ink on Paper and board Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary This immersive installation submerges visitors in a metaphorical lake of tears. In 1962 under Pakistani rule with American financial and technical support, the construction of the Kaptai dam flooded 400km of Chakma land in what is now Bangladesh, even submerging the Chakma royal palace. Today, tourists in Bangladesh take boat rides over these beautiful waters, mostly unaware of the trauma submerged below the reflective surface that mirrors the sky. To the local indigenous Chakma people, this lake is the site of a heartbreaking event called Bor Porong, or “the great exodus.” Over 100,000 people from about 18,000 families, mostly from indigenous communities, were displaced, resulting in the forced migration to neighboring India of over 35,000 Chakmas and Hajongs. Dams and flooding are a shared weapon of violence against indigenous people all over the world. Roaja’s installation imagines people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts raising the submerged palace from the bottom of the lake back up to the surface, a promise of hope for renewed ways of life after the flood. Part of the artist’s making process involved interviewing multiple generations of indigenous people who remember life before the dam, and also younger generations who have only heard about life before the dam via storytelling and oral tradition. Roaja has an interconnected performance, painting and drawing practice that highlights the challenging social and political landscape of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. His works are tied to the experiences of indigeneity, often emphasizing the deep and symbiotic connection of indigenous people with their land as well as the fight for recognition and rights. His work is an empowering demand preservation of minority cultures. b.1973, Khagrachari; lives and works in Khagrachari Kasper Bosmans No Water, 2019/2023 Instruction based mural Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery No Water refers to the descending level of the ground water table, otherwise known as the boundary between water-saturated ground and unsaturated ground. This descent is partly the result of sand mining and the proliferation of concrete architecture. These works were produced according to the instructions of the artist Kasper Bosmans, which are always the same: the uppermost segment of the painting must be blue, the lowest one brown. Specific hues of each color are chosen by people who have a connection with the place where the work is being shown, in this case, nine people who have been working on Dhaka Art Summit since 2012. They also determine the height of the horizon, but this may never be situated precisely in the middle of the wall, giving rise to playful involvement to create a portrait of Dhaka Art Summit and its surroundings. This is part of a series of instruction based, participatory works found across the Summit. Bosmans is a storyteller; a keen observer of the many ways in which images probe the boundaries between nature and fiction, art and craft. From an intuitive, playful, as well as anthropological approach, he takes the remnants of local traditions, tales, and mythological iconography to speak about global questions in today’s world. b. 1990, Lommel; lives and works in Brussels Matt Copson Age of Coming, 2021 Laser animation with 16 minute audio soundtrack Samdani Art Foundation Collection Formed by a laser machine that flickers in nearly every color, a naked baby created by the artist Matt Copson faces storms inside and outside of his shapeshifting body, which sings to us about his existential conflicts. This work is inspired by the iconic self-help book Diary of a Baby that follows the journey of a baby discovering the world step by step until he turns four years old. The baby expresses how he feels hunger as a storm: “A storm threatens. The light turns metallic. The march of clouds across the sky breaks apart. Pieces of sky fly off in different directions. The wind picks up force, in silence. There are rushing sounds, but no motion. The wind and its sound have separated. Each chases after its lost partner in fits and starts. The world is disintegrating. Something is about to happen.” Copson’s ravenous baby swallows a chair, then a gun, then a plane and grows larger and larger until disintegrating into an abstract work of art. Copson talks about this shift: “The baby wants it all: every color possible, to grow and grow and this is impossible. The laser projector is a mechanical device and the growing density of information eventually means that it can no longer even depict an image and becomes a barrage of spinning broken lines.” This work captures the struggle of trying to obtain something impossible, and the beauty that can be found in these existential quests. Based on theatrical elements and artistic tropes, Copson broaches notions of contemporaneity, abstraction, automation, recurrence, the eternal, and the strange in his work as an artist and a director. He uses elements ranging from classical philosophy to traditional folklore to introduce familiar characters, sometimes partially sketched or whose process of abstraction is incomplete. Generally expressed in the form of a monologue, these characters are perceived through perpetual questioning as to their state or present situation, always hard to pin down and impossible to resolve. b. 1992, Oxford; lives and works in London and Los Angeles Miet Warlop Chant For Hope, 2022-2023 Participatory performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation in partnership with KANAL, Centre Pompidou, Brussels with support from the Flemish Region of Belgium and EUNIC Inspired by the history of the language movement and movement of language in Bangladesh, visitors get swept into the trance conjured by a participatory dancing sculpture which injects energy to propel makers (of history) past exhaustion. Chant for Hope is an incantatory ritual that aims, literally and figuratively, to convey hope for a better world. The performers act as cheerleaders and freedom fighters, injecting energy and meaning into the struggle for life. A group of performers sculpt a series of words in Bengali by flooding molds with plaster, which become moving sculptures that can be rearranged and find new meaning as they are passed between the performers and the audience. The audience thus becomes a participant: spectators are asked to take all the words out into the 'real' world, into the street and/or into their homes. The content of Chant for Hope thus spreads, literally, as a critical reflection and as an invitation to connect ourselves more with each other, as human beings. Warlop’s work is about making the static-dynamic and making the dynamic-static. She treats art as an experience, like ritual concerts or objects animated by choreography. She works in cycles rather than in projects and believes in the attitude that accompanies an idea, using a combination of performance, choreography, theater, and sculpting skills to make her shows. Her work amplifies the dynamics of personal relationships that are created between memories, skin, objects and sounds. b. 1978, Torhout; lives and works in Brussels LOCATION: SOUTH PLAZA Afrah Shafiq Where do the Ants Go?, 2022-2023 Immersive game installation This project was created as part of the "to-gather" international collaboration of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council with curatorial support of Diana Campbell, Fernanda Brenner, Chus Martinez, Daniel Baumann, and Iaroslav Volovod Where do the Ants Go? is a large-scale sculpture of an anthill that the audience can enter and interact with a colony of ants that live within it. Using real time inputs the “players” within the anthill make choices that affect the behavior of the individual ants and the collective outcome of the colony. The anthill is imagined as a real-life rendering from the game Minecraft, using the logic of voxels and referencing immersive environments, speculative futures and web3.0; the ant colony set within it translates ant behaviors from the natural world into algorithms and data sets. As more and more of human existence continues to play out in the virtual space where conversation is mediated by seemingly invisible algorithms, the installation creates a meeting ground between the physical and digital, the algorithm and consciousness, the virtual world and the natural world and offers a space to step back, observe patterns and perhaps even re-set. Shafiq uses the process of research as an artistic playground. She intertwines archival findings, history, memory, folklore and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remix culture. Her work moves across various mediums drawing from the handmade language of traditional folk forms and connecting them to the digital language of the Internet and video games. When she is not glued to her computer she makes glass mosaics. b. 1989, Bangalore; lives and works in Goa Ahmet Öğüt Balanced Protest Banners, 2022-2023 Bamboo stilts, Digital Print, Performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and Latvian Center for Contemporary Art with support from SAHA and Goethe Institut Bangladesh and the curatorial contribution of iLiana Fokianaki Performers walk across the South Plaza on bamboo stilts that are both support structures and also protest banners highlighting difficult-to-find goods and commodities in Bangladesh such as cherry blossoms, avocados, blueberries and kiwis. This precarious balancing act invites us to consider what we might take for granted as we exert ourselves in the world. Bangladeshis in villages, as well as Indians in similar climatic contexts, address their rising water levels by creating tools for living similar in form to these stilts, finding new ways to walk on unstable ground.Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist, and lecturer. Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, the artist often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on serious and/or pressing social and political issues. Öğüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in collective perception of society. B. 1981, Diyarbakır; lives and works in Istanbul, Amsterdam and Berlin This work is also part of Very Small Feelings Antony Gormley TURN, 2022-2023 A 2.5km line of bamboo Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationCourtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens Bamboo, the world’s largest grass, can be a metaphor for generative transfers of energy in Bangladesh. It grows high out of the earth powered by photosynthesis and when harvested, is bundled and tied together to form large rafts that float down Bangladesh’s many rivers, then unbundled and transferred to construction sites across the country to be transformed into architecture, a kind of second-body for human and non-human bodies to dwell in. Antony Gormley and a team of Bangladeshi artisans have transformed 2.5km of bamboo into a drawing in space that could also be seen as a sculpture or as a second skin for the visitors passing through it. It is an energy field, exploding like unfurled springs and seemingly boundless orbits, a line transformed into an infinite loop without beginning or end. It makes us think about time, which can be perceived as linear in some contexts, circular in others. Our bodies, and how they move in making drawings, sculptures, and architecture are interconnected in their role in world-building. How can we create and collaborate on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy? Continuing along the shapeshifting journey of bamboo in Bangladesh, the work will be recycled into other forms after Dhaka Art Summit is over. Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviors, thoughts and feelings can arise. He studied meditation in South Asia in the 1970s prior to attending art school, and this is his first return to the region since 1974. b. 1950, London; lives and works in London Ashfika Rahman বেহুলা আজকাল (Behula These Days), 2022-2023 Community-led photography and textile installation Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist বেহুলা আজকাল (Behula These Days) is a collaborative community project articulating the violence against women around in one of the most flood-prone areas in Bangladesh, which is also the birthplace of the mythological figure Behula. Behula is the protagonist of one of the most popular epic mythological love stories in Bengal - Behula and Lakhindar - written between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the plot line, Lakhindar (Behula’s husband) lost his life on their wedding night through the curse of the Hindu goddess of snakes, Manasa. In the hopes that a victim of a snake bite could miraculously be brought back to life, it was customary that the dead body would float down the river rather than be cremated. Behula accompanied her husband’s dead body on a raft towards heaven, facing many dangers and praying to Manasa and all of the gods to revive her husband. Once in heaven, Behula pleased all of the gods with her beautiful and enchanting dancing and earned her husband's life back. Behula’s sacrifice and isolation from society are regarded as the epitome of a loving and loyal wife in Bengali culture. This popular mythological love story is translated through the lens of feminism in Ashfika Rahman’s work. Idolizing such a sacrifice and celebrating such isolation through the reverence of Behula, while villainizing Manasa (the goddess of the snakes) who needed devotion from a man in order to reach heaven, speaks to ongoing systemic violence against women. Behula and the many women she represents float without agency on their own lifes’ paths. Rahman’s epic investigative project traces the footprints of Behula through the riverline and landscapes mentioned in the epic story. She collected stories of violence against women on the river bank, which is isolated and almost impossible to navigate during the many floods there. The women illustrated their stories on their own portraits displayed here, which reconsider this epic love story from the lens of contemporary reality. Death rates during floods do not have gender balance; more women die in floods, speaking to the gendered nature of climate-based violence, which is tied to societal beliefs about a woman’s role at home. Rahman’s practice explores and experiments with photography, using media ranging from historical techniques like 19th-century printmaking to documentary approaches and contemporary media. Photography is the predominant medium that she uses to express her views on complex systemic social issues such as violence, rape, and religious extremism – often overlooked by the administrative machinery of the state. In her practice, she creates a conceptual timeline of the stereotypes of victims, repeated across history, notably in regard to minority communities in Bangladesh. b. 1988, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Bhasha Chakrabarti নরম অতিক্রমণ (Tender Transgressions), 2022-2023 Site Specific Installation Made from Jute, Bamboo, and Tropical Plants Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation with support from EMK Center, Dhaka Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter নরম অতিক্রমণ (Tender Transgressions) is a site specific installation which explores the concept of Bonna as the feminine form of bonno, meaning wild, untameable, and excessive, all words historically used to denigrate women’s sexuality. The large-scale work transforms nine columns that structurally hold up the building of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy into a jungle of anthropomorphic feminine forms. It materially references Navapatrika, a Hindu practice common in Bengal, where plants are wrapped in sarees and worshiped as embodiments of the goddess Durga. Here, the plant being venerated is jute: essential to the economy of Bangladesh, dependent on excessive rainfall, and commonly used as a fabric support in Western painting. This transformation of rigid architectural supports into supple caryatids of cloth and crop, breaks down binaries of strong and soft, functional and decorative, necessity and excess. Chakrabarti engages with art-making as a process of mending, which is primarily associated with clothing, and then extended to relationships. As opposed to other forms of repair, traditionally undertaken by men in a professional capacity, mending is largely non-transactional and often delegated to women. Working across painting, weaving, sound, and installation, her work explores how art can function as a mode of public discourse rather than being a self-contained discipline, bringing feminist ways of being to the fore in a patriarchal world. b. 1991, Honolulu; lives and works in New Haven Bishwajit Goswami ঋতু, 2022-2023 Mural and interactive performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist The word ঋতু (Reetu), meaning ‘seasons’, is also a commonly used first name for Bengali girls, culturally and symbolically related to the name ‘বন্যা (Bonna)’. Bangladesh has six seasons (and some would argue “had” as climate change has made two of the seasons difficult to recognize anymore) each harkening a particular mood, feelings and cultural practices. (Human) life can also be measured in seasons. Goswami connects these personal stories of land, nature and seasons with words, pigment and touch. Fragments of memory enable a sensorial, intimate exchange of feelings and words to take place with the artist, and within the self, manifesting in moving drawings connecting our inner and outer worlds. Bishwajit Goswami began his career as a figurative, hyper-realist painter. Inspired by the Bangla language and its written formation, the artist has been breaking down and rearranging and reconstructing his artistic language into abstract forms and shapes. Institution building and education is also a core-part of his creative practice as the founder of Brihatta Art Foundation and as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. B. 1981, Netrakona; lives and works in Dhaka Roman Ondák Measuring the Universe, 2007/2023 For the whole duration of the exhibition, gallery attendants offer to the exhibition visitors marking their height on the gallery walls along with their first name and the date on which the measurement was taken. Performance, felt-tip pens, guards, audienceFrom the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York As we grow(up), our scale to the world and our understanding of time changes. Flood lines and people are measured in similar ways; vertical markings on walls. Measuring the Universe extends out of Roman Ondák’s interest in blurring lines between art and everyday life, and using simple means to create complex images that can metaphorically compete with cutting-edge technology. Ondák got the idea to create this work after frequently taking measurements of his sons’ heights at home as they were growing up, and he created this instruction-based work by extrapolating this personal, intimate act into an exhibition space where guards write visitors’ measurements on the wall, creating the presence of people into a physical object. The work begins with a blank, white, room, but over time, a thick black band of names will begin to encircle the walls, almost resembling a galaxy where each black mark of a visitor’s name could resemble a star. These marks are part of registering the passage of time, the public experience of Dhaka Art Summit. Ondák’s artistic interventions blur the boundaries between art and the everyday, challenging traditional hierarchies between artists and non-artists, the artwork and the spectator and between public and private domains. In presenting elements of everyday life in an art context, new perspectives on social relations and human experience arise. Ondak’s relational art practice breaks with the traditional idea of the art object - the constructed social environment becomes the art. Choosing immersion over representation, he invites viewers, friends and family, to play a vital role in his work, enlisting their own creativity in the process of following his instructions. The result is a controlled study of collective discovery and imagination. b. 1966, Zilina; lives and works in Bratislava Sumayya Vally They who brings rain, brings life, 2022-2023 Ceramic vessels activated by performance Performance 7pm daily Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationCo-curated by Diana Campbell and Sean Anderson as an overlay of “To Enter the Sky” on the 2nd floor of DAS oletha imvula uletha ukuphila Translation: “They who brings rain, brings life” IsiZulu proverb Wielding the comings of rain is a tradition practiced by cultures across geographies. To possess the power to command rainfall is by inference possessing the power to dictate the flow of the natural cycle and climatic conditions. Across Southern Africa, rain-making rituals are directed towards royal ancestors because they were believed to have control over rain and other natural phenomena. One of these rare and powerful individuals is the Moroka of the Pedi tribe in South Africa: the traditional rain-making doctor. Here, a series of fired and unfired clay vessels are assembled as a temporal space to hold gatherings. Over the course of DAS, a series of performances which draw on the traditions of rain-making and harvest are performed in the space where the hands that formed the pots also work to un-form them. The rituals include the use of water, which allows the un-fired pots to dissolve over time, revealing areas and niches of gathering contained by the pots, as well as rhythmic drumming that evokes the sound of thunder at the end of each day. Vally’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions. Her design process is often forensic, and draws on the aural, the performative and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. B. 1990, Pretoria; lives and works in London LOCATION: SECOND FLOOR, GALLERY 4: STORMS HAVE EYES AND EYES HAVE STORMS Antora Mehrukh Azad Ground Zero, 2022-2023 Oil on Canvas Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist Ground Zero is a large-scale landscape painting that depicts the modern relationship between nature and humans. The work depicts how the natural Bangladeshi landscape has gradually been subdued and replaced by citified objects such as traffic signs, poles, and neon colors. It is a stylized, exaggerated rendition of common Bangladeshi flood scenes. Bangladesh is suffering from severe floods and rising sea levels, more extreme than in the past as a result of global warming. With the next flood perpetually around the corner, Bangladesh is frequently referred to as “ground zero for climate change.” The bright neon pink water body symbolizes how this situation is not entirely natural but rather manmade, and how silently Bangladeshis are metaphorically treading water as the sea level rises, finding new ways to survive. Azad’s work is based on the modern connection between nature and humanity. Exaggerating the increased toxicity in this relationship with an overtly artificial color palette, her paintings reveal how urban life is gradually taking over the natural world. b. 1994, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Ayesha Sultana Breath Count, 2019 Mark-making on clay-coated paper Samdani Art Foundation Collection Nightfall, 2022 Acrylic and oil on canvas Samdani Art Foundation Collection Untitled, 2023 Aluminum Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from Experimenter Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter Untitled, 2023 Aluminum Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from Experimenter Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter Ayesha Sultana’s recent work negotiates space and distance by measuring the space between things – such as the breaks between taking breaths – marking the rhythm of the day. She contemplates the relationship between her hand, her body, and the rest of the landscape surrounding her, making visible the motion of rhythm without being seen. Through a body of scratch drawings on clay-coated paper, Breath Count are personal explorations of movement, mark-making and corporeality. Ayesha reveals staccato patterns that represent a delicate inward probe of her own body using count, distance, motion and removal in breath in these works. Like the marble lines in Louis Kahn’s parliament building, which mark the labor of a day’s work casting concrete, Sultana’s marks measure the labor of internal bodily systems, which are related to the toxicity of the world outside which are internalized as we breathe. Floor-based aluminum sculptures seem to freeze a flood of acid rain, holding toxicity back from its onward journey. A painting depicting the sea and a seemingly infinite space beyond can be seen as a portrait of the artist’s personal emotions as well as her constant return to looking at water as an amorphous, shape-shifting medium that holds more than what is apparent on its surface. Sultana works with drawing, painting, sculpture,and sound, through processes that translate notions of space. She employs drawing as a tool of inquiry, through cutting, folding, stitching, layering, recording, and tracing applied to her series characterized by repetition, variation, and rhythm. Sultana often draws inspiration from architecture and the natural environment. b. 1984 in Jessore; lives and works in Dhaka Hana Miletic Materials, 2022 Hand-woven and hand-knit textile (azure blue cottolin, cobalt blue repurposed mercerised cotton, dark blue peace silk, deep blue organic cottolin, gold repurposed polyester, indigo washed rub- ber cotton, ocean blue organic linen, variegated blue recycled wood, and white peace silk) Materials, 2022 Hand-woven (barley white organic cotton, beige repurposed mercerised cotton, brown variegated recycled wool, gold metal yarn, and organic hemp) Materials, 2022 Hand-woven textile (beige peace silk, and white repurposed polyester) Materials, 2022 Hand-woven and felt textile (copper repurposed polyester, dandelion yellow, dark brown, cinnamon brown, russet brown, and white-yellow raw wool) Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with the support of the Flanders Region of Belgium Courtesy of the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda and The Approach The positions, shapes, colors and textures of repairs and transformations in public space, often made in quick and improvised ways on buildings, infrastructure and vehicles as the material consequences of economic and political actions, can also be seen as marks of gestures of care and repair. They are core to the way the artist Hana Miletić experiences the world, and these woven sculptures are based on repairs and transformations that the artist observed after a recent flood in her home country, Croatia. The museum quarter where the artist was exhibiting flooded due to heavy rainfall combined with rising sea levels. As is the case of Bangladesh, but admittedly to a lesser extent, this huge influx of water is the result of climate change. The world outside seeped into the museum world inside, a normally pristine, utopian space. The artist photographed the repairs and transformations made by the city authorities and the individual residents the morning after the flood, and based on these photographs, she produced these works for Dhaka. Through these hand-woven textiles, Miletić is sharing in Bangladesh the soft power of care and resilience from her homeland, and proposing a dialogue between these two geographically remote yet familiar practices of repair. Miletić reflects on issues of representation and social reproduction by making linkages between photography and weaving. The artist models her handwoven textiles after her photographs that document vernacular, often do-it-yourself, repairs in public space. Remaking these repairs allows Miletić to understand and participate in the complexity of society, striving to tell alternative feminist stories of technology and progress stemming from the loom, the precursor of the computer today. Miletić uses the weaving process – which requires considerable time and dedication – as a way to counteract certain economic and social conditions at work, such as acceleration, standardization and transparency. b. 1982, Zagreb; lives and works in Brussels and Zagreb Krishna Reddy River, 1959 Whirlpool, 1963 Samdani Art Foundation Collection Krishna Reddy’s prints consider elements of nature and his life experiences in diverse landscapes. Early representational works including Insect (1952) and Fish (1952) explore the physical structure of those animals, physically bringing about the image by mixing liquid inks of different densities together at the same time, freezing them in time by printing them on a single plate. Through the 1950s, his works became progressively more abstract, and River (1959) refers to the movement of its subject but avoids direct representation. Reddy’s prints of the 1960s reflect a strong sense of dynamism, as Wave (1963) and Whirlpool (1963) each reveal the immediacy of water in motion, and through color variation and modulation of line show the fleeting collision of water with air and light. Reddy was born in rural Andhra Pradesh, India and educated at the idyllic Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan. As a student of pioneering artist Nandalal Bose at Santiniketan in the mid 1940s, Reddy absorbed India’s great heritage of figuration by traveling to historical sites including Ajanta and drawing the goddesses represented at the caves. He later studied sculpture under famed British artist Henry Moore, whose work shaped Reddy’s abstracted figurative sculptures. Reddy then moved to Paris where he joined Stanley William Hayter’s intaglio printmaking studio, Atelier 17. He approached the intaglio plate from the perspective of a sculptor, lending a sculptural quality to his printmaking throughout his career. At Atelier 17, Reddy invented the technique of simultaneous color printmaking by experimenting with the use of several colors of different viscosities on a single plate. Reddy is best known for this innovation, and it can be seen in the fluid layering of colors in the works on view here, especially from the 1960s onwards. b. 1929, Nandanoor; d. 2018, New York Lala Rukh Mirror Image II 1, 2 & 3, 2011 Graphite on carbon paper Samdani Art Foundation Collection Gazing deep into the dark black carbon paper, subtle, almost flickering glimpses of water’s movement on a moonlit night reveal themselves to the viewer. In the words of the artist and art historian Mariah Lookman, the subtle graphite markings appear “like phosphates that are able to absorb and reflect back barely visible traces of light. The marks one can see are like those signs of life that are reflected back onto the paper by hand of the artist, who [was] living through perhaps the bleakest of times in Pakistan’s history. Given the high level of violence that is perpetrated on innocent civilians, the darkness in the work speaks volumes of the horror and tragedy that is witnessed in everyday life. And yet, in the fine lines against the darkness of the paper, I can see signs are still symbolic of hope, of anticipation, expectation, and a force and belief against pure forces of nihilism.” One of the foremost feminist activists of South Asia, Rukh’s contribution to art and culture spans far beyond the visual arts and into politics, music, and countless other parts of civic life in Pakistan and the wider region. Her works often chart horizons and draw together the waves we experience in nature as sight and the waves we experience within as sound, bridging inner and outer worlds and asking for heightened sense of perception from the viewer. b. 1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore Lucas Arruda Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2018 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2020 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2020 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2021 oil on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM who also provided support for this presentation The first image of Earth taken from outer space, Blue Marble, captures the image of a cyclone over the Bay of Bengal; it is fitting that Arruda’s cyclones find their debut here in Bangladesh.“Light constitutes an essential aspect of Lucas Arruda’s paintings, even though it’s never as much a representation of light as a representation of the presence of light; indirect, subtle, glowing not shining. Only a hint of the sunlight, whose rays struggle through dark clouds above the seas, is nervously reflected by countless waves. Or are these foreboding images of impending climate change, of toxic skies and a world void of inhabitants?” “The small format, the repetitiveness of Arruda’s imagery may strike one as minimalistic, yet it is anything but mechanical. There’s a physical dimension: Arruda presses his brush into the paint, roughens it up. Turned and turned while pressed, the brushes move in circles and in angular strokes. They scratch the paint. The handle of the brush incises the paint, cutting the surface up like with a knife or a burin, revealing what lies below the surface, revealing more than meets the eye. It reminds us on an etching and yet the quality of the engraved paint is not a one-dimensional image as in a print. The landscape visibly becomes a painted construct. The hair of the brush transforms into bristle scratching the wet painting away in a manner that is as forceful as it is elegant. Arruda’s subtractive method of painting is like writing a story in beautiful calligraphy, one that goes under the skin. Paintings that glow from within.* ” *Text by Till-Holger Borchert edited by Diana Campbell Between sky and earth, ethereal and solid, imagination and reality, Arruda presents meditations on the infinite drawn from his memory while highlighting the materiality of the media he works with, from paint to film. As we move above and below horizon lines, the artist puts us before atmospheres that are charged with visual as well as metaphysical questions. b. 1983, São Paulo; lives and works in São Paulo Marina Tabassum Photograph of Khudi Bari structure photo credit: Asif Salman, 2022 Marina Tabassum and her team are among a generation of architects and designers who see the power of design as a generative resource; a significant creator of value even in the face of meager financial resources and plentiful contextual challenges. To quote her, a paucity of means should not limit hopes and dreams. The Khudi Bari (Bengali for ‘Tiny House’) is an example of this kind of thinking and action, a modular, mobile home that can be fabricated for as little as 500 dollars that provides elevation to save goods and lives in the wake of flash floods on tiny “desert islands” of sand known as 'chars' that are dotted precariously across the Bengal delta (and also visible in the background of SM Sultan’s painting exhibited next to this photograph). Land is fluid on the floodplains of Bangladesh, and these islands often break off and erode into the water, making it necessary for people to physically move their home as the land it was originally placed on may no longer exist. Tabassum’s design mimics the traditional language of architecture on the Bengal delta to create modular mobile housing units that are low cost, durable, and can be assembled and disassembled within a short time with minimum labor, taking advantage of a rigid space-frame structure. Khudi Bari reminds us to look to locally rooted knowledges to innovate solutions for uncertain futures. As an architect, Marina Tabassum has established a language of architecture that is contemporary to the world yet rooted to the place. She rejects the global pressure of consumer architecture, a fast breed of buildings that are out of place and context, pledging to root architecture to the place informed by climate and geography. She and her team engage in extensive research on the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, working closely with geographers, landscape architects, planners and other allied professionals. The focus of her studio, Marina Tabbasum Architects (MTA) and the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (FACE) which she founded, also extends to the marginalized ultra-low income population of the country with a goal to elevate the environmental and living conditions of all people. b. 1968, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Marzia Migliora Paradoxes of Plenty #51 (Big Wave), 2022-2023 Ink on paper Courtesy of the Artist and Lia Rumma Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationPresentation realized with the support of ARAV s.r.lSilvian Heach, SH, John Richmond, JR kids, Trussardi Kids, Marcobologna Marzia Migliora’s ongoing series of drawings, I Paradossi dell’abbondanza (Paradoxes of Plenty, 2017-2023), is a continuation of the artist’s studies over the last years reflecting on the relationship between food production, commodities and surplus value of the capitalist system and the exploitation of natural, animal and human resources. A visual exploration of the paradoxes that govern consumer society, this series outlines the limitations of an anachronistic model antithetical to present-day environmental and social emergencies. Reflecting on the dramatically visible consequences of climate change in Bangladesh, such as frequent flooding, tropical cyclones, riverbank erosion, and high salinity levels in groundwater, Paradoxes of Plenty #51 is a large-scale drawing depicting the rush of a giant wave that reveals the depths of a sea. Ecosystems of a multi-species universe are animated in this work by schools of fish realized using the gyotaku technique, used by Japanese fishermen in the nineteenth-century. This technique is a direct printing method that involves fish covered in cuttlefish ink as a matrix imprinted directly on Washi rice paper. The presence of fishing nets lying on the bottom of the work points to the consequences of intensive fishing and the phenomenon of ghost nets, which constitute 85% of the plastic waste in the world's marine waters. In the metaphorical sense, the words ‘Big Wave’ in the title also refer to the surfing practice of looking for the perfect wave. The artist pays homage to Ayesha, a young surfer from Cox's Bazar, who defied social norms and dared to surf in the ocean, becoming the subject of the award winning Bangladeshi documentary Nodorai (I'm not Afraid). Marzia Migliora uses a wide range of media including photography, video, sound, performance, installations and drawing to focus on everyday life. She investigates themes like identity and desire, delving into present and past history and putting memory into relation with places and spaces. Her projects are like questions that trigger the active engagement of the observer, who becomes the protagonist without whom the work cannot be resolved. The artist’s goal is to propose an experience that can be lived and shared by the audience. B. 1972, Alessandria; lives and works in Turin Michael John Whelan And they did live by watchfires 1, 2020 pigment print on paper, 50 x 40cm, edition 1/3 And they did live by watchfires 2, 2020 pigment print on paper, 200 x 160cm, edition 1/3 Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise These analog photographs explore light pollution, specifically skyglow, as an eco-marker of humanity’s unbridled global population growth and subsequent effects on the environment. Today over half the world’s population live in cities. According to research from the UN, by 2050 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities. Michael John Whelan has been documenting urban densification from an array of locations (including Dubai, Vienna and Dublin) and elevations, focussing on the abstract visual gradient caused by the artificial light refracting in the night sky. The light sources themselves are excluded from the image, focusing only on the effects. Abstraction becomes a tool for accessibility and contemplation on how our ways of life affect the circadian rhythms of the planet. Working across film, video, photography and sculpture, Whelan’s practice asserts the landscape as a place where traumatic narratives overlap with the evidence of anthropogenic processes. Whelan undertakes extensive long-term projects documenting elusive but ever-present phenomena like light pollution or darkness. Animals, people or places, like the last Irish wolf, a young marine biologist struggling with the effects of climate change, or the world’s most radioactive ocean, are given agency within his work. b. 1977, Dublin; lives and works in Berlin Pol Taburet Out the womb, 2022 Parade, 2022 alcohol based paint and raw pigment Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM who also provided support for this presentation with alongside Alliance Francaise de Dacca For millennia, humans have invoked their minds and bodies through prayers, rituals, songs, and dances to summon rain from the sky. These bold, spiritually charged paintings depict that age-old human desire to extend our power of movement on earth to universes above us. Ghostly figures in the foreground dance and pulse with the energy of thunder and lightning inside of them to make it rain and bring about abundance. There is something haunting, even sinister about these figures, who seem to conjure dark magic. In the language of hip-hop, the term “make it rain” refers to a hypothetical relationship between the rapper and the devil invented by fans, where the rapper conjures the devil in a quest to make money manifest itself as if falling from the sky. Taburet’s work brings a complex range of reference including his Caribbean background and its syncretic voodoo traditions and belief systems, wider contemporary culture, and Western classical painting. He developed his unique painting style by incorporating the use of airbrushing alongside traditional brush painting with acrylic colors, symbolic of his work which mixes the old and the new. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, his work speaks of life and death, and the passage from one state to the other. b. 1997, Paris; lives and works in Paris Rithika Merchant Transtidal, 2022 Gouache, watercolor, and ink on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Tarq who also provided support for this presentation River deltas are environments, gateways between rivers and seas that offer challenges and opportunities, where the conditions for sustaining life change throughout the days and seasons. Deltas are cradles of life and tell a story of evolution from the sea, by the river, to the land, possibly representing what the future holds. We now have to go backwards as the sea gains ground and makes land hostile. Like the mudskippers floating in the foreground of this work, we too will have to learn to be amphibious as waters rise. This watercolor is inspired by the nomadic river based Bede community of Bangladesh. They reap the benefits of water as a life giver and have adapted to overcome the more destructive aspects of the water. As waters rise, their amphibious way of living on the river is something many of us may have to adopt on our ever flooding planet in order to survive. Figures from Bangla lore such as crocodile djinns and snakes appear in the work, speaking to fertility, prosperity, and abundance tied to river based life. Snakes are a source of livelihood for the Bede community who earn income from snake charming, snake catching and snake selling, generating possibility from a place others may cower away from in fear. Both the Goliath Heron and the Peregrine Falcon inhabit the mangrove and can be seen as sacred animals integral to the ecosystem, immortalized here as constellations and stars reflecting in the winding rivers connecting the desert to the mountains to the sea to the sky. Merchant is fascinated with navigation. She is inspired by how old maps and celestial charts are folded and stored, and how they are built up with water-based paint on paper, transformed by exposure to the sun and the elements over time, appearing very different to us now than when they were originally made. After she finishes her paintings, she folds them up into geometric shapes and unfolds them to create and reveal a narrative of the paper’s journey. She imagines that in the future, someone might come across her folded drawings in a book or in a drawer and when they unfold them, they would find strange and otherworldly maps, with creatures and clues from another time. b.1986 Mumbai, lives and works in Barcelona and Mumbai Safiuddin Ahmed Flood, 1994 Flood 8, 2004 Gusty Wind, 2005 Bare Trees-2, 2004 Charcoal on paper The Cry, 1980 Copper engraving print Courtesy of the Shilpaguru Safiuddin Ahmed Memorial Storms have eyes and eyes have storms. Safiuddin Ahmed emblazoned the relationship between Bangladeshis and the storms plaguing them from inside their bodies and outside through floods and wars in his iconic prints and lesser-known, haunting charcoal drawings, which are rarely exhibited. Pulsing with emotion, these works speak to Bangladesh’s ongoing cry for freedom from both natural and manmade violence. Their symbolism speaks to the entanglement of human and non-human life on the Bengal delta. Ahmed helped raise the profile of printmaking in Bangladesh, a discipline often considered of secondary importance, by adopting it as his main medium and inspiring others to engage with the medium through his teaching practice. His work addresses the violence of water and the storms, literal and metaphorical, that Bengali people live with culturally. Many of his titles address strong emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear paired with symbolic scenes of water, fishing, and flooding. b. 1922, Calcutta; d. 2012 in Dhaka Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska The Womb of the Land, 2022 People of De-occupied Territories, 2022 Oil on Canvas Courtesy of the Artist Voluptuous female forms keep a violent sky at bay, feeding and fuelling a counter-apocalypse with their life-giving energy. Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska has been painting harbingers of life in the midst of war-torn Ukraine, depicting the role that women play in keeping the world alive in the midst of man-made horrors, both today, and also historically in her homeland with countless injustices including man-made famine, the Holodomor, which parallel histories in Bangladesh when it, too, was a colonially occupied territory. As a visual artist, Shahmuradova-Tanska she mainly works with graphics and painting, searching for the barely explored roots of her ancestry through collective and personal archetypes. Women are the main protagonists in her work, which is also inspired by her experience training in ballet and studying drawing with an elderly Jewish artist who introduced her to Jewish frescoes, among other references. b. 1996, Odessa; lives and works in Kyiv SM Sultan Untitled, 1987 Natural dyes on unprimed jute canvas Samdani Art Foundation Collection While South Asian art history describes him as a landscape painter, S.M. Sultan is remembered in Bangladesh for his energetic paintings of bulbous-muscled farmers made after 1975. These large-scale paintings, primarily made with natural pigments on unprimed jute canvases, celebrate the strength of Bengali peasants, both male and female, in their struggle against colonial and ecological disasters. Famine had been plaguing the country on and off from the era of the British Raj until just the year before Sultan first painted these icons of physical might. In this context, his depiction of the weak and downtrodden as invincible forces cultivating the future of Bangladesh can be seen as subversive. Small islands, known as chars, dot the landscape in the background of this painting, an integral part of the Bangladeshi landscape. While still violent, the storms and floods impacting Bangladesh’s landscape during Sultan’s time are different from those experienced now, yet architects and designers are turning toward traditional solutions from Bangladesh’s wetlands to imagine ways to survive on wetter and wetter land. Sultan’s work as both an artist and an educator highlight the importance of rural culture in the collective identity of Bangladesh. After traveling extensively as a celebrated artist both internationally and within South Asia, Sultan retreated from urban life, moving to his home village of Narail, where he founded the Shishu Shwarga art school. His devotion to rural art education has had a lasting legacy, inspiring many initiatives to promote personal growth outside of urban centers through art. b. 1923, Narail; d. 1994, Jessore Veronika Hapchenko Shelter, 2022 Acrylic and Ink on Canvas Samdani Art Foundation Collection This painting is Veronika Hapchenko’s contemporary interpretation of the mosaic Windfighter, a depiction of a bird fighting the wind that was created by the legendary artist Alla Horska in 1967 for Mariupol’s restaurant Ukraina, recently destroyed by shellings in July, 2022. This work commences a new series by the artist devoted to the topic of Soviet avant-garde mosaics and murals from the 1960s and 1970s located on the territory of Ukraine. These works of art once spoke of a bright, peaceful future of the republic, and are now being destroyed in the course of the Russian invasion and bombardment of Ukrainian cultural heritage sites. A first glance at this painting reveals two figures of long-haired women flanking a mysterious shape placed in the center of the scene. Upon a closer look, one notices that the women’s strands of hair form a roof over the heads of the multitude of figures whose faces emerge from the body outlines. With silhouettes infinitely looped in the composition, it is difficult for the viewer to establish the number of people who are sheltered in this painting. Like Bengal in the 1940s, Ukraine also suffered a man-made famine in the 1930s known as the Holodomor. Responding to violent, ongoing histories of oppression, Hapchenko, as well as the iconic Bangladeshi painter SM Sultan, paint figures with bulging muscles of epic strength, refusing to be reduced to skin and bones by occupying forces and rising up to protect their communities and ways of life. Coming from a stage design background that migrated into painting and object making, Hapchenko’s practice has a strong research foundation. Looking to philosophical theses, cultural archives and oral history in her work, the artist traces legends and taboos surrounding revolutionary artists and political gurus to deconstruct and rethink the cultural tropes of the former USSR, which oscillated between esotericism and militarism throughout the twentieth century. This work was commissioned by KANAL- Centre Pompidou, Brussels to mark their inaugural feminist conference and garner support for the crisis in Ukraine. B. 1995, Kyiv, lives and works in Krakow LOCATION: SECOND FLOOR Amit Dutta Mother, Who Will Weave Now?, 2022 Digital AnimationCommissioned by MAP (Museum of Art and Photography) Bangalore on the Textile Collection of the Museum Mother, Who Will Weave Now? attempts to sample and mirror the grand tapestry of Indian textile traditions and histories by interweaving snippets of Indian cloth on an editing table, using poetic elements of classical Indian literature sewn together with the words and motifs of the weaver-saint Kabir. Dutta attempts to create in film what he sees in painting, and describes all of his formal work as an attempt in that direction. Whether examining India’s contemporary artists, traditional weavers, or classical painters and the scholars who know their every brushstroke by heart, Dutta’s process-oriented films attest to the ardor of art history. b.1977, Jamu; lives and works in Palampur Kamruzzaman Shadhin Irrelevant Field Notes, 2020-2023 Two-channel video, sound, sculptures Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist This installation traces the seasons and cycles of indigenous rituals, poetry, myths, and practices that have been intertwined with agricultural landscapes and the act of cultivation in Bangladesh. Drawing from Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s childhood memories of deeply ingrained community practices rooted in agriculture, the work tells the story of how the move towards an extractive nature of cultivation has slowly rendered a disconnection in the intimate/intrinsic ties between humanity and land. Incorporating sculptures, video, and sound and using materials related to land and rituals, Shadhin creates an imaginary landscape where the old rhymes, songs, fables, and other “irrelevant beings” hover around in apparent aimlessness, disconnected from the earth. They are displaced, but linger on as a distant and fragmented memory of a forgotten link, almost as if to stage a secret rebellion against this capitalist aggression on soil, water, and many ways of life. Made over a three-year period, this two-channel video chronicles the fields at different seasons through movements of masked figures who also appear in this space as various forms, linked through an immersive soundscape where the disappearing songs and rhymes come alive again. Shadhin's participatory practice incorporates installation, sculpture, performance, video and public art interventions. His work is shaped by long-term engagement with communities, exploring themes of the environment, migration and local history, and their connection to personal and collective memory. He usually works with locally sourced materials, drawing inspiration from the techniques and practices of the past to comment on the present. He is the founder of the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts (f. 2001). b. 1974, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka and Thakurgaon Najmun Nahar Keya বর্ণগীতি(Symphony of words), 2022-2023 Soft Sculptures Made from Antique Sarees Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery Bengali script seems to drip from the ceiling as rain, or flow through space like a river, similar to how the words of Khana have flowed across time in Bangladesh. Khana was a poet and an astrologer active in Bengal somewhere between the 9th and 12th centuries, and her verses are among the earliest compositions of lyrical Bengali verse and tied to wisdom gleaned from observing nature. According to legend, Khana attracted the attention of King Vikramaditya by solving problems that neither her husband nor her father-in-law, who were both court astronomers, could answer. Threatened by her knowledge and divinatory power, her father-in-law had her tongue cut off and forced her into exile. In another version, Khana cut off her own tongue to spare her father-in-law the shame of being upstaged by a woman. Both scenarios speak to how the fragility of male egos threatens the basic wellbeing of women. Putting Khana’s words into the air as sayings and/or writing them into physical form as text, or inscribing them as an artwork as the artist Najmun Nahar Keya has, speaks to the power of orality and of collective memory to keep alive the wisdom that oppressive forces, such as patriarchy, have tried in vain to silence. These sayings that are still alive in rural Bangladesh today, known as Khanar Bachan (Khana’s words), are also a collective memory of climate, and how human behavior and weather could interact to produce fruitful results. These adages must have worked at some point; otherwise it is unlikely that they would have been carried across so many generations, but they don’t all make sense anymore as weather does not move over the lands in the same way it once did. Like the Tangail sarees that Keya and her elder sisters used to craft these sayings into soft sculptural form, they are likely to become obsolete as these generationally passed down wisdoms are at risk of being forgotten. Najmun Nahar Keya is primarily a painter, but also employs old photographs, gold gilding, drawing and printmaking, which she juxtaposes to create nostalgic settings. Having grown up in the old part of Dhaka, Keya draws her inspiration from the rapid social, economic and environmental changes happening in the area as a result of urbanization. She is interested in the duality of society focusing on lifestyle, culture, cityscapes, urban motifs, customs and architecture. b. 1980 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka Miet Warlop The Board II, 2014/2023 Performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from BGMEA In a dynamic collaboration with female garment factory workers in Bangladesh, this performative installation challenges preconceptions of “who wears the pants” in society. A group of trunkless, armless, and headless pants in heels walk across the Dhaka Art Summit venue, taking stock of the artworks and the exhibition, laughing hysterically that anyone could take life so seriously and releasing their own irreverent gestures in paint for the audience to take in. Warlop’s work is about making the static-dynamic and making the dynamic-static. She treats art as an experience, like ritual concerts or objects animated by choreography. She works in cycles rather than in projects and believes in the attitude that accompanies an idea, using a combination of performance, choreography, theater, and sculpting skills to make her shows. Her work amplifies the dynamics of personal relationships that are created between memories, skin, objects and sounds. b. 1978, Torhout; lives and works in Brussels Rana Begum No.1234, 2022-2023 Fishing Net and Bamboo Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from British Council BangladeshCourtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Inspired by the fragile drape of fishing nets and the filtered reflections of light across water, No. 1234 Net is closely connected to Begum’s childhood memories growing up in Bangladesh. The work sweeps above the visitors, layering veils of color and form. This organic expression marks a departure from Begum’s language of ordered geometric abstraction, growing in the space to create a dramatic, site specific installation. Begum utilizes industrial materials such as stainless steel, aluminum, copper, brass, glass, and wood in her minimalist sculptures and reliefs. Her contemplative works explore shifting interactions between geometry, color, and light, drawing inspiration from both the chance encounters of city life and the intricate patterns of Islamic art and architecture. b. 1977, Sylhet; lives and works in London Sahej Rahal Black Origin, 2022 Digital Collage Courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee and Lal This series of images, rising from the artist’s imagined world of digital “storm sisters,” gathers a collection of digital collages conjured in collusion with AI-driven image generation programs. The images portend visions of an Earth exhausted of all human life. In this aftermath, new denizens populate the planet, petroleum-drenched beings, draped in the ruins and refuse of humankind. They rise under mangroves that rest over ramshackle housing complexes, highway lines, boulevards, banks, and bureaucratic enclaves, mounting insurrections on the other side of extinction. Rahal’s work builds up mythology that he weaves together by drawing upon local legends and hidden histories and bringing them into conversation with the world today. He manifests his myth-making in sculptural installations, paintings, performances, films, and video games that he creates using found materials, ranging from digital technology as well as ephemera, found footage, salvaged furniture, and scrap material. b. 1988, Mumbai; lives and works in Mumbai Shawon Akand ধীরে বন্ধু ধীরে (Slow friend, be slow), 2022-2023 Hand-woven installation Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist Turtles are icons for slowness, and slowness is necessary to keep certain cultural practices alive that fall outside of the speed necessary for mechanical reproduction. Shawon Akand worked with traditional jamdani weavers to transform turtle motifs in his paintings into a woven installation. ধীরে বন্ধু ধীরে (Slow friend, be slow) questions where in the fast paced world the need for slow process work falls, and how slowness can be adapted in this timeline of urgency. When a slow-pace culture merges with a fast paced life, will any good come out of it? Akand’s body of work questions cultural norms with a critical perspective on social and political structures through painting, printmaking, installation, photography and video. He is passionate about empowering and amplifying the reach of Bangladeshi craftspeople in his creative work which extends from art making to curating to entrepreneurship. He founded the organization Jothashilpa which has been a melting pot where various categories of arts (such as fine art, folk art, native art, crafts etc.) are brought together to create a new art language rooted in cultural history. Since its inception Jothashilpa has been working with artisans and traditional folk artists living in rural as well as urban areas. This includes women who are experts in hand embroidery, jamdani weavers, cinema banner painters and rickshaw artists who he regularly collaborates with. b. 1976, Kushtia; lives and works in Dhaka Tanya Goel Botanical Studies (Monsoon Flowers), 2020-2023 Crushed pigments on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte who also provided support for this presentation Like flowers, we are formed by feelings that follow our relationship to sunlight and moonlight that illuminate our time on this planet, transforming what we perceive with our eyes into emotions that we feel with our hearts. The artist Tanya Goel has been meditatively studying flowers and the role that color plays in lived experience especially when it comes to the “laws of attraction.” As part of that process, she has been building what she refers to as “a collection of dust”; an archive of pigments that reminds her that color is ground. Ground: both in the sense of being a pulverized material (a physical process she actively engages with when making pigments), but also as coming from the surface beneath our feet (such as chalk and titanium dioxide). This series of Botanical Studies is inspired by monsoon flowers, forms that grow when the ground is wet and flooded with rainwater, just as beautiful as flowers blooming in the spring, but often overlooked when the global imagination around flowers relates to a world of “four seasons” that does not correspond with the seasons in South Asia. The artist perceived new universes when observing the pistils of flowers under a magnifying glass, zooming closer and closer in order to understand how the interplay of color around the reproductive parts of flowers serves to attract bees while also attracting our eyes. Goel reminds us that color is a powerful harbinger that life will go on in a duration that defies the limits of the optics of a human life-span. Goel’s compositions, noted for their density and complexity, are mathematical formulas which are established and then violated, resulting in a balance between structure and chaos. The artist makes her own pigments from a diverse array of materials including charcoal, aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite and foils, many sourced from sites of architectural demolitions in and around New Delhi. She is interested in the textures of her pigments as well as their colors, which is a direct result of how they reflect light. b. 1985, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi LOCATION: THIRD FLOOR Anthony McCall Line Describing a Cone 2.0, 1973/2010 Digital projection with fog machine Samdani Art Foundation Collection Like watching the sunset, experiencing the work Line Describing a Cone requires a duration of 30 minutes to watch a white curve appear and transform in space. This iconic work by Anthony McCall, key to the artistic movement that opened up the visual arts towards cinema, was inspired by the artist observing how projections in a cinema hall - where dust swirling in the air interacts with light spewing from the projector - can produce sculpture-like effects. Here, a thin mist flows into the room, allowing the viewer to progressively see a large cone of light which simultaneously becomes a light sculpture that the audience can walk into, almost like a portal into another universe. This work is not just something to watch, it is a universe to be absorbed in and to participate in. The artist inverts the relationship between the projector and the audience. Here, the public faces the projector, not the movie, destroying the illusion of a moving image while opening up another kind of space of wonder. The process of the realization of the film becomes its content. During the 1970s, Anthony McCall was one of a number of filmmakers who rejected the narrative demands of Hollywood cinema as well as the more abstract content of independent films, addressing instead the specific properties of the film medium itself–light, surface, projection, frames, and time. His work spans across drawing, installation, and performance, one of his preferred mediums. He is an indispensable reference to a younger generation of artists working in video and installation, including Matt Copson whose work is found at the entrance of DAS. b. 1946, Saint Paul's Cray; lives and works in New York Daniel Boyd Untitled (GPS Coordinates), 2022-2023 Vinyl on glass Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery with Curatorial Contributions from Alexie Glass-Kantor and Michelle Newton Daniel Boyd’s works often explore the ways in which Indigenous people and histories are seen, interpolated, and represented within a western or colonial vision. In this site-specific window installation, circular cut outs re-frame the views outside, transforming them into a web of illuminated dots, and spilling new light patterns across the gallery. As in Boyd’s artworks re-working colonial imagery, he uses a simple technique for mediating the audience’s vision to transform and reorient how things are seen. The work disrupts any kind of passive consumption of the landscape as usually framed by the architecture, while creating a new immersive visual spectacle. These circular forms are used to perform a complex re-envisioning wherein dark matter becomes part of a total image, connecting a multitude of flashes of detail beyond. Daniel Boyd is an Indigenous Australian multidisciplinary artist. His paintings, installations, and sculptures are informed by his Kudjla/Gangalu heritage, and examine Eurocentric narratives around Australia's colonial history. Through his signature 'dot' painting technique, Boyd presents visual manifestations of Indigenous collective memory and perception, suggesting a form of lens with which to view the world. b. 1982, Cairns; lives and works in Sydney Marina Perez Simão Untitled 1-9, 2022Oil on canvas Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM who also provided support for this presentation In a world where we are supposed to know everything through the touch of a screen, Marina Simão paints in order to conjure the wonder and awe that comes with experiencing a sense of being that was previously unthinkable. Her paintings open up possibilities for new states of matter beyond known solids, liquids, gasses, and plasmas. What colors might suffuse the smoldering gasses of yet-to-be-discovered atmospheres in far-off extraterrestrial landscapes? These paintings could be window portals of a spaceship, imagining rivers and waterbodies in yet-to-be-known planets in yet-to-be-known galaxies. Our minds are left free to wander in the myriad paths that open up in her paintings and reach far beyond the limits of the canvas. She takes us to the edge of an abyss with no solid place to step, but with no need to touch the ground. Simão uses a variety of techniques, such as collage, drawing, and oil painting, as starting points in order to marry interior and exterior landscapes, she composes visual journeys that sometimes traverse the unknown, the abstract and the nebulous, but also include visions and memories. With interests ranging from science to literature, the artist is on a constant quest to surprise viewers and herself by creating new worlds with visions we might have never imagined before. B. 1980, Vitória; lives and works in Sao Paulo Munem Wasif পতন / Collapse, 2021-2023 Spatial design in collaboration with Architect Salauddin AhmedArchival pigment prints, Variable sizesMetal structures, Wooden frames With additional support from Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Project88 Munem Wasif brings forward the conflicted relationship between the idea of development and the larger ecosystem. On one side flows a mighty river while on the other stands an intrusive structure made out of rods, cement, sand and stones. In these photographs, we see a man-made structure, geometric, brutal and monumental in scale, standing tall against the forces of vigorous currents of the Jamuna river that race down on the horizontal plane amidst soft and fragile elements of nature. Bangladesh is born out of the nerves and veins of numerous rivers spurring out of the Himalayas. These rivers move through the mountains, deciding the very nature of the land they pass through, the ecology, human character, life’s rhythm, politics and economy. Neo-liberal development processes in the last few decades have neglected the natural flow of water, climate and the lives around these areas. With human-centric notions of development, economic gain and consumption of natural resources as the basis of modern life, the voices of other species have been excluded resulting in the consequent loss of biodiversity. Grains of sand particles glisten like stars in these black and white photographs, a ferocious body of water bends hurriedly down the curves, and tall mutilated parts of the structure pierce through the skin of the river silently witnessing the flat plane. Bringing forward this juxtaposition of a horizontal and vertical axis, Munem Wasif’s image based installation discloses a contradictory tale of climate, life, nature and development. One can’t help but ask “What is the definition of development?” Wasif’s image-based works explore the notion of trace in its various forms. His complex installations often mix photographs with moving images, archive documents or collected paraphernalia to reveal notions of impermanence and insecurity. Never exhaustive and always open to interpretation, the narratives they develop simultaneously test the limits of documentary representation and the possibilities of fiction. b. 1983, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Shahzia Sikander Singing Suns, 2016 Digital animation with music by Du Yun Samdani Art Foundation Collection Shahzia Sikander recontextualizes traditional motifs from Indo-Persian miniature painting, such as the hair found on gopis (female worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna), into dynamic forms in motion in her animation practice that makes painting sing and dance. Gopi hair swirls in orb-like-forms of varying densities, reminiscent of the shape-shifting movements of flocks of birds or colonies of bats, creating an illusion of singing suns that light up the room. We often think about the sun as singular, but every star is a sun and there are billions of stars in billions of universes. The music accompanying this piece by the Chinese composer Du Yun rejects linearity, and through working cross-culturally across musical traditions, her collaboration with Sikander speaks to the way that cultural practices have developed new forms in circulation, taking new paths by way of collision and deep integration. Sikander reinterprets the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a vibrant multimedia practice that considers colonial legacies, orientalizing narratives, and current events, pairing ancient traditional painting techniques with the latest digital technology. She introduces postcolonial and feminist perspectives into rigorous compositions that feature scenes and abstractions related to trade, migration, and imperial histories. b. 1969, Lahore; lives and works in New York

ALL PROJECTS Expression of Time Curated by Md. Muniruzzaman Expression of Time , curated by Mohammad Muniruzzaman, Director of the Department of Fine Arts, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, presents an intergenerational exhibition to show a cross-section of the dynamism of young Bangladesh. To connect the idea of giving space to a younger generation of artists, the exhibition will present early works of now prominent artists who have played important roles in building the infrastructure for contemporary art in Bangladesh through their careers alongside works of a younger generation of artists, whose practices will undoubtedly steer the future of the country’s art history. The exhibition will also explore Bangladeshi visual culture in parallel the diverse practice of urban and folk art of Bangladesh from cinema banner painting to the centuries old tradition of kantha embroider. ARTISTS Abdur Rob Khan Abdus Shakoor Shah Abul Barq Alvi Ahmed Nazir Ahmed Samsuddoha Anisuzzaman Anisuzzaman Sohel A. R. Rumy Azadi Parvin Tuesly Bipasha Hayat Bishwajit Goswami Dhali Al Mamun Dr. Mohammad Iqbal Golam Faruque Bebul Haroon Ar Rashid Tutul Jamal Ahmed Jayanta Sarker John Kalidas Karmakar Maqsudul Iqbal Nipa Md. Tokon Mohammad Eunus Monirul Islam Monsur Ul Karim Mostafizul Haque Naima Haque Nasim Ahmed Nadvi Nasirul Hamid Nikhil Das Nisar Hossain Priti Ali Proddyut Kumar Das Rajiuddin Choudhury Ranjit Das Rashid Amin Rashida Begum Rashedul Huda Rezaun Nabi Rokeya Sultana Ruhul Amin Tareque Sahid Kabir Samarjit Roy Chowdhury Shambhu Acharya Shayamal Sarker Sheikh Afzal Siddharta Talukdar Shishir Bhattacharjee Tarshito Tasaddak Hossain Dulu Tejosh Halder Josh Wakilur Rahman

ALL PROJECTS Untitled | 2017-2018 (Ongoing) Pablo Bartholomew THROUGH SEVERAL BODIES OF WORK CREATED WITH INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES IN NORTHEAST INDIA, PABLO BARTHOLOMEW HAS OBSERVED THAT THESE COMMUNITIES WEAR THEIR CULTURAL DNA THROUGH THEIR CLOTHING, ORNAMENTATION AND MARKING ON THEIR BODIES; CODES THAT THEY KEEP AS A FORM OF SELF IDENTITY. The Dhaka Art Summit featured Pablo Bartholomew from February 2-10, 2018. The exhibition later toured as part of the exhibition "A Beast, a God, and a Line," curated by Cosmin Costinas. 17 MARCH - 20 MAY 2018 | PARA SITE, HONG KONG 6-24 JUNE 2018 | TS1, YANGON 20 JULY - 7 OCTOBER 2018 | MUSEUM OF MODERN ART IN WARSAW With a father hailing from Burma and mother who is of partial Bengali origin, Pablo Bartholomew traces, in his newly commissioned project (a work in progress as part of a longer ongoing cross-border inquiry) the links between geographically fractured indigenous communities/ethnic minorities in Myanmar, India, and Bangladesh. Working within the Chakma community into which he is related from his mother’s side, he extends the scope of his practice by working with weavers. The artist asked these artisans to use their traditional idioms on back-strap looms (carried on the body through periods of migration) to weave graphic DNA patterns the imagery rendered through scientific testing. Through this project Bartholomew hopes to weaves together science, myth, legend and tradition, exploring a cross-border ethnic identity. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation

ALL PROJECTS To Enter The Sky Curated by Sean Anderson To Enter The Sky Curated by Sean Anderson (Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture) Weather, when visualized, relies on the interaction of multiple forces enacting potential acts of benefit as well as destruction. Sometimes predictable, and even mapped, more often, spaces inherit weather in unpredictable patterns that suggest tumult, a conjuring or a question, in defiance of the unknown. For example, airplane pilots depend on degrees of turbulence to achieve lift, to enter the sky. Likewise, for architects and builders, turbulence presents a manifold of acts for the body and the landscape to confront, with which to bend and flex, and from which one may achieve improbable balance. With sea level rise and the increased intensity of unprecedented weather systems, the world has witnessed recent devastating floods in Northern Pakistan and Bangladesh, the ongoing strengthening of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, and the anticipated disappearance of Maldivian atolls as well as those throughout the South Pacific. The invention of land for real estate development adjacent to the oceans and seas simultaneously destroys sensitive ecosystems while displacing vulnerable human and non-human settlements. A perpetuation of cataclysmic events tear at the definitions of geography, of fixed temporalities, for an architecture and urbanism subject to extremes continually redefined on the ground, in the water and the air. Recent years have also shown us that a global pandemic can challenge nearly every aspect of humanity and expressions of collectivity. Refugees and asylum seekers traverse the planet while confronting the fixity of imposed boundaries. Architecture can be reimagined to consider how and with whom we seek common grounds among spaces of repair, comfort and joy. With livelihoods unfolding over screens large and small, and those landless and nationless continue to seek refuge, the built environment presents itself as a backdrop, stage and as an agent for change. We all share one sky. Drawings by children situate both the vulnerability and strength of future selves who, in a spirited display of potential, of beauty, of imagined spaces and buildings, can also aspire to elevate and share possible futures. Just as we navigate the unknown, architecture must activate new encounters with economies of materiality, ecology, community, sovereignty, and citizenship. How do we design and build for the inevitability of conflicts, past and future? How does architecture establish belonging in landscapes of devastation and transit? This exhibition responds to those insecure conditions that allow architects, artists and designers to engage with the dimensioning of turbulence as a catalyst for addressing how we encounter each other. To Enter the Sky brings together examples of architectures and artworks of resilience, of trust, while not discounting fear, entropy, and destruction. The exhibition centers Bangladesh as part of a broader reckoning of what it means to be human in and of the built environment today. We know that various turbulences will persist. Architecture need not be resistant. Rather, the exhibition asserts how a spatial medium, with its multitudes of hope and chance, can begin to disseminate radical stories of becoming to help us understand our own fragile inheritances as individuals, communities, nations. LOCATION: FIRST FLOOR SOUTH PLAZA Sumayya Vally Ceramic vessels activated by performance Performance 7pm daily Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationCo-curated by Diana Campbell and Sean Anderson as an overlay of “To Enter the Sky” and “Bonna” Pavilion and performance conceptualisation by Sumayya Vally Sound in collaboration with Shoummo SahaChoreography in collaboration with Arpita Singha Lopa oletha imvula uletha ukuphila Translation: “They who brings rain, brings life” IsiZulu proverb Wielding the comings of rain is a tradition practiced by cultures across geographies. To possess the power to command rainfall is by inference possessing the power to dictate the flow of the natural cycle and climatic conditions. Across Southern Africa, rain-making rituals are directed towards royal ancestors because they were believed to have control over rain and other natural phenomena. One of these rare and powerful individuals is the Moroka of the Pedi tribe in South Africa: the traditional rain-making doctor. Here, a series of fired and unfired clay vessels are assembled as a temporal space to hold gatherings. Over the course of DAS, a series of performances which draw on the traditions of rain-making and harvest are performed in the space where the hands that formed the pots also work to un-form them. The rituals include the use of water, which allows the un-fired pots to dissolve over time, revealing areas and niches of gathering contained by the pots, as well as rhythmic drumming that evokes the sound of thunder at the end of each day. Vally’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions. Her design process is often forensic, and draws on the aural, the performative and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. b. 1990, Pretoria; lives and works in London LOCATION: SECOND FLOOR Ali Kazim Untitled (Cloud Series) 2018 In his 1949 novel, A Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles writes about the precarities of individuals: “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.” The sky, that which envelops us, is an arbiter of all life on the planet. It is that which comforts or destroys and always reminds us of where we are and where we can be. While the horizon is a measure of the sky, clouds, as condensations of molecules, are signs of life and its potentials; they signal transformations. The cloud is a sky’s signature. Detached from the ground and horizon, the clouds presented in these drawings suggest both movement and stasis. Caught in a moment of change, the clouds are suggestive of temporary presence, just as the weather conditions that they indicate and the individual lives that may be affected among spaces below. What may be discovered behind these scaleless formations? They are emboldened by forces large and small while also having the capacity to reveal new worlds. The works of Ali Kazim are embedded in the spatial histories of Pakistan’s landscapes and the civilizations that once inhabited the region. In works that use a variety of materials and techniques to evoke bodily and emotional experiences, Kazim’s work reimagines multiple narratives that are at once metaphors for human connectivities that may be hidden among unexcavated remains, long-abandoned cities, and the spaces that may be exposed or still buried. Ali Kazim b.1979, Pakistan Agnieszka Kurant Risk Management Commissioned for the New York Times 2020 Post-Fordite Fossilized automotive paint, epoxy resin, powdered stone, steel 2021-22 Sentimentite Digital NFT and physical sculpture Various pulverized objects, powdered granite stone, resin 2022 How can we redefine methods for understanding and responding to precarity at multiple scales throughout the world today? Materials extracted from the ground are but one illustration of how natural resources are continually pillaged in order to support unsustainable population growth and unfair labor practices, which is coupled with environmental devastation. The works in this exhibition speculate about the consequences of economies in parallel with digital capitalism, in which entire societies have become distributed factories of data production and exploitation, where everyone is a worker producing digital and carbon footprints. Risk Management presents a geographical map of a history of outbreaks of social contagions based on fictions spanning the last thousand years. The work draws on the inability of risk-prediction models to consider irrational human behavior and other largely impactful social phenomena. Post-Fordite takes up a recently discovered hybrid, quasi-geological formation created as a natural-artificial byproduct, through fossilization of thousands of layers of automotive paint accumulated and congealed on production lines at automobile factories since the opening of the Henry Ford Motor Company manufacturing plants in the early 20th century. Recently, these fossilized-paint configurations , named Fordite or Detroit Agate, by the former workers of now defunct factories, began circulating online and accruing value. Since Fordite can be cut and polished, it is often used like precious stones to produce jewelry. Post-Fordite embodies more than 100 years of amalgamated human labor and the collective footprints of workers, past and present, translated into geology. S entimentite is a speculative mineral-currency investigating the relationship between digital capitalism and geology in which a future mineral could become more precious than gold and become a currency. Kurant collaborated with computational social scientists who used Artificial Intelligence sentiment-analysis algorithms to harvest data from hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Reddit posts related to recent historic seismic events, including the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Brexit, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic global lockdown, and Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. These aggregated emotions of millions of people shaped the forms of 100 sculptures, which were cast in a new mineral created by pulverizing 60 objects used as official and informal currencies throughout the history of humanity: shells, Rai stones, whale teeth, corn, Tide detergent, electronic waste, soap, beads, mirrors, batteries, playing cards, phone cards, stamps, tea, and cocoa pods. Invested in exploring how “economies of the invisible” bolster fictions about humanity’s survival in the face of such destructive socio-political and economic processes, Agnieszka Kurant’s sculptural and mapping works speculate on how value is translated and can transgress conventional definitions. Her work challenges how objects today are mutated through their global circulation and production while also questioning modernist conceptions of aura, authorship, production, and hybridity. Many of her works emulate nature and behave like living organisms and self-organized complex systems. b.1978 Łódź; lives and works in New York Aziza Chaouni Projects Rehabilitation of Modern Public Buildings in Africa Sidi Harazem, Morocco Old Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone (1827) CICES, Dakar, Senegal (1974) Throughout the world today, modern architecture, especially those examples in rapidly developing areas of the Global South, remains at risk of demolition due to economic, political, and societal forces that consider its buildings not worthy of preservation. Modern buildings are often judged unattractive, too far removed from “traditional” architecture and building types while overlaid with memories of a traumatic colonial past. How do contemporary architects reimagine the ways in which modernism is understood today? How can spaces imbued with societal traumas be rewritten with the goal of transforming their value to communities and publics? These three rehabilitation projects are actively engaging with and responding to the design of community-centered spaces that are envisaged as cooperative, reparative and responsive for all that participate in their making. In Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal, like in other areas subject to the simultaneity of post-colonial transition meeting neoliberal economic drivers, buildings and landscapes are continually being questioned as productive zones for living today. Designed between 1959 and 1975 by prominent Moroccan architect of Corsican origin, Jean-François Zevaco, the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex, located near the city of Fez, is the first example of public post-independence leisure architecture designed for Moroccan inhabitants. Unfortunately, villagers whose ancestors had lived on the same land for generations were forcibly moved several miles away to accommodate the new tourist destination.Deploying a long-term phased masterplan that accounted for the memory of these historical events while also attending to environmental sensitivities with the use of water in a drought-prone area of the country, the Complex moves beyond the rehabilitation of the buildings themselves to adaptively reuse the spaces for the local population. Since 1827, Old Fourah Bay College was a laboratory and educational setting in which western ideas of governance, political organization and public service were shared as experiments with populations across Sierra Leone and West Africa. The onset of conflict throughout the 1990s radically altered this building and it was occupied by displaced families fleeing a brutal ground war. Working with local school and university groups to rethink what a “dream school” might look like, new methods of design centered in active conversations and designed interactive spatial exercises have established new shared narratives from which the College can once again return to being a space of civic and educational learning. Designed by the architects, Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin, the CICES was commissioned by the first president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor, who sought a universal African architectural language, shed from Western referents. The CICES complex uses Modernist principles in its circulation and layout, and simultaneously embraces Senghor’s ‘asymmetric parallelism’ theory, that he defines as "a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space,” which allows for unique spatial experiences. Working with local stakeholders to reconsider what a “masterplan” for such an iconic complex affected by environmental and economic issues will be, ensures its continued use as a productive site for international exchange and commerce into the future. Aziza Chaouni was born and raised in Fez, Morocco and is trained both as a structural engineer and as an architect. Through the integration of users and stakeholders across the design process, Chaouni’s office, Aziza Chaouni Projects, offers alternative processes for imagining and designing empathetic spaces that move past staid aesthetics to articulate human and material-centered approaches to sensitive areas throughout North and West Africa. b.1977 Fez; lives and works in Fez and Toronto Coral Mosques of Maldives Mauroof Jameel and Hamsha Hussain Among the Maldivian atolls and islands, there are at least 26 documented mosques and compounds that have been constructed using coral stone. Assembled from porite coral stone ( hirigaa ) hewn from the reefs and integrated with interior structures fashioned from timber and crafted by lacquer work, itself a unique Maldivian artform, these buildings represent an architecture of resilience found nowhere else on the planet. Akin to other monumental structures found in India and Southeast Asia, the mosques coalesce building, material and artistic practices that point to the transit of ideas and typologies. While historical uses of coral in building construction have been discovered among the Mayan communities of Central America between 900-1500 BCE and among the coastal communities of the Red Sea between 146-323 BCE, among the Maldives, the coral used is both unique to the islands while the building conveys spatial and spiritual resonances found across the Indian Ocean and its sub-continent. These buildings illustrate how the use of localized materials at any scale can maintain long standing spaces for communities. The continued use of the coral mosques today is emblematic of a nation’s peoples and their unwavering faith in the face of environmental calamity. The images of six primary coral mosque compounds included in this exhibition are in use across the islands today and were nominated for UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2013. Each example embodies architectural forms that are both specific to their island location while also expressing discrete art practices including exterior coral carving, calligraphy, and lacquer work that speak to the movement of Islamic artistic practices across the ocean. With carpentry techniques in the mosques no longer extant and coral mining forbidden for environmental sensitivities, these buildings are recognized for their integration of construction techniques and artforms that speak to the Indian Ocean realm as a space for visual, material, and spatial exchange. Ihavandhoo Old Friday Mosque Miskiy Magu, Ihavandhoo, Haa Alifu Atoll6º 57' 17.33" N and 72º 55' 38.33" EIhavandhoo Old Friday Mosque was completed in 16 December 1701 CE (15 Rajab 1113 A. H.) during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Muzhiruddin (1701-1705). Meedhoo Old Friday Mosque Hiyfaseyha Magu, Meedhoo, Raa Atoll5º 27' 27.80" N, 72º 57' 16.41"EAccording to local oral history, the mosque was probably built during the reign of Sultan Muzaffar Mohamed Imaduddin around 1705. It is the only surviving coral stone mosque with Indian clay roofing tiles. Malé Friday Mosque Medhuziyaaraiy Magu, Henveiru, Malé, Kaafu Atoll4º 10' 40.77" N, 73º 30' 44.57" EMalé Old Friday Mosque and its compound comprise one of the most important heritage sites in the country. It is also the biggest and one of the finest coral stone buildings in the world. The present mosque was built in 1658 during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Iskandhar I, replacing the original mosque built in 1153 by the first Muslim sultan of the Maldives. Fenfushi Old Friday Mosque Hiriga Goalhi, Fenfushi, Alifu Dhaalu Atoll3°45′15″N 72°58′35″EFenfushi Friday Mosque was built during the reign of Sultan Mohamed of Dhevvadhu (1692-1701) on the site of an earlier mosque. It is a well-preserved compound with a unique coral stone bathing tank, coral stone wells, a sundial, and a large cemetery with grave markers of fine quality. Isdhoo Old Mosque Isdhoo, Laamu Atoll2° 7′ 10″ N, 73° 34′ 10″ EIsdhoo Old Mosque was built prior to a renovation in 1701 during the reign of Sultan Mohamed of Dhevvadhoo (1692-1701). This is the mosque where the 12th century royal copper chronicles 'Isdhoo Loamaafaanu' was kept in a special chamber. The mosque is built on a pre-Islamic site and analysis of the architectural details of the mosque indicates that the stonework could be even older. Hulhumeedhoo Fandiyaaru Mosque Koagannu, Hulhumeedhoo, Addu City0º 34' 51.6" S and 73º 13' 42" EHulhumeedhoo Fandiyaaru Mosque located in the Koagannu area in the island of Hulhumeedhoo (Addu City) was probably built around 1586 during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim III. The Koagannu area is the largest and the oldest cemetery in the Maldives with more than 500 coral grave markers, a sheltered mausoleum and 15 open mausoleums. It had six small mosques but now four small mosques remain. They are Koagannu Miskiy c.1397, Boadhaa Miskiy c.1403, Athara Miskiy c.1417 and Fandiyaru Miskiy c.1586. Felecia Davis and Delia Dumitrescu Computational textiles are textiles that are responsive to cues found in the environment using sensors and microcontrollers for the making of a textile that uses shape-shifting properties of the material itself to communicate information to people. In architecture, these responsive textiles are transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. For instance, they can be used in making temporary and more permanent manifestations of shelter in conflict and environmentally devastated areas. Davis, a trained engineer and architect, with Dumitrescu, a textile designer, asked with this project, ‘How can we design lightweight textiles for use in architecture that can translate responses to their environment? Further, how might we make textiles that dilate if the temperature surrounding the textile becomes hot, or if one wants more transparency in that textile to see the view?’ With her experimental lab, SOFTLAB@PSU, Davis creates responsive textiles that defy conventional structural and representational modes for the material itself and its applications. At the Smart Textiles Lab in Sweden, Dumitrescu has been developing responsive artistic effects in textile design that reshape an understanding of textile as a material that operates at different scales. In this project they consider ‘how’ and ‘what’ textiles can be ‘when’—much like individuals and communities. The first typology of material developed for this work was pixelated, designed with yarn that melts at high temperature; accordingly, the fabric opens or breaks when it receives current. Openings allowed the designers to ‘write’ upon the fabric making apertures, collecting foreground and background through the qualities of the material. The second material has been designed with yarn that shrinks or closes into solid lines in the fabric when it receives current. Shrinking is activated by the material while also revealing more opaque patterning in the textile closing parts of that textile off, transforming the material and the quality of space framed by that material. Davis’ work bio responsive textiles questions how we live while she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Davis and her lab are interested in developing computational methods and design in relation to bodies in locations that simultaneously engage specific social, cultural and political constructions. Her collaborative lab is dedicated to developing soft computational materials and textiles alongside industry and community partners to establish a culture of hands-on making and thinking through computational materials not only as a future but also as a holistic approach to living within uncertain circumstances. Central to Dumitrescu’s research is the topic of material and textile design, focusing on new materials expanding from computational textiles to biodesign and biofabrication. Through the notion of textile design thinking, her research expands the textile methodology; it includes systematic work with: colour, materials, texture, structure, pattern, and function to explore and propose new design futures for sustainable living from material to spatial design. b. United States and Romania; Lives and works in State College, Pennsylvania and Borås Marshall Islands Navigation Charts Beijok Kaious The Marshall Islands in eastern Micronesia of the Southern Pacific Ocean consists of thirty-four coral atolls composed of more than one thousand islands and islets spread out across an area of several hundred miles. The islanders have mastered an ability to navigate between and among the almost-invisible islands—since the land masses are all so low that none can be seen except from a short distance away. In addition to closely observing wave and swell patterns, the Marshallese used the celestial constellations to navigate the ocean. They also determined the locations of the islands by observing the flight of the birds that nested on them. Song was also used to estimate the distance that the navigators traveled. Navigation is a form of storytelling and placemaking. For thousands of years Marshall Islanders used complex navigation techniques with charts made from coconut midribs and seashells. There are three kinds of Marshall Island “stick charts”: the Mattang , the Rebbelib , and the Meddo . The mattang was specifically designed to train individuals in the art of navigation while the Rebbelib covered a large section or the entirety of the islands. The charts consisted of curved and straight sticks. The curved sticks represented ocean swells and the straight sticks represented the currents and waves around the islands. The seashells represented the locations of the islands. Marshallese navigators memorized the charts and did not take them with them on their canoes. Each chart was unique and could only be interpreted by the person who made it. Today, different configurations of the charts are still being produced across the islands and used by young navigators learning to “read” the ocean. Beyond maps, the charts are thus built stories that speak to the past, present and future simultaneously. The examples of charts ( meddo ) presented in the exhibition, while made as souvenirs on the island of Majuro by Beijok Kaious and facilitated by others, still speak to the continuities and difficulties of navigating across oceans and territories that are rapidly disappearing with the onset of global climate crises. Olalekan Jeyifous How can one envision and design potential? Rather than observing historically overlooked areas of cities such as Crown Heights, Brooklyn or within megacities such as Lagos, Nigeria as impoverished, exclusionary, and open to demolition, as is commonly depicted for underserved areas throughout the world, Jeyifous’s immersive images and spaces speak to the potential for questioning present conditions and future possibilities. Many of the spaces in such locations are also subject to the extremes brought about by environmental instability. Such alternative futuristic visions are simultaneously based in real spaces and conditions while also shifting the gaze of top-down “development” efforts in the same cities that gentrify, displace and erase. These works recenter individuals and collectives as plural complex communities understood as fundamental contributors to the forging of the built environment. The politics of architecture is presented as an extension of how people build themselves as much as their communities. Recognizing that architecture can be built and imagined by these communities, buildings and infrastructures are configured not in opposition to each other but appended to and effectively built among existing real estate projects, socially-constructed spaces and historical monuments. Trained as an architect, and now working at the intersection of art, spatial practices, and public art, Nigerian-born Olalekan Jeyifous explores how the conventions of immersive digital renderings, collages and videos open spaces for critique and revelation of the contemporary built environment. b.1977 Lagos; lives and works in New York Rizvi Hassan Collaborators: Minhajul Abedin, Khwaja Fatmi, Prokolpo Shonapahar, Rohingya Artisans: Kamrunnesa & Jaber, Khairul Amin, Aminullah, Hosna Akhter & Shofiq, Nurul Islam, Shahabuddin, Imam Hossain, Ali Johor, Faruk, Artisans from Sylhet & Shonapahar: Rehana Akhter, Khatun begum, Rita akther, Nikhil Architecture, for Rizvi Hassan, has the capacity “to connect life, to strengthen mental health, to enhance culture, to mitigate conflicts, to enrich the ground, or just to ensure the basic but very important needs to have a better quality of life.” Among the sustainable structures constructed in the world’s largest refugee camps housing Rohingya refugees in and around Cox’s Bazar, Hassan approached these community-centered designs that amplify quality of life for both non-human and human beings. Each of the buildings is responsive to regional climate and environmental precarities, including cyclones, while also establishing safe spaces for vulnerable women and children. Collaborating with members of these communities as well as those building the structures often without the aid of technical drawings, Hassan deploys tools and processes that may be considered antithetical to conventional Western-based architecture practices. His work is as much a facilitator as a designer. Rather, utilizing regenerative materials such as bamboo and thatch, but also overlooked products including mattresses for insulation, Hassan’s buildings emphasize how the use of non-extractive materials alongside minimal industrial intervention encourages sympathetic design processes, dynamic interior spaces, and much-needed shelter and respite for countless individuals. Rizvi Hassan and his collaborators established their practice to work in precarious zones including camps as well as flood-prone districts in Bangladesh. He has stated that “the nation didn’t prepare me to be just an architect, but to be an educated person who can contribute to society. For that, it is important even just to be present, in places where people will need us.” His work reimagines buildings and spaces that empower all community stakeholders while also creating inclusive spaces for the perpetuation of beauty, belonging and survival. b. 1993 Dhaka; Office based in Dhaka and Cox’s Bazar Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) Camp Life, 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestry with stories of Rohingya refugee camp in BD. Participating Artisans: Yasmin, Shobika, Shomima, Roshida Facilitator: Sadya Mizan, Khurshida Permanent collection of RCMC Future Life, 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestry with dream of future life of Rohingya refugee’s in BD Participating Artisans: Yasmin, Shobika, Showmima, Fatema, Ajida, Hosne Ara, Setara, Shamsunahar, Rokeya Facilitator: Rowson Akter, Asma Permanent collection of RCMC British physician and geographer, Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, published an article in 1799 that states, “the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, call themselves ‘Rooinga’, or natives of Arakan… the other are Rakhing … who adhere to the tenets of Buddha.” This early description not only establishes that there was an indigenous Muslim minority in the Arakan province of present-day Myanmar with the name Rohingya, but it further distinguishes them from the majority Rakhine Buddhist population. In 1982, the Burmese government enacted the 1982 Citizenship Law with a document that identifies 135 ethnic groups, which the government asserts had settled in Burma prior to 1823. The Rohingya, however, are not included as one of them. Subsequent decades of displacement and discriminatory policies incited by military coups and political brinkmanship has led to more than a million Rohingya refugees settling across numerous camps in Cox’s Bazar. Underlying their mass exodus into a country and spaces that are not their own, is the risk of negative psychosocial impacts stemming from, among other factors, a loss of cultural identity. Rohingya people have many stories, knowledge and wisdom that are rooted in mutual cooperation and care. “There is a dominant narrative that the Rohingya are poor and simple village people who don’t really have art or a developed material culture, and we want to show the world that this is not true,” describes Shahirah Majumdar. In 2022, the estab lishment of the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) in Camp 18 was designed in tandem with extensive community participation and led by architect Rizvi Hassan. The RCMC is a Rohingya-led institution that collects, preserves, and disseminates the importance that knowledge narratives create goodwill among displaced communities. Even in the most unsettled conditions, cultural practice expressed through art is a significant mode through which generations of displaced communities can maintain their identity. The RCMC encourages empowerment across gender and social lines. Embroidery workshops provide an essential outlet for women artists, who gather to share personal experiences that are subsequently then stitched into tapestries. These are stories of being and becoming that further confer Rohingya histories into tangible forms. Women are trained by Bangladeshi artists who have helped them expand their artistic repertoire beyond traditional floral and faunal motifs, to even include human depictions. The embroidered tapestries presented here are powerful evocations that move past fear, anguish, and insecurity to illustrate stories of building that cannot be erased or forgotten. Sarker Protick jxb, OF RIVER AND LOST LANDS 2011 – 2023 [Ongoing] Inkjet Prints on Archival Paper ‘Of River and Lost lands’ is a series of photographs that surveys the River Padma (Ganges) and the waterborne land of Bangladesh. Made over a period of 12 years and continuing, the series describes a complex relationship of intimacy and ruthlessness between nature and humans on the margins. The life and ecology of rural Bengal, like much of both non-urban and urban worlds, have seen a continuous slow decay. It is a story of loss which begins with a hostile river resulting in devastating frequent erosion. With these occurrences, the landscape disappears and along with it, its many ways of life. Residents witness the river making abrupt changes in its course, drowning their villages, and resulting in forced migrations to other parts of the banks which too can erode without warning. Overnight, a stretch of land, and with it houses, farmlands, and livestock, will collapse and flow off in different directions. As uncontrolled sand mining proliferates, erosion increases at a fast pace. Now the River is not only a potential source of hostility, but also of casualty. Masses of land vanish and the river’s ecosystem changes in ways that cannot be undone. Shallow mud banks (chars) will emerge along with the influx of new sediments. The shore forms new land with the possibility to restart and build new communities for environmental and ecological refugees. Most places seen in these photographs have ceased to exist. As a result, the photographs survive as visual documents of these vanished and vanishing lands. Protick's works are built on long-term surveys rooted in Bangladesh. To make decaying memory tangible, to define the disappearance of a place without confining it, Protick’s often minimal, suspended, and atmospheric photography, video, and sound, explore how form and materiality often morph into the physicality of time. Accompanying its raptures and our inability to grasp or hold time, the process of image-making is a way to expand time, to make space for more subdued moments, or hint at the possibility of an embodied life. b. 1986, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Storia Na Lugar / [un]Grounding NarrativesPatti Anahory and César Schofield Cardoso Among the islands that comprise the nation of Cabo Verde in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, increasing territorial segregation, socioeconomic disparities, a general lack of quality of the built environment, are all present despite development indices for the country indicating one of the best performances in Africa. Ongoing phenomena including the rapid and asymmetrical growth of cities, large investments in mass tourism, the lack of alternatives of materials and construction techniques, are having an irreversible effect on people’s lives throughout the world. Coupled with an increasing desire to build tourist resorts on already environmentally sensitive areas of the archipelago, this video work explores how both sea and sky are becoming compromised in the pursuit of unsustainable, destructive economies. Given this, [un]Grounding Narratives focuses on communities facing exclusion, insecurity, or marginalization, while engaged with various forms of negotiation that reflect how social and natural environments can be repaired through cultural practices of affirmation and belonging. Storia Na Lugar merges the analytical visual languages of an architect and a visual artist alongside a joint pursuit of social and environmental ethics with multidisciplinary art and architectural works that explore forms of environmental and structural precarity in West Africa. Through engaging an international network of researchers, social activists, artists and professionals to engender action, Anahory and Schofield Cardoso seek to influence policy makers and promote a more inclusive development approach for the world’s cities and islands. Patti Anahory b. 1969 aboard a ship at Latitude 26o 50’ N Longitude 17o 05’ W; Based in New York City and Praia César Schofield Cardoso b. 1973 Mindelo; Based in Praia, Cabo Verde Suchi Reddy Reddymade Architects Between Earth and Sky Experiences found within architecture and the (built) environment play an essential role in shaping our capacity to engage with agency, equity, and empathy. Suchi Reddy’s guiding principle is “form follows feeling,” privileging human engagement as a mode for conceiving, designing, and building architectures that invite wonder and discovery. While working toward broader yet critical notions of “design justice,” alongside investigations of machine learning, the holistic design of spaces is recognized as an asset for the benefit of all and not just for some. Reddy considers how we, as individuals and collectives, encounter space as both a constructed and imagined phenomenon. The “mirages” installed as part of this exhibition are an exploration of how belief and the reimagining of boundaries through architectural intervention may contain limitless possibilities. Mirages become metaphors for societal rupture and repair. What is a building or space but an extension of who we are and who we wish to become? Uniting the architect’s wide-ranging portfolio of architecture and artistic work is a multidisciplinary approach guided by a belief in the power of architecture and spatial experience to impact how we feel, how we shape society, and the positive contribution we can offer through design. Interested in the complexities of uniting scientific studies of neuroaesthetics with overt spatial and haptic experiences found in building, the experiential works of Suchi Reddy and her office Reddymade, are at once built manifestations of extensive research of the interplay of human behavior with the material, metaphysical and structural forms that build us. b. Chennai; lives and works in New York We Are From Here Collective Conceived with the collective We Are From Here based in the Slave Island (Kompannaveediya) area of Colombo, Sri Lanka, this work highlights how deeply interconnected communities continually find their homes threatened by gentrification for State and corporate interests. Focused on Slave Island, a rapidly developing location in the center of Colombo where Rahman grew up and now resides, the ongoing project explores the threat of socio-political intersections that are gradually being erased for inequitable economic and political drivers that subsequently are displacing residents. While many residents are of Malay origin, the suburb has been home to multiple cultures, languages, and religions for generations. The area was first described under British Colonial rule as a holding area created by the Portuguese to hold slaves from the African continent. Such historically rich yet seemingly overlooked areas are not only disappearing throughout Colombo but also across cities throughout the world due to the misalignment of definitions of value based on land and property and not for humans. The collective’s multi-media work spotlights how entangled threads of multiple narratives that offer both sources for and representations of intimacy, precarity and memory. The project focuses on mobilising a creative peace-making movement that would help participants and beneficiaries alike to socially engage in their own unique realities through artistic and spatial production. We Are From Here is a multidisciplinary artist’s collective formed by Firi Rahman in 2018 including Parilojithan Ramanathan, Manash Badurdeen (and earlier including Vicky Shahjahan) whose work includes drawing, photography and sculpture, considers the threatened codependent relationships that people and endangered species have with their natural, lived and built environments. Their work has questioned the rise of endangered species in Sri Lanka. The collective and Rahman are particularly interested in the interactions between animals and urban environments, and the responsibility societies share in protecting biodiversity. b. 1990(Firi Rahman), Colombo; Collective established in 2018; lives and works in Slave Island (Kompannaveediya), Colombo Jaago Foundation One Thousand Futures Drawing has been a universal language that both children and adults share since time immemorial. From one’s first attempts at drawing, including the random marking with lines and scratches, and even after the first representations of the world around them, individuals are communicating to establish reciprocal meanings through images. Children of all ages use drawing to express their individual interpretations of experiences near and far. Yet, drawings, as language, can also be “read” and translated. For architects in particular, drawings are tools with which to imagine, capture and define ways of inhabitation. They possess scale, contain volumes, indicate varying temporalities, relay environmental considerations and “speak” to multiple audiences through commonly accepted forms. Our eyes and bodies can occupy the spaces found in a drawing. The project at the heart of this exhibition relies on drawing, as both an artform and as perhaps the most widespread language in the world, to transcend age, gender, background, culture, and other markers of identity. One thousand school-age children from schools across Bangladesh were asked by the Curator to respond to one question with their drawings: What might the future look like? According to governmental agencies in 2022, with around 98% of Bangladeshi “children of primary school age” enrolled in school, many students still have difficulty with basic reading skills. While education is essential to improving the economy of any nation, many people lack foundational lessons for living if they do not receive proper schooling. But all children, when provided with the materials, can draw—or at least create a visual means by which to communicate and thus establish complex meanings for both themselves and others. The drawings presented here are not fictional as they are responsive to an individual’s personal experience and vision while also sharing in multiple images of hope, of joy, of the possibility for becoming and living without the fear of environmental catastrophe. The drawings are active reminders that beyond the structures and boundaries that continually define us, we can draw a future for and about ourselves. JAAGO Foundation began in a single room in the Rayer Bazar slum area of Dhaka. In April 2007, Korvi Rakshand and a group of friends rented a room in Rayer Bazar, with a vision of improving the lives of the local youth. Rakshand and his friends began teaching 17 local children from the area. The first project of the JAAGO Foundation was born from providing relief supplies in response to a flood that destroyed part of the Rayer Bazar in 2007. Since then, the JAAGO Foundation has expanded to actively work toward the integration and participation of all youth in nation building through activities that support inclusion, transparency, and accountability. More than 50,000 volunteers today are working across the country in 11 schools and other sectors to ensure the participation of youth to support and ensure equitable access to education, environmental stability, and women’s rights throughout Bangladesh. Neha Choksi Sky Fold 2, 2013 Sky Fold 8, 2013 Folded paper and light cyanogram Collection of the Samdani Art Foundation What might be the dimensioning of the sky? Across time and geography, the sky has been both a backdrop and a foreground for countless civilizations. Centuries of song and poem have accessed the sky as an arbiter for the faithful and is never complete. It can be made invisible and while at other times, it is a preface for events to come. For some, the sky is a limitless expanse, continuous, open. And yet, for many others, the sky cannot be accessed, it is felt as the origin of sorrow, or even imminent danger. These works at once suggest the fragility and difficulty to contain the sky, its temporalities, and its power. While the grid may be understood as an ordering system, a mathematical invention that is supposed to relay equanimity while also potentially demarcating both economic and political conditions upon the ground; when imposed upon the sky, one is confronted with the possibility of its boundaries, both real and imagined. Choksi’s interest in forging temporary presence is, for the artist, “an affirmative act of destruction.” The Sky Fold cyanograms are photographic works that are embodiments of the means of their own production, folded paper, and light. Like a blueprint of the sky, these photographic prints capture those creases in time—perhaps moments of rupture—when the sky which we all share is made a reflection of the multiple worlds in which we live and dream. Neha Choksi deploys interdisciplinary approaches including performance, video, installation, and sculpture to redefine the poetics and transience of everyday life. Often reflecting on absence, her works employ an uncertain gravity that suggests an uneasy groundedness. Centered among logics that respond to the dialectics of socio-cultural contexts and their variable scales, Choski’s interdisciplinary multi-format works are both interventions into and responses to intersections of time, consciousness, and context. b.1973, USA and India

ALL PROJECTS Love- Power- Fall , Master Class Srihatta Driant Zeneli conducted an intensive six-day Master Class for five young Bangladeshi creatives at Srihatta: Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. The workshop revolved around his upcoming film, 'Love Power Fall,' which intertwines themes of a white peacock, Bangladesh’s iconic Parliament Building designed by Louis I. Kahn, and the country's six distinct seasons. During the Master Class, Driant provided insights into his creative process, exploring idea development, working methodologies, and his inspirations. A significant influence on the film is Baroque music and theatre, which will be heavily reflected in its storytelling, aesthetics, and dramatic structure. He encouraged the participants to research and integrate local Bangladeshi elements into the narrative, ensuring a fusion of their cultural heritage with his artistic vision. Under Driant’s guidance, the participants collaboratively developed the film’s storyline, connecting their research with the theatrical traditions of Baroque. They explored local knowledge systems, particularly drawing from Khona’s proverbs—an ancient collection of agrarian and meteorological wisdom that continues to influence Bangladeshi agricultural and architectural practices. Khona, a philosopher and astrologer from Bengal, is believed to have lived sometime between 400 AD and 1200 AD. Notably, Khona’s observations on vernacular architecture resonate with the design principles of Bangladesh’s Parliament Building, offering a compelling conceptual link within the film’s narrative. Beyond script development, the young creatives are playing an active role in designing the film’s costumes, scenography, and assisting in cinematography and musical composition. Their collective efforts are shaping a film that seamlessly weaves together local knowledge and Italian artistic influences, creating a rich tapestry of love, power, and downfall. Through this Master Class, Driant Zeneli facilitated a dynamic exchange of ideas, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and artistic collaboration. The resulting film promises to be a unique and layered representation of storytelling, blending the dramatic elements of Baroque theatre with the deeply rooted traditions and wisdom of Bangladesh. The five young creative continue to work with Driant Zeneli and will be part the core team throughout the whole production. The five participants are: Scenography : Md. Tasnimul Izaz Bhuiyan, Pulak K. Sarkar Storytelling and script: Rafi Nur Hamid Production: Sondip Roy Costume Design: Sumaiya Sultana

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 5 - Residence Time Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 5 - Residence Tim e Standing in the air on scaffolding, laying telecommunications cables while submerged under the sea, or manning call centres while suspended on a foreign time zone– the toiling bodies of the over 20 million migrant South Asian workers around the globe are mostly invisible, and yet instrumental in creating many of the world’s most picturesque cityscapes as well as to the simultaneous socioeconomic development of South Asia through the money they send home. Bangladeshis are moving beyond the countries geopolitically comprising South Asia, further west to the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and further east to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. These people are often treated as bodies without souls, having no culture of their own beyond their otherness. They are often written out of the narratives of the very nations they help to build, as reflected by the sparse South Asian cultural discourse in Southeast Asia. Works by Subas Tamang, Gan Chin Lee, Liu Xiaodong and Shahidul Alam attempt to humanise this issue through technique of portraiture. South Asian culture is present all over the world via complex relationships of labour, and this Bearing Point serves to reorient our thinking about South Asia away from land-bound definitions - no longer sufficient markers of where a culture lives. Even if you watch a Hollywood 3-D film such as Harry Potter, the film was post-produced via a global assembly line running from Los Angeles through Bombay and beyond, capitalizing on low labour costs and government subsidies to supply the painstaking work going into each frame of a film. These digital networks are beautifully captured in the work of Lucy Raven and Anoka Faruqee, and the diversity and complexity of these interwoven movements can be seen Nabil Rahman, Yasmin Jahan Nupur and Pratchaya Phinthong’s work.Overseas workers often inhabit a suspended condition of statelessness, literally going underground as in Charles Lim’s haunting video or being forced to cross unfamiliar black waters as in Andrew Ananda Voogel’s chronicle of the pain of indentured labour. Bangladesh has its own migrant labour situation now that over half a million Rohingya refugees have entered Bangladesh. Just as there are instances of Bangladeshi workers being trafficked or falsely enticed into exploitative labour contracts in Southeast Asia, there are also cases of Rohingyas being trafficked in Bangladesh as a cheap labour source as chronicled in Kamruzzaman Shahdin’s monumental quilt made from material traces of displacement.We build the world around us through our labour, and it is important to remember that the post-industrial economies in which many of us participate are built on the backs of cheap, often coerced, migrant labour in the Global South. Transnational flows of labour create new cultural economies, which need to respected and celebrated as having as much legitimacy as national narratives. Artists Andrew Ananda Voogel (b. 1983 in Los Angeles, lives and works in Taipei) Kalapani: The Jahaji’s Middle Passage (2014) Video installation Courtesy of the artist Andrew Ananda Voogel chronicles the legacies of longing from exile in his work, much of which explores the history of the Jahaji’s of Guyana. Through a new form of debt-bound slavery termed indenture, about 3.5 million South Asian workers (primarily from Bengal), including Voogel’s great-grandmother, were tricked, forced, or manipulated by the British before being loaded on boats and sent to Britain’s 19 colonies including Fiji, Mauritius, Ceylon, Trinidad, Guyana, Malaysia, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa between 1834 and the end of World War II. As our eyes adjust to the darkness of the room in Kalapani: The Jahaji’s Middle Passage (2014), we enter a state of uncertainty about the ground we stand on, thrust into the trauma of being separated from loved ones on alien lands across the “black waters.” Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972 in Ann Arbor, lives and works in New Haven) 2016P-08 (Wave), 2016 2017P-08 (Wave), 2017 2017P-10, 2017 2017P-27 (Circle), 2018 2017P-05, 2017 2017P-11, 2017 acrylic on linen on panel Courtesy of the artist and Koenig and Clinton. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew Anoka Faruqee’s hypnotic technicolour paintings create uncanny surfaces reminiscent of digital screens. The glitches and bruises break the illusion, speaking to the imperfect and unpredictable translations from the virtual to the physical, and the role of the human hand in this translation. In the context of Bangladesh, Faruqee’s patterns and motifs also call to mind the histories of the textile industry, where it is said the fear of superior craftsmanship lead British administrators to cut off the thumbs of weavers; today, this once venerated industry feeds a global cycle of cheap fast fashion and accelerated consumption. Faruqee creates delicate topologies in her hand-combed paintings, where the imperfection, or glitch, plays a crucial role in the formation of otherwise smooth-milled surfaces. Charles Lim Yi Yong (b. 1973 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) Sea State VI, Phase I, 2015 Single Channel HD digital video, 7 minutes, sound Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from National Arts Council Singapore and technology support of Sharjah Art Foundation Singapore continues to grow, both above and under the sea. The Jurong Rock Caverns are Southeast Asia’s first underground liquid hydrocarbon storage facility. Located at a depth of 130 metres beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s. Opened in September 2014, Phase 1 of the caverns holds some 1.47 million cubic metres of oil storage tanks. This is about the size of 600 Olympic swimming pools. The volume of undersea rocks excavated from Phase 1 equals 1.8 million cubic metres, enough to fill 1,400 Olympic swimming pools. The SEA STATE, which exists as the frontier of a climatic and ecological complex, takes us to places that were until recently only a thing of oneiric theory. This place is occupied by submerged migrant workers from Bangladesh whose labour here contributes to the residual climactic effects plaguing their country back home. Gan Chin Lee (b. 1977 in Kuala Lumpur, lives and works in Kuala Lumpur) No Place for Diaspora, 2015 Oil on linen Private collection, Kuala Lumpur Post-Colonial Encounter, 2015 Oil on jute Private collection, Kuala Lumpur Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Gan Chin Lee’s paintings grapple with the changing urban landscapes of Malaysia, tracing demographic and cultural shifts that accompany the influx of international labour and capital. He examines the lives of diasporic South Asian communities, tracing their occupation of already-existing urban infrastructures and creating new spaces of cultural hybridity. The patterns evoked in these mesmerizing paintings also call to mind batik fabric techniques which carry histories from South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and also Africa, speaking to the wealth of existing cultural memory found in these hybrid spaces reactivated by the movement of labour. Labour and conditions of precarity, where the circumstances of citizenship often become murky, become the basis of the invention of new ways of living together. Kamruzzaman Shadhin (b. 1974 in Thakurgaon, lives and works in Dhaka) Haven is Elsewhere, 2017-2018 Used clothing, embroidery, video Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Produced by the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s work Haven is Elsewhere (2017-2018), the newest iteration of an ongoing community project, embodies the common quest of most migrants and refugees: the search for a “safe haven.” In Kamruzzaman's work, internally migrated people in Thakurgaon in Northwest Bangladesh, create a quilt from the used clothes of displaced people from Southern Bangladesh - the border demarcating South and Southeast Asia. Many of these clothes and narratives of displaced people were collected over a period of a year and a half by the artist from people who were illegally trafficked as forced labourers into Thailand and Malaysia, some of these were abandoned by the newly arrived Rohingya refugees who accepted new clothes given by local people in Bangladesh and NGOs. These are then sewn together by the internal migrant community in Thakurgaon and embellished with the traditional Bengali kantha embroidery techniques through a therapeutic ritual. These monumental quilts form a projection surface for video documentation that attempts to capture the stories of displacement through these once-used clothes. This quest for freedom often continues as the new migrants and refugees become targets for illegal trade and trafficking, continuing a cycle where the safe haven shifts its axis further and further out of reach. Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963 in Jincheng, lives and works in Beijing) Steel 8, 2016 Oil on canvas, diptych Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong Refugees 7, 2016 Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong Refugees 8, 2016 Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew Liu Xiaodong’s portraits of refugee and migrant workers from South Asia in Europe intervene in the narrative of what is often termed “the refugee crisis” – of the “non-Western Other” arriving in droves on the shores of “Fortress Europe”. He produces intimate encounters that disrupt the dehumanisation of these men, where often the only self-image allowed to them are stamp-sized photographs on identity documents that no longer hold validity in the countries where they have arrived. Secrecy often surrounds the sites where migrant labourers live and work. Chinese migrant workers are a growing force in Bangladesh with heavy Chinese investment in infrastructure projects. In 2016, Xiaodong created hopeful portraits of Bangladeshi workers at infamous ship-breaking yards in Chittagong, encountering difficulty in the process as his presence as a Chinese artist created a sense of heightened tension in the workplace in an industry fearful of being shut down. Lucy Raven (b. 1977 in Tucson, lives and works in New York City) Curtains, 2014 Anaglyph video installation, 5.1 sound, 50 min looped. Courtesy of the artist Technology supported by Sharjah Art Foundation In Hollywood, the incredibly labor-intensive process of creating visual effects for our 21st-century cinema is called “post-production.” But the industry still relies on 20th-century modes of industrial production: its global assembly lines run from Los Angeles through Bombay, Beijing, London, Vancouver and Toronto, capitalizing on cheap labor and government subsidies to supply the countless hours of painstaking work going into each frame of a film. Viewed with anaglyph 3D glasses, Lucy Raven’s video installation Curtains explores the digital creation of location and space insofar as they relate to contemporary movie-making. The work brings real-world geographies (and real workers) back into the computer-generated virtual spaces today’s moviegoers inhabit. Nabil Rahman (b. 1988 in Sylhet, lives and works in Dhaka) Old Bond Street, 2017 Found cigarette foils from Bangladesh Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist Richmond, 2017 Found cigarette foils from the Philippines Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Bellas Artes Projects. Photographer: Noor Photoface During a residency at Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines in 2017, Nabil Rahman was surprised to learn that several of the artisans with whom he was collaborating spoke a few words of Bengali due to their time as migrant workers in Dubai, during which time they had Bangladeshi friends. The artist has woven together found cigarette foils from both countries into two sculptural forms reminiscent of emergency blankets. Cigarette foils are gleaming golden motifs that indicate the depth of colonial traces in Bangladesh and the Subcontinent, stamped with subtle symbols on their surfaces such as the Benson & Hedges (a British Tobacco company) logo. The patterns proliferate in terms of psychological preference to foreign branded products, even if the tobacco itself is grown locally. Nicotine is consumed during breaks- so whether working for foreign companies abroad or smoking foreign tobacco – there exists a problematic addictive cycle, manipulating human behavior rather than selling an actual product. Pratchaya Phinthong (1974 in Ubon Ratchathani, lives and works in Bangkok) Untitled (Jeans), 2016-2018 Jeans, performers Courtesy of the artist and gb agency Produced by the Bétonsalon, Paris for the exhibition Anywhere But Here (2016) In Untitled (Jeans), Pratchaya Phinthong questions ideas of value, localizing transnational flows of workers and capital by producing a participatory system of exchange. The artist borrowed pairs of jeans from two migrant Cambodian construction workers residing illegally in Thailand. They had purchased these jeans at the Bangkok weekend market, known for selling items stolen or cheaply bought from the stocks of clothing donated by charity organizations in the West to NGOs in Cambodia. Much of the clothing for sale had previously been intercepted by middlemen, who sell them to Western tourists and local workers alike for profit. These jeans purchased in Thailand were sent to Paris to be worn by the staff of the exhibition Anywhere But Here (2016) at the Bétonsalon, Paris, which originally commissioned the work this work was originally commissioned. In return, Phinthong used the production budget of that exhibition to buy bicycles for the workers back in Thailand, as they had requested. These jeans are now worn by DAS staff working as art mediators in Bearing Point 5. Jeans are a powerful symbol of the networks which we are forced to participate in everyday in a global economy, and carry the material history of denim’s association with industrial capitalism, including with Indigo in Bengal. The Levi’s jeans used in this work are themselves knock-offs, alluding to out-sourced assembly-lines, where garment workers in countries such as Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico, work to produce cheap clothing which feeds the international demand for fast fashion. Bangladesh alone produces one of every seven pairs of Levi’s jeans, so it may be speculated that the jeans were originally produced here. Knock-offs feed a parallel economy of needs, where items such as Levi’s jeans are status symbols, despite being unaffordable to many who want them, particularly those from the very class that produces them. By introducing these knock-off jeans into the space of an exhibition, Phinthong raises the question of the value of copying, particularly in the context of contemporary art, where the idea of originals still holds considerable importance. Through this process-driven artwork, the artist brings to the surface the already-existing entanglement between two unregulated spaces of labour – of the migrant labourer and the cultural worker, both frequently working contract-to-contract jobs, with no fixed working hours – and the precarious conditions within which they operate. The work becomes a system through which both sides are able to imagine possibilities for their own parallel economies of exchange. Shahidul Alam (b. 1955 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka) The night before a migrant is about to depart, his family members pray for his safe return, 1988 A woman bids goodbye to her man, unsure of whether they will meet again, 1996 Workers and relatives wave at each other unaware that they are too small to be visible, 1996 Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Digital Fine Art Paper Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface Shahidul Alam chronicles the moment before the departure of Bangladeshi migrant workers, in the suspended state of Dhaka’s international airport. Migration is often a collective experience, where entire villages contribute to raising the funds necessary to pay the recruiting agencies, and extended family and friends accompany the to-be migrants to the airport. He unpacks the almost ritualized gestures that accompany this journey, in the moments before dislocation, as men are herded through the theatre of airport security, and these families reconfigure the in-between space of the airport to act as spaces of intimacy, of prayer, of hope. Subas Tamang (b. 1990 in Amardaha, lives and works in Kathmandu) I Want to Die in My Own House, 2017 Carved slate with metal armature Commissioned and produced with support from Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Subas Tamang’s work I Want To Die In My Own House (2017) uses the traditional form of a slate roof – a motif of vernacular architecture formerly prominent in his native Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia – when immortalizing his parent’s labour and dreams by carving their image into stone. This is an autobiographical commentary on the dreams of thousands of family members in Nepal who move from small villages to bigger towns and cities or even abroad in the search of a better life. When people move, they usually rent a room as part of the struggle for survival. The continuous challenges of securing their daily needs and a decent livelihood for their families while nursing a hope to have a permanent roof above their heads, often traps such families in an unending cycle of struggle. The money that overseas Nepali workers send home keeps the country afloat, and the dreams of one day being homeowners help them to endure adversity. Yasmin Jahan Nupur (b. 1979 in Chittagong, lives and works in Dhaka) The Long Way Home, 2011 Fabric with embroidered maps Courtesy of the artist and Exhibit320. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Yasmin Jahan Nupur is inspired by multicultural connections forged across linguistic barriers in spaces created by the transnational flow of labour. Nupur spent six months immersed in the community of migrant workers in Mauritius, which was once of the destinations for debt-bound labourers during the British colonial period from 1833-1920 when about 3.5 million South Asians were transported to Africa, the Caribbean, and islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In the miserable housing conditions Nupur encountered, occupied today mostly by Chinese and Bangladeshi migrant workers, the artist found that strong community bonds formed when people from different countries were forced to occupy a single small room , leaving them no choice but to find ways to survive together. In the suspended fabric sculpture The Long Way Home (2011), Nupur sewed and embroidered the routes of connections that forged this vast network of friendships.

ALL PROJECTS Roots Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Roots Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Artists in Bangladesh have played a key role in building the institutions that support artistic production in the country, from founding formal institutions like art schools (such as Zainul Abedin with the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka and Rashid Choudhury with the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong) as well as informal art education outside of the capital (S.M. Sultan’s Shishu Swarga and Charupith). Dhaka based artist and educator Bishwajit Goswami’s exhibition examines the transfer of knowledge by art educators who have been critical in the building of Bangladesh’s art history. Roots Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Roots explores the transfer of knowledge by 61 art educators who have been critical in the building of Bangladesh’s art history through painting, sculpture, ceramics, craft, and other forms of art. They are represented not only through their art works but also related archival material that connects them across time and space. Zainul Abedin (1914–1976), Safiuddin Ahmed (1922–2012), Quamrul Hassan (1921–1988), and S. M. Sultan (1923–1994) were pioneer artists and educators who established fertile ground during the 1950s-60s that allowed artists from East Bengal (1947–1971) to transform from colonial subjects into artists who expressed their unique voices in a newly Independent Bangladesh. After Independence, the next generation of artists of the 1970s and 1980s were more focused on trying to relocate their artistic identities in a global context. Building on the foundations laid by Abedin, Ahmed, Hassan, and Sultan, the artists in this exhibition were crucial to the creation of the contemporary art ecology of Bangladesh. Their work in and outside of the studio and classroom has had a lasting influence on multiple generations of Bangladeshi artists. Their art and thoughts have had an influence on wider Bangladeshi society. Decolonial Awareness and Action There was a strong sense of decolonial awareness in the 1950s that pervaded the art scene of what was then East Pakistan. Several Muslim students and teachers from the Government School of Art in Calcutta opted to move to East Pakistan to develop their own distinct style after the 1947 partition of India – among these artists were Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed and Quamrul Hassan. Zainul Abedin, for example, founded Dhaka’s art institute in a context that previously had no recent history of institutional or professional art. What this first generation of artists initiated was not only a stylistic shift, but a call for the rethinking of East Bengali cultural practice, in addition to identifying its lack of institutional representation. They founded institutions to allow this culture to flourish in the new context of East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. Building from Scratch The first generation of teachers in what is now the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka made deliberate strides to cultivate a context for artistic expression outside of British or West Pakistani domination. The school was and continues to be an intellectual meeting point and its building designed by Muzharul Islam made it one of the first examples of modern architecture in East Pakistan, if not all of South Asia. These teachers were politically active and vocal against the injustices imposed on them by West Pakistani rulers. They participated in mass movement demonstrations as part of the Language Movement of 1952 leading up to the independence movements of 1969–1971, remained involved in the struggle for democracy of 1980s and later participated in the anti-fundamentalist uprising movements of the last two decades. Newlyfounded formal institutions like art schools as well as informal art education platforms outside of the capital (S. M. Sultan’s Shishu Swarga and Charupith in Jessore (1985)), artists such as Zainul Abedin with the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1948, Rashid Choudhury with the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong (1970), and Shoshibhuson with Mahesharpasha School of Art; currently Fine Arts School, Khulna University (1904), established deep and resilient roots allowing the culture of East Bengal to spread its branches all over the country. The Birth of Bangladesh The birth of Bangladesh was made possible by a shared hope of creating a secular, democratic and socialist country where Bengali culture would flourish. It was a cultural movement before it was a nationalist one. The government’s commitment to create institutions to nurture the country’s culture was not limited to Dhaka – it extended to Chittagong (Southeastern Bangladesh), Rajshahi (North Bangladesh), and Khulna (Southwest Bangladesh). The 1971 war renewed the search for inspiration from Bengali cultural heritage and sparked a new impulse to communicate with the population at large by incorporating social and political interpretations into art. Quamrul Hassan depicted the furious face of West Pakistani aggression and encouraged people to demolish it in his poster Annihilate These Demons. In 1988 he again awakened the people against the authoritarian ruler of HM Ershad by inscribing his last drawing with the title The country is under an impudent ruler. Many of the artists in the 1950s such as Aminul Islam ( 1931–2011), Murtaja Baseer (1932–), Rashid Choudhury (1932–1986), and Abdur Razzaque (1932–2005) went abroad for higher education and trained in the art centres of the ‘Western world’ (France, Italy, USA) where they came in contact with avant-garde movements. Looking eastward, Mohammad Kibria (1929–2011) travelled to Japan where he adopted a style of abstraction influenced by Japanese (as well as American) philosophy. The artists of the 1960s searched for expanded and more meaningful involvement with ideas that had begun to dominate artistic and aesthetic discourse combining local and international influences. Hashem Khan (1941–) and Rafiqun Nabi (1943–) are notable examples of artists who portrayed local issues through illustrations and cartoons. Mustafa Monwar (1935–) invested his time in introducing art and creative practices to the masses through his widely broadcast television show that taught children how to express themselves with puppets, drawings, and watercolours. A great deal of passion flowed through the works of the 1970s where the impact of the Liberation War was visible. The re-emergence of figurative art was a welcome relief from the obsessive preoccupation with abstract formalism of the previous decades. Hamiduzzaman Khan (1946–), Chandra Shekhar Dey (1951–), Alok Roy (1950–) and many other artists demonstrated an interest in the increased ‘localisation’ of themes and forms. The second generation of East Pakistani Artists of the 1960s worked in parallel with the first generation of Bangladeshi Artists of the 1970s with their teaching and artistic activities. They began to develop the local art scene by introducing art criticism, exhibition and graphic design to support the public dissemination of art. They established formal exhibition platforms (such as the Asian Art Biennale (f. 1981), which is the oldest continually running biennial of contemporary art in Asia) to share their work with both local and international audiences. The generation of the 1980s developed a critical point of view about history and reality to combat the oppressive dictatorial regime of Ershad. The artists from the Shomoy Group (Dhali Al Mamoon (1958–), Shishir Bhattacharjee (1960–), Nisar Hossain (1961–) and others) blended elements of diverse social issues and represented time and history. The contribution of this generation of artists is significant; they brought about new readings of modernism, altering the art world and its values (more information about this generation can be found in Mustafa Zaman’s exhibition at DAS on page 83). Roots, Branches, and Leaves; Generations, Collectives, Individuals The works of art in this exhibition visually stand for the individual contributions of 61 artists as they developed unique styles while being mentored by artist-pedagogues from the previous generation. When the socio-political environment was stable (which it rarely is in Bangladesh) artists became more focused on their personal practices and strove to build an art market in this young country, and several opened up commercial art galleries. However, during the several periods of unrest in the country, many shifted their focus to activism. They built collectives and artist groups to create a support system to push their radical ideas and demand for reform into being. This energy carried across generations, and the borders between individuals, groups, and generations are ambiguous. Visitors are invited to form their own narratives of connectivity across space and time through the artworks themselves, but also through the underlying networks that built the art scene of Bangladesh that we experience together at DAS. A Guide to Bangladesh’s Art Schools Name changes of cities, streets, and buildings are common in South Asia, and the institutions described in these biographies are referred to by multiple names. The guide below is an attempt to map out how the four main art schools of Bangladesh were referred to at different times of their history. Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka: Government Institute of Arts, Dacca (1948–1963) East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts,Dacca (1963–1971) Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca (1972–1983) Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (1 September 1983 – 1 August 2008) Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (2 August 2008 – present) Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong: Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong (1970–2010) Chittagong Art College (1973–1984) Government Art College, Chittagong (1984–2010) The Department of Fine Arts and Government Art College combined together to form Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong (2010–present) Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi: Rajshahi Arts & Crafts College (1978–1994) Department of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi (1994–2015) Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi (2015–present) Fine Arts School, University of Khulna: Maheshwarpasha School of Art/ Arts (1904–1983) Khulna Art College (1983–2009) Institute of Fine Arts, University of Khulna (2009–2019) Fine Arts School, University of Khulna (2019–present) Abdur Razzaque Simultaneously a painter, a printmaker and a sculptor, Abdur Razzaque is known for his Jagroto Chowrangi (The Vigilant Crossroad), a memorial sculpture dedicated to the valiant Bengali Freedom Fighters from 1971 at Gazipur, Tongi. Razzaque earned his Fine Art Degree from the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1954 and then received a Fulbright Scholarship to study Fine Arts at the State University of Iowa, USA in 1956, where he continued as a research assistant until 1957. Upon his return to Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1958, he joined the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca as a teacher. He established the first sculpture department in the country in 1963 and dedicated himself to the development of the academic programme at a time when figurative sculptural representation was considered antireligious and was therefore discouraged. b. 1932, Shariatpur; d. 2005 in Jessore Abdus Shakoor Shah Over a large span of his career, Abdus Shakoor Shah’s work has been drawing on folk motifs and ancient Bengali ballads including Mahua and Malua love stories, Nakshi Kanthar Maath, Gazir Pata, Manasha Pata through painting, tapestry, batik and serigraphs. Shakoor was encouraged by his mentor Rashid Choudhury to work with heritage, culture and myths while studying at the Department of Fine Arts, Chittagong University. As a teacher, he inspires his students to find inspiration from the region. He earned his BFA from the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1970, and his Post Graduate Diploma from the M.S. University, Baroda, India in 1978. He is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Craft, University of Dhaka and formerly held the position of Director of the Institute of Fine Art. b. 1946, Bogra; lives and works in Dhaka Abul Barq Alvi Abul Barq Alvi, a painter and printmaker, has been an inspiration for several generations of Bangladeshi art students. During the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, he was arrested by the occupying forces and incarcerated and tortured. The war left a deep scar in his psyche that changed his perception of reality. Instead of recording external impressions, he became more interested in exploring the inner world of nature where images are reduced to their essential forms. He completed his BFA at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1968 and conducted postgraduate research at Tsukuba University, Japan from 1983–84. He is currently Honorary Professor of the Printmaking Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka where he held the position of Dean from 2012 to 2014. Abul Monsur Over a more than three-decades-long career as an art educator and writer, Abul Monsur applied his literary practice to contribute to the field of art theory and art criticism, also promoting Bangladeshi artists through publishing artist monographs. To integrate the disciplines of art and literature, Monsur and his friends published the annual magazine Proshongo in 1985 and later established Shilpo Somonnoy (a space for young artists) in 1999. As a student, Monsur was involved with the collective Oti Shamprotik Amra that created a 13-panel mural in 1972 narrating the history of Bangladesh which was part of the India- Bangladesh Friendship Fair in Calcutta (considered to be the first international exhibition of an independent Bangladesh). Monsur started his career as a teacher in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong and taught theory until 2012. He completed his studies at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1972 and received his MFA in Art History from the M.S. University in Baroda in 1982. b. 1947, Chittagong; lives and works in Chattogram Abu Sayeed Talukder Abu Sayeed Talukder played an important role in developing the foundation for modern ceramics and studio pottery practice in Bangladesh, by introducing modern techniques and concepts such as crystalline glaze and establishing ceramics as a mainstream art medium. He experimented with pottery-making, primarily using terracotta. He completed his BA in 1985 and his postgraduate diploma in 1986 in Ceramics at the Central Academy of Applied Art, Beijing, China. He became a teacher at the Ceramics Department, Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1987 where he had previously completed a certificate course in 1980. Alok Roy Alok Roy is known for his monumental figurative sculptures combining folk and classical terracotta style in a contemporary fashion. Inspired by the ancient architecture of Bengal, his sculptures often carry fragments reminiscent of architectural forms and are also often situated in outdoor environments, interacting with the elements of sunshine, wind, and rain. One of his finest masterpieces that combines sculpture and architecture is his residence Aroni, where he also established Chittagong Sculpture Center in 2018, a space for students to share knowledge about sculpture. Alok Roy completed his studies at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1973 and earned his MFA from M. S. University in Baroda, India (1978). He later served as a teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong from 1978–2016. b. 1950, Mymensingh; lives and works in Chattogram Aminul Islam Aminul Islam was arguably the first artist to introduce mosaic murals to the art scene of Bangladesh. The Osmani Memorial Hall, Dhaka has a great example of his mural work on its entrance. An autobiographical streak runs through many of his paintings. His figures gradually became more suggestive and more geometrically organised later on in his career. He drew his designs from various sources, and his compositions became more focused and articulate. He was a student of the first batch of the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1953 and studied in Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze in Florence from 1953–1956. Later he became a teacher at the Institute and became its principal in 1978. b. 1931, Narayanganj; d. 2011, Dhaka Anwarul Huq Anwarul Huq was one of the initiators of the Government Institute of Arts in Dhaka in 1948 and served as a teacher until 1977. He made significant contributions to the development of the curricula of the school. Anwarul Huq was the founding teacher of the Department of Drawing and Painting. He was a somewhat reclusive figure, preferring to stay away from the public gaze, focusing on institution building activities such as teaching and administrative duties. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1941 and a ‘Teachership’ Course at the Government School of Art, Calcutta and taught there until Partition in 1947, after which he relocated to Dhaka. b. 1918, Uganda; d. 1981 in Dacca Banizul Huq Banizul Huq was a vital figure in the foundation of two major art institutes in Bangladesh: Chittagong and Rajshahi Art College. Huq joined Chittagong Art College in 1973 as one of its first teachers. While teaching there, he built a hostel for the art college students to transform it into a residential campus. But soon after, he left the institution to establish Rajshahi Art College in 1978 which is now the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi. He remained there as founding principal until 1986. Huq was a painter whose work reflected the serene beauty of nature with surrealist motifs. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts, Dacca in 1973. b. 1948, Gaibandha; d. 2018, Dhaka Bulbon Osman Despite having a background in sociology, Bulbon Osman has dedicated his career to the teaching of art history. He completed his BA in 1962 and his MA in 1963 at the Sociology Department of the University of Dacca. Osman began his teaching career in 1966 as a teacher of the ‘Sociology of Art’ at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca. Osman’s involvement in theory has also inspired him to become a self-taught artist working across painting and printmaking. He contributed to the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (Free Bengal Radio Centre) during the Liberation War of 1971. Osman is currently serving as an Honorary Professor of the History of Art Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1941, Howrah; lives and works in Dhaka Chandra Shekhar Dey Chandra Sekhar Dey’s canvases capture the magic of everyday life in Bangladesh and its stories, mostly focusing on urban landscapes. His unique use of the colour white in his art practice is notable and stands out in the Bangladeshi context. He worked as a teacher at the Chittagong Art College from 1973– 1977 and from 1984–1988. During that time, he also volunteered at several cultural spaces in Chittagong. Active as a student, Dey was one of the key members of the collective group Oti Shamprotik Amra that created the 13 panel Abahoman, Bangla Bangali murals in 1972. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1972 and his MFA in 1975 at the Fine Arts Department, University of Chittagong. b. 1951, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Debdas Chakraborty Debdas Chakraborty works across various mediums and disciplines creating artworks that are distinct for their combination of lines that build up abstract geometric forms. His Bristi (Rain) series is the finest example of his style. As a politically aware artist, Chakraborty’s artworks repeatedly depict social realism, but in an abstract form. Debdas Chakraborty taught at the Fine Arts Department of Chittagong University for about a decade from 1970–80. During the Liberation War of Bangladesh, he worked as a designer for the temporary Government of Bangladesh. Chakraborty completed his art education at the Government Institute of Arts in 1956. b. 1933, Shariatpur; d. 2008, Dhaka Dhali Al Mamoon Dhali Al Mamoon is known for his versatile experimental works, both in terms of their ideas and the diverse media employed. His drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and videos explore history and identity of Bengal. He finds it difficult to escape history and is driven by the need to articulate the social and political imperatives of the nation. His art writings reflect his anti-colonial standpoint and reveal the inferiority complex issues of colonised people in their cultural contexts. He was a founding member of the Shomoy artists’ group, active from 1980 to 1995. He completed his Master Degree in Fine Arts at the University of Chittagong in 1984 and received the DAAD Fellowship at the Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin, Germany from 1993–94. He is a Professor in the Department of Painting, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong and one of the most influential teachers in Chittagong. b. 1958, Chandpur; lives and works in Chattogram Farida Zaman Farida Zaman has been an inspiration for women in Bangladesh over her five decade long career due to her persistence to keep working against all odds. The artist’s subjects interact with time and space, and she is particularly well known for her fishnet series. Zaman has published illustrations and articles in journals across Bangladesh. She completed a BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1974 and an MFA at the M.S. University, Baroda, India in 1978 and later earned a PhD from the Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India in 1995. She is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1953, Chandpur; lives and works in Dhaka Foyejul Azim Foyejul Azim’s artistic journey centres on the theory of art which he taught from 1982–2018 at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong, publishing several theoretical books parallel to his painting practice. In 1992 he published a collection of articles entitled Charukalar Bhumika, defining fundamental concepts of Fine Arts and their visible processes, helping Bangladeshi art students to enrich their theoretical knowledge. Bangladesher Shilpakalar Adiparba O Aupanibeshik Probhab is another one of his research contributions. Foyejul Azim completed his MFA at the Fine Arts Department of Chittagong University. He earned his PhD from Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta in 1994. b. 1953, Cox’s Bazar; lives and works in Chattogram Golam Faruque Bebul Golam Faruque is an abstract painter and printmaker and his works are notable for their fragmented imagery with varying forms and compositions that depict the anguish and joy of life. His abstract imagery includes a vocabulary of abundant and varied textures and colours and his layering techniques create enhanced expressiveness. He earned his BFA in Printmaking from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978. He later earned an MFA in 1985 in the same subject from the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. He is a Professor of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi. b. 1958, Jamalpur; lives and works in Rajshahi Hamiduzzaman Khan Hamiduzzaman Khan is known for his large-scale public sculptures that are found in Dhaka and across Bangladesh. His work is associated with the Liberation War and freedom fighters, and he uses a wide variety of materials in his sculptures from metal to marble to wood. While his own individual works on these themes began while he was a student in Baroda, the work became more ambitious while he assisted his teacher Abdur Razzaque in executing Jagroto Chowrongi in Gazipur in 1972. Khan earned his BFA in painting from the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1967. His travels in Europe sparked his fascination for sculpture in urban and public space, and he later enrolled in an MFA programme in sculpture at the M.S. University, Baroda from 1974–76. He interned at the Sculpture Centre in New York from 1982 to 1983. He is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Sculpture, University of Dhaka. b. 1946, Kishoreganj; lives and works in Dhaka Hashem Khan Hashem Khan’s school textbook covers and illustrations have been inspiring many generations of students to pursue art; his simple drawings effortlessly connect to the people and their daily life. His painterly work is romantic, abstract, and colourful. He actively participated in the Liberation War of 1971 and produced many works addressing the subject to rally the cause. Hashem Khan was one of the designers and illustrators of the handwritten Constitution of Bangladesh of 1972, under the supervision of Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin. He completed his Fine Art degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1961. He was a faculty member of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka from 1968 to 2017. b. 1941, Chandpur; lives and works in Dhaka Hashi Chakraborty Hashi Chakraborty was one of the pioneers in synchronising regional and global forms in his paintings, most of which demonstrate a strong presence of nature, the sea in particular. His work explores ideas of progression and epic consciousness. During his undergraduate years Chakraborty founded the Painters’ Group along with his friends in 1973. He joined The Chittagong Art College as a teacher after completing his education at the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts, Dacca in 1972 and earned an MFA from the Fine Arts Department of Chittagong University in 1974. b. 1948, Barisal; d. 2014, Chittagong Hritendra Kumar Sharma Hritendra Kumar Sharma is an artist and an art educator. A contrasting use of light and shade on the surface and drawing-based abstraction dominates his work. His powerful lines create visual illusions and generate dynamic space on the surface of the work. He completed his BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1981. He later earned an MFA in 1984 in the same subject at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. He became a lecturer in Rajshahi Arts & Crafts College in 1989. b. 1961, Netrokona; lives and works in Rajshahi Jamal Ahmed Jamal Ahmed’s artworks portray two-dimensional painted figures against pastoral and urban scenes. He is known for his use of colour and textured surfaces and his ability to invoke drama and tension. He earned a BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978 and an MFA degree at Tsukuba University, Japan in 1982. He studied oil painting in Japan from 1982 to 1984 and completed another year-long research course in Warsaw, Poland in 1980. Ahmed is currently a Professor at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. b. 1955, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Kazi Abdul Baset Kazi Abdul Baset’s work varies from realism to abstraction with a distinct richness of colour. He completed his BFA at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1956, and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under a Fulbright Scholarship from 1963 to 1964. While studying in the USA, Baset was influenced by abstract expressionism. Baset was at the forefront of those who tried to introduce abstract expressionism in Bangladesh and played an important role in modernising painting. In 1957 he joined what is now the Faculty of Fine Art University of Dhaka as a teacher, the Director of the Institute of Fine Art (1991–94) and the head of the Drawing & Painting Department. He retired in 1995. b. 1935 Dacca; d. 2002 Dhaka Kazi Rakib Kazi Rakib is recognised for his glass paintings although he also works in a variety of other media. Rakib was a founding member of the Dacca Painters 1974–1977, an artists’ group inspired by Surrealism and Dada. In 1981, he created a series of prints denoting the corruption, killing, political instability, economic crisis and social discrimination of the time, part of his longstanding work as an artist-witness. Rakib completed his BFA in 1977 at the Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong. He was one of the founding teachers of Rajshahi Art College from 1979–1984. He regularly wrote on art and aesthetics for a newspaper named Dainik Barta. b. 1958, Shariatpur; lives and works in New York KMA Quayyum Stories originating from the sensibility and expectations of life find their place on the canvases of K M A Quayyum. His journey in the field of art finds its distinct identity through the use of a melancholic colour palette. While influenced by western naturalism, Quayyum’s subject matter remains grounded in Bangladesh. After completing his studies at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1973, he completed his MFA degree at the Fine Arts Department, University of Chittagong in 1975. He started his teaching career at the Chittagong Art College in 1978 and taught there for four decades. b. 1952, Comilla; lives and works in Chattogram Lala Rukh Selim Lala Rukh Selim is a sculptor, academic and researcher who was a member of Shomoy, an influential artists’ group active during the 1980’s and 1990’s. She was the editor of ART, a quarterly Journal active from 1994 to 2004 that played an important role in disseminating English texts about art in Bangladesh. She edited the ‘Arts and Crafts’ section of the Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series, published by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh in 2007. She completed a BFA at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1984 and earned an MFA at the Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, India in 1989. She was the lead partner for the Faculty of Fine Art in the INSPIRE project which was an educational exchange program with the Slade School of Art, UCL, London, UK from 2010–2017. She is a Professor of the Sculpture Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1963, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Mahbubul Amin Mahbubul Amin played an important role in the country’s fine art movement through his service as a teacher for three decades, helping students to choose their artistic paths. Amin’s works reflected various motifs of village life, both human and nonhuman. Although his taste was enriched and polished by urban life, his mind was filled with the essence of the soil. Amin completed his BFA at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1970 and joined the college as a teacher in 1972. b. 1948, Mymensingh; d. 2001, Dhaka Mahmudul Haque As an artist and teacher, Mahmudul Haque introduced different printmaking and painting processes to his curriculum. Haque’s stylised artworks are non-representational; line, color, shape, textures are dominant on the surfaces of his prints and paintings. He cooperated with the Bengal Foundation to establish the Safiuddin Bengal Printmaking Studio, an alternative space for artists. He completed his BFA at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1968 and an MFA at Tsukuba University in Japan in 1984. Haque was a visiting Professor at Tsukuba University and the Indus Valley School of Art and Design, Pakistan. He is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Printmaking, University of Dhaka and held the position of Director of the Institute of Fine Art from 1999 to 2002. b. 1945, Bagerhat, lives and works in Dhaka Maran Chand Pal The cultural history and heritage of Bangladesh inspired the work of Maran Chand Pal. He made a great contribution to the practising and conservation of traditional pottery folk dolls (i.e. Tepa Putul, peacocks, elephants, horses). He transformed forms and ideas from traditional dolls into impressive sculptures with his unique style. He was one of the first students of the Department of Ceramics at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca where he completed his certificate course in 1964. He later joined the department as a teacher in 1965. Taking his teaching role outside of the classroom, he also taught ceramics to local youth as a tool for improving their livelihood. b. 1945, Dacca; d. 2013 in Dhaka Matlub Ali Matlub Ali is an artist, art educator, art critic, writer, lyricist, composer and playwright. He has been contributing to Bangladeshi literature through numerous books on the socio-political scenario as well as the country’s art and culture. He is highly influential in the development of art historical writing. He completed a BFA in 1969 at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca and an MFA in 1987 at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. He joined as a lecturer of Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts in 1973 and retired as a Professor of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 2012. He held the position of Dean, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka from 2010 to 2012. b. 1948, Rangpur; lives and works in New York Mir Mustafa Ali Mir Mustafa Ali was an artist and art educator who played a pioneering role in the development of ceramics as institutional practice in Bangladesh. He was the founding head of the Ceramics Department at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca. He completed a Fine Art Degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dhaka in 1955 and later went to England to study modeling and ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1956–1960. Zainul Abedin took the initiative of opening the Ceramics Department in 1961 and invited Ali to join as a lecturer in 1963. Ali collected traditional ceramics and donated those to the department’s permanent collection to enrich the students’ knowledge of the medium. He was the Director of the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka from 1986 to 1988. b. 1932, Burdwan, British India; d. 2017 in Dhaka Mohammad Eunus Mohammad Eunus is a painter and graphic designer whose versatile style enriches the scenography of major events like Amar Ekushey, Zainul Utsab, and many convocations at Dhaka University. He is also known for his painting, which is inspired by abstract expressionism but carries familiar textures of urban society. His canvases depict the effects of time, the rotation of the planet, and the cycle of the seasons through the use of texture across various shapes and forms. He earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978 and an MFA from Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan in 1987. He is currently a professor in the Graphic Design Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1954, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka Mohammad Kibria Mohammad Kibria was an abstract painter and graphic artist who is remembered as one of the first successful non-representational artists in Bangladesh. Guided by Hideo Hagiwara while studying in Japan, Kibria learned to apply precision and balance to his painted surfaces, values that he passed onto his students. Kibria was inspired by abstract expressionism and his early-works articulated architectural concepts and geometric influences that recalled cubism. He completed his art education at the Govt. School of Art, Calcutta, India in 1950, and studied at the Tokyo University of Arts from 1959–1962. Prompted by Zainul Abedin, in 1958, Kibria joined the Government Institute of Fine Arts and taught painting and eventually moved to the printmaking department. As a teacher and artist, he inspired students and others to be open minded and to create art in a global context. b. 1929, Birbhum, British India; d. 2011 in Dhaka Monirul Islam Monirul Islam is one of the most influential living artists in Bangladesh known for his constant search for new methods of painting and print-making which also involves making his own paint and paper. He studied at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts in Dacca from 1961–1966. He was a teacher at the same college in Dacca from 1966–1969 and left teaching for higher studies in Spain, studying mural paintings at the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts. Even while abroad, he remained in touch with Bangladeshi artists and conducted workshops when visiting Dhaka in order to pass down his methodology. b. 1943, Chandpur; lives and works in Dhaka and Madrid Monsur Ul Karim Monsur Ul Karim expresses himself through paintings that speak to the co-existence of nature and humanity. Coming from Rajbari, a district near the bank of Padma River, he has depicted the life and struggle of people displaced by erosion, using bright and vibrant colours. His works on the hilly region of Bandarban are calm with cool compositions of blue and green. He founded Monon Academy (2005–2015) and established an artists’ group called Amader Chattogram 95 in order to keep the art scene in Chittagong alive. In his retirement, he founded ‘Bunon Art Space (2016–) in his hometown of Rajbari. Monsur Ul Karim earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts, Dacca in 1972. He received his MFA degree from the Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong in 1974 where he taught from 1976–2015. b. 1950 Rajbari; lives and works in Rajbari Mostafizul Haque Although Mostafizul Haque has been teaching painting at graduate and postgraduate level and made a considerable contribution in developing a culture for educating children in Fine Art. Very conscious about the relationship between children, art, and psychology, he implemented this knowledge to introduce new techniques to help children learn more effectively. He completed his BFA in 1978 and MFA in 1981 at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca. He later earned another Master’s degree in Japanese Painting from the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1995. He is currently teaching as a professor in the Drawing and Painting Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1957, Bagerhat; lives and works in Dhaka Murtaja Baseer Murtaja Baseer is known for his ‘abstract-realist’ paintings reflecting his daily experience of Bengal. In 1967, he started the Wall series, his first step towards abstraction, which depicted the entropy and layers of textures and colours on the walls of old Dhaka, a reflection on the society under the dictatorship of Ayub Khan (1958–1969). He actively participated in the Language Movement of 1952 and pre-Liberation War demonstrations. He was sent to jail throughout the East Pakistani period for his leftist political views and later left for Paris. Baseer enrolled in the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1949. After earning the degree in 1954, he studied at the Academia di Belli Art of Florence from 1956–1958. He later studied mosaic making at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1971–1973) and Etching and Aquatint in Academie Goetz in Paris, France from 1972–1973. Baseer is also a writer, poet, numismatist, and acted as an academic at the University of Chittagong until 1998. b. 1932, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Mustafa Monwar Mustafa Monwar is a painter, art educator, designer,media personality and cultural activist. He participated in the language movement of 1952 and during the 1971 Liberation War he organised puppet shows at refugee camps in West Bengal to inspire and encourage people in the midst of war. Monwar’s television puppet show Moner Kotha ran on Bangladesh Television for twelve years and had a great impact on the children of that generation. Through his television show, many children learned about the different techniques of art. He runs the Dhaka-based organisation Educational Puppet Development Centre (EPDC). He studied at the Govt. College of Art and Craft, Calcutta in 1959. Monwar started his career as a teacher at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca from 1960–1963. He later joined Bangladesh Television (BTV) as Director General and went on to become Director General of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and the National Media Institute. He also served as a managing director of the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation. b. 1935, Magura; lives and works in Dhaka Naima Haque Women and the mother–child bond dominate both the paintings and illustrations of Naima Haque. While earning her MFA, Haque took on the challenge of engaging with the male-oriented discipline of graphic design and later made this her tool to reach out to mass audiences, educating children with her illustrations, story books and witty poems. Being a prominent member of Shako (an association of female Bangladeshi artists established in 2003 that works for the welfare of women), she frequently works closely with organisations across Bangladesh who support groups that are marginalised by society. She completed a BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1974 and an MFA in Graphic Design at the MS University of Baroda, India in 1983. She joined the department of Graphic Design at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1987 as a lecturer. b. 1953, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Nasreen Begum Nasreen Begum broadly practices oriental-style wash painting. Her fluid use of color reflects the restlessness found in capturing the beauty of a passing moment and employs age-old techniques in a contemporary manner. Colour plays a great role in her works and one of her best-known bodies of work is the Cactus Series where women and nature are depicted symbolically. She completed a BFA in Oriental Art at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978 and an MFA in Printmaking at MS University, Baroda, India in 1983. Nasreen Begum is currently a professor of the Department of Oriental Art, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1956, Chuadanga; lives and works in Dhaka Nazlee Laila Monsur Nazlee Laila Monsur depicts social relationships and issues of urban life in her own distinct style. She looked for inspiration from Indian miniature painting and rickshaw paintings of Bangladesh, transforming these traditional techniques with characteristics of her own. Her paintings display a narrative tendency and use bright and vivid colours. Set in an urban surrounding, symbolised by the presence of crows and rickshaws, her figures seem to be in a mystical mood torn between belonging and non-belonging. Nazlee completed an MFA at the Fine Arts Department of University of Chittagong in 1976. She started her career as a teacher at Chittagong Art College in 1976 and retired in 2009. b. 1952, Rajshahi; lives and works in Chattogram Nisar Hossain Nisar Hossain is a versatile artist, academic, researcher, organiser and cultural activist. He was a founding member of the Shomoy group. Hossain rejected the complacent geometry and singleviewpoint perspective pursued by many artists of his time. His work today includes elements of performance art, sound art, installation, photography and pantomime to create moving images of our time. His research articles on folk art are published in national and international journals. He earned his BFA from Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1981 and his MFA from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santineketan, India in 1985. He is a professor of Drawing and Painting Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka and holds the position of Dean. b. 1961, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Qayyum Chowdhury Qayyum Chowdhury was known for his illustrative paintings and book illustrations. He designed many book covers and posters which are still used until this day. He used motifs of folk art more for stylistic reasons than for their content. He focused squarely on the rich style of folk art – its decisive use of lines, its decorative designs and ornamentation, and its detailed workings of various leitmotifs. He was the convener of the Charu Karu Shilpi Songram Parishad during the Liberation War in 1971. He completed his Fine Art degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1954. Chowdhury joined the same institute as a teacher in 1957 and then took a job at the newly established Design Centre and within a year joined the Pakistan Observer where he served as its chief artist. He later returned to the East Pakistan College of Art and Crafts in 1965 as a teacher. Although he retired in 1994, he continued teaching there until 2002 as Honorary and Supernumerary Professor. b. 1932, Feni; d. 2014 in Dhaka Quamrul Hassan Quamrul Hassan was a painter, designer and art educator who was always politically active and is perhaps most famous for the poster Annihilate These Demons of the Liberation War of 1971. He was involved in the Non-Cooperation movement (1969–70) and also took part in the Liberation War, serving as the Director of the Art Division of the Information and Radio Department of the Bangladesh Government in Exile. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1947 at the Govt. School of Art, Calcutta, India. After Partition, Quamrul Hassan came to Dacca and, in collaboration with Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin, established the Government Institute of Arts in 1948. He taught at the same institute until 1960. The East Pakistan Small and Cottage Industries Corporation was established under his leadership in 1960, and he worked there as Director of the Design Centre until his retirement in 1978. Politically active until his death, one of his last sketches became an inspiration for a mass movement that brought about the downfall of the Ershad regime in 1990. Annihilate These Demons, Poster of a representation of Pakistani General, 1971. Courtesy of Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh b. 1921, Calcutta; d. 1988 in Dhaka Rafiqun Nabi Rafiqun Nabi (also known as Ranabi) is a painter, print-maker, art educator and cartoonist, best known for his creation of the icon Tokai. Tokai is a character that represents poor street children who live by begging and scavenging from the garbage and have a knack for telling simple yet painful truths about the current political and socio-economic situation of the country. His Tokai character has become a nationally adopted icon and has inspired many students to become cartoonists. He completed his art education at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1964. During 1973–1976, he studied printmaking at the Athens School of Fine Arts with a scholarship from the Greek Government. Nabi joined as a teacher at East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts in 1964 and served as a member of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka until 2010 and held the position of Dean. He is currently the Supernumerary Professor in the Department of Drawing and Painting, University of Dhaka. b. 1943, Chapainawabganj; lives and works in Dhaka Ranjit Das Ranjit Das’s romantic works seek to capture the essence of nature with an abstract and poetic disposition. His canvases reflect his experience with colour, space and time through his expressive brush strokes. Das was influenced by Picasso, Rembrandt, Matisse and other European painters as well as Indian contemporary art that he encountered while pursuing a Master’s degree at the M. S. University, Baroda in 1981. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1975 and worked as a teacher in the Fine Arts Department, the University of Chittagong. b. 1956, Tangail; lives and works in Dhaka Rashid Choudhury Rashid Choudhury’s work is unique among his contemporaries as the source of his inspiration was not folk art but rather folk-lore. His works explore the myth, magic and the legend of both Muslim and Hindu cultures living across rural Bengal. While he painted with oil and gouache, Choudhury is best known for his tapestries. He was a significant pioneer in the modern art movement from as early as the 1950s, creating many hand-woven tapestries for government as well as private buildings. He studied at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca from 1950 to 1954. He went to Madrid on a scholarship at the Central Escuela des Bellas Artes de San Fernando from 1956 to 1957. Returning from Spain, he joined the Institute of Arts as a teacher in 1958. He obtained a French Government scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts from 1960 to 1964. In 1970, the Fine Arts Department was established at Chittagong University and Choudhury joined as one of its first teachers and played a major role in developing the department. He was also a leader in establishing the Chittagong Art College in 1973. His works can be found in the permanent collections of Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the initiatives of Samdani Art Foundation. b. 1932, Faridpur; d. 1986 in Dhaka Rokeya Sultana Courtesy of the artist and Ms Nilu Rowshon Murshed Rokeya Sultana’s painting and printmaking practice is largely focused on her inner life and an exploration of the feminine experience. Sultana’s works recall the relationship between mother and child, the apathy of girl’s care, and the struggles of ‘liberated Bangladeshi women’ as compared with the contemporary global status of women. Her Madonna series is a well-known body of work that carries a strong determined feminist statement. She earned her BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts in 1980 and her MFA from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan in 1983. She is a Professor of Printmaking Department at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1958, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Safiuddin Ahmed Safiuddin Ahmed is remembered for the lasting legacy he left on printmaking in Bangladesh. He, along with Zainul Abedin and others, played an important role in the foundation of art institutions in Dacca. Ahmed helped raise the profile of a printmaking, a discipline often considered of secondary importance, by adopting it as his main medium. He inspired many other artists from the subcontinent to begin printmaking. He often travelled to Dumka, India, a place populated by Santhal people, and like many modernists before and after him, he was inspired by their way of life. But after coming to East Pakistan the look, posture and the environment of his works changed and he gradually started to move towards abstraction. He completed a Fine Art Degree (1942) and Tearchership Course (1946) from Government School of Art, Calcutta, India and subsequently travelled to London for advanced training in printmaking, enrolling at the Central School of Arts (now Central St. Martins) in 1956. b. 1922, Calcutta; d. 2012 in Dhaka Samarjit Roy Chowdhury Samarjit Roy Chowdhury is a painter, art educator and graphic designer in Bangladesh. His book illustrations, book covers, poster designs, typography and other elements of graphic design are recognisable for their unique style. He was one of the designers of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh prepared in 1972. He completed a Fine Arts Degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1960 and joined as a teacher in the same year and spent 43 years teaching Graphic Design. He later served as Dean of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts of Shanto-Mariam University of Creative Technology, Dhaka until 2010. b. 1937, Comilla; lives and works in Dhaka Shahid Kabir Shahid Kabir’s art speaks to the struggles of everyday life; his art narrates the life experience of ordinary as well as subjugated and underprivileged people. His use of colour and texture in his paintings and prints connect to the earth of his motherland. Kabir was inspired by spirituality and Baul philosophy and he attained local fame for works on Lalon Shah Fakir and Baul masters in the 1980s. He left for Spain in 1981 to seek western contemporary art knowledge and came back to Bangladesh after 17 years. Kabir earned a BFA from the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts in 1969. He taught painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca from 1972 to 1980. b. 1949, Barisal; lives and works in Dhaka Shafiqul Ameen Shafiqul Ameen was an art educator, administrator and painter. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1938 at the Govt. School of Art, Calcutta, India. He assisted in the primary administrative work of establishing the Art Institute in Dhaka. Ameen joined the Government Institute of Arts in 1955 as a founding teacher in the Oriental Art Department. Zainul Abedin retired from the post of Principal in 1967 and Shafiqul Ameen took up this leadership role. He was an excellent administrator and held the position of Executive Director at the Folk Art Museum, Sonargaon from 1976–1982 which was also founded by Abedin. b. 1912, Assam; d. 2011 in Dhaka Shoshibhuson Paul Shoshibhuson Paul was a well-known artist in colonial East Bengal. It is assumed that he was the first initiator of a sustainable art community in East Bengal, working to enrich art skills in the region (especially when it came to oil painting techniques). His works brought him respect and fame with the British Raj. His artworks were appreciated by many patrons and were commissioned by colonial officers and the local wealthy community. Shoshibhuson’s greatest achievement was setting up the first art educational institute for the East Bengal region, named Maheshwarpasha School of Art, in 1904. It was later developed and became known as Khulna Art College, and is now merged with Khulna University. b. 1877, Khulna; d. 1946, Khulna Sheikh Afzal Hossain Sheikh Afzal is well known for his representational art-making from the 1980s. He created many portraits of legendary personalities such as Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Rabindranath Tagore, Zainul Abedin and many others. He earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1981. He completed an MFA at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1984 and the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1993. He is a faculty member in the Department of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1960, Jhinaidah; lives and works in Dhaka Shishir Bhattacharjee Shishir Bhattacharjee is a painter whose work stands out for its strong social commitment, sarcasm and wit. He was a founding member of Shomoy, an artists’ group which was significant both in terms of the artists’ understanding of time and their role in the course of Bangladesh’s history. His works project a dystopia where power-hungry people rule. He is considered to be one of the leading satirical cartoonists in the vcountry and continues to publish his political satires on the front cover of the highest nationally circulated newspaper. His socio-political commitment inspires him to create murals on the Shaheed Minar (Martyr Monument) premises every year to commemorate International Mother Language Day and he plays a vital role for organising Mongol Shovajatra on Pohela Boishakh (Bangla New Year). He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dhaka in 1982 and MFA at the M.S. University Baroda, India in 1987. He is a professor and chairs the Drawing & Painting Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1960, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka Showkatuzzaman Showkatuzzaman was known for his watercolour wash techniques and use of tempera, a practice employed by artists practicing ‘oriental art’ in Bangladesh. He was one of the artists who played an important role in developing and inspiring students to pursue oriental art, a genre that was inspired by pan-Asian movements of the 20th Century. Showkatuzzaman earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1974 and completed his postgraduate studies from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, India in 1976 and 1990. Showkat taught at the Chittagong Art College for a few years and joined the Oriental Art Department at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1992 and taught there until his death. b. 1953, Faridpur; d. 2005 in Dhaka Siddhartha Talukder Siddhartha Talukder’s area of interest is abstraction. He completed his BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca i n 1981. He continued his studies and earned an MFA in 1985 in the same subject from the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. In 1999, he earned his PhD in the History of Art from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India. Talukder is currently a professor in the Department of Painting, Oriental Art and Printmaking and also holds the position of the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi. b. 1957, Jamalpur; lives and works in Rajshahi S. M. Sultan S. M. Sultan was known for his energetic paintings of muscular farmers and their engagement with the landscape of Bangladesh. He began to study at the Government School of Art, Calcutta but left without completing his degree in 1944 to travel to Kashmir, which inspired many of his landscapes. After travelling extensively as a celebrated artist both internationally and within South Asia, Sultan retreated from urban life, moving to his home village of Narail, where he founded the Shishu Shwarga art school. His devotion to rural art education has had a lasting legacy, inspiring many initiatives to promote personal growth outside of urban centres through art. b. 1923, Narail; d. 1994 in Jessore Syed Abdullah Khalid Syed Abdullah Khalid belonged to the first generation of sculptors who practiced sculpture-making as an institutional discipline despite discouragement under the West Pakistani regime. He flourished as a sculptor practicing realism. The Aparajeyo Bangla monument of the liberation war of 1971 at the Dhaka University campus is one of his most well-known creations. Today this sculpture stands as a prominent example of modern sculpture in post-independence Bangladesh. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1969 and MFA at the Fine Arts Department, University of Chittagong in 1974. He served as a professor at the same institute until his retirement in 2012. b. 1942, Sylhet; d. 2017, Dhaka Tarun Gosh Zainul Abedin Zubanul Islam Bangla-e-Bidroho Photographer: Randhir Sing and Noor Photoface

ALL PROJECTS Nobody Told Me There Would be Days Like These Curated by Mustafa Zaman Assistant Curator: Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury The 1980s was a decade during which art played an increasingly social-political role in Dhaka’s art scene. This defiant point of departure from ‘surface painting’, which saw its emergence in the 1960s, can be seen as a tectonic shift since this strain of artmaking continues to inform the discourses and debates across the cultural horizon in Bangladesh to this day. Artists sought detours and vocalised antagonistic positions primarily to dislodge art from its elite academic perch. Dehumanisation and storytelling became twin conduits for artists to formulate new strategies to articulate dissent. In artist-curated exhibitions, access to ideas and information on art and artists was supplied with the intention to edify the public. This ‘critical turn’ left its influence on many disciplines – it effected a change in how artists, poets, as well as theatre and film activists perceived the relationship between their works and society. Thus, the 1980s witnessed a determined detour through reframing of the ‘social’ and invocation of the ‘political’. New idioms were born out of the resistance movements waged against the longest-ruling military dictatorship in Bangladesh – the regime of the recently deceased general H.M. Ershad that lasted from 1981 to 1990. The dictator’s unscrupulous move to align with those who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the Liberation War in 1971, the pseudo-Islamic garb that came with the emerging brand of populism he was responsible for, the opening up of the economy to global market forces, and rising corruption coupled with political repression provided the backdrop for the subsequent resistance movements leading to the final overthrow of the dictator in 1990. To parse the developments of the 1980s, one can say that in the arts, it was the decade of radicalisation as interrogation won over introspection and action over passivity. It was an era of political resistance as well as cultural re-organisation. In the arts, this critical turn resulted out of the conviction that to topple the dictator one must spread antagonism in all spheres of life. After the fall of the dictator in 1990 – the fate of ‘democracy’ in Bangladesh became entangled with issues of corruption and flawed elections, and art and activism of the 1980s were carried over to subsequent decades to be reframed and re-organised to bear on various different goals. As DAS mounts its fifth edition, in which a synergy of the newest samples of South Asian art provide fodder for the public eye/mind, ‘Nobody Told Me There Would be Days Like These’ maps the history of groups that laid the ground for art and theatre, film and literary movements in the 1980s with the hope that we do not collectively renege on our promises made in favour of life. The exhibition’s title is a nod to a song from the same era by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Visual Arts In the visual arts, Quamrul Hassan (1921–1988) set a visual language into motion that sought to critique the emerging ruling elite of the early 1970s. Otherwise well-known for his pleasant depiction of rural life, Hassan, who belonged to the first generation of artists in East Bengal when Pakistan was formed, tackled what may be termed as the gentrification of urban society and the concomitant loss of social values. His political art, which articulated a critical voice by crowding his canvas with symbolic motifs where the dominant minority or alienated elite is represented in both human and animal form, was the first attempt in Bangladeshi art to instrumentalise ‘social fact’. Later in the 1980s, a group of young artists calling themselves ‘Shomoy’ emerged fresh out of art institutions. The group’s politically cast art once again brought storytelling to centre stage and sought to redefine narrative painting in South Asia. Shomoy, which literally translates to time, sought political salvation, hoping to end the military misrule which coloured life in Bangladesh in the 1980s. Their creative acts percolated into a critical analysis of their time, often reflecting the prevailing mass discontent, seeking to restore the ethos of the 1971 Liberation War. The members of Shomoy were Dhali Al Mamoon (b. 1958), Wakilur Rahman (b. 1961), Habibur Rahman (b. 1958), Shishir Bhattacharjee (b. 1960), Nisar Hossain (b. 1960), Dilara Begum Jolly (b. 1960), Aziz Sharafi (b. 1956), Saidul Haque Juise (b. 1960), Ali Morshed Noton (b. 1958), Lala Rukh Selim (b. 1963), Tawfiqur Rahman (b. 1959). Shomoy works lay at the intersection of many fields of emerging discourses and forms. The most active Shomoy members, including Shishir Bhattacharjee, Dilara Begum Jolly, Nisar Hossain, Dhali Al Mamun, and Wakilur Rahman also transported their creative energy to activities which lay beyond the scope of their respective disciplines. To understand the drift, one must take into account how the idea of dissent began to redefine cultural production of the era. The most active protagonists of theatre, cinema and poetry began to respond to the unfolding political events and the marketisation of the economy. Shomoy artists worked simultaneously through various themes and trajectories, utilising the power latent in little-noticed popular culture of South Asia. They devised their own brand of social realism – a way to attend to the ‘here and now.’ The works of Shishir Bhattacharjee, Wakilur Rahman, and Nisar Hossain unveiled the decadence and dehumanisation of the era while throwing up sharp critiques of the dictatorial and imperial political scheme. Both Dilara Begum Jolly and Dhali Al Mamoon’s figurative motifs began to break down into mangled entities referring to what was rotting in society, while Nisar Hossain’s insect-like predators were set against a backdrop teeming with references to rickshaw paintings. The belief in secularism and democracy was of prime importance to the generation of artists that came to maturity in the 1980s. Pitted against the destructive power unleashed through subsequent regimes, their conviction to create a secular social sphere fuelled their creativity, although the zeal for the ‘real’ assumed many different dimensions in theatre, cinema and even in poetry. If secular logic was the common thread to all this, artist’s voices often turned sarcastic while talking back to power. Architecture Networks of knowledge also kept people in sync with one another although they were working from within their respective disciplines. Chetana, a platform that grew out of a study circle that was presided over by late architect Muzharul Islam (1923–2012), often hosted their programmes in the presence of poets and literary personalities as part of the group’s early advocacy for interdisciplinarity. The late poets Shamsur Rahman (1929–2006) and Belal Chowdhury (1938–2018) and late professor and educationist Kabir Chowdhury (1923–2011) attended Chetana’s inauguration event. The most important element of their activism was that they attempted to bring Bangladesh’s architecture and heritage into the conversation about modern architecture. Chetana saw the union of like-minded architects: Raziul Hassan, Nazmul Latif, Syed Azaz Rasul, Uttam Kumar Saha, Nahas Khalil, then architects working in different fields including teaching at the architecture department of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, BUET, comprised the group. Saiful Haq (b. 1958), and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf (b. 1959), were members from the time they were fourth year students at BUET and are now established architects and researchers who continue to build on the ethos of Chetana. Theatre Resistance took the most effective and potent form in the arena of the theatre. The most influential iconic theatre and literary personality Selim Al Deen (1949–2008), who initiated Dhaka Theatre, was also responsible for Gram Theatre (launched in 1983) and worked to extend urban theatre to the rural hinterland. Nasiruddin Yousuff Bacchu, an actor-director, played an important role in the creolisation of modern theatre by way of absorbing Al Deen’s ideals and activism. By the late 1980s, more than 150 theatre troupes were developed in villages across the country under Gram Theatre, although most ceased to be active over the following years. These troupes lent momentum to a country-wide cultural regeneration and in spreading awareness among the masses about the slow erosion of society and politics under military rule. As a playwright and teacher, Selim Al Deen introduced what many refer to as ‘Epic Realism.’ His extensive study on Bengali popular theatre genre called ‘jatra’ coupled with his attempt in retracing the Hindu-Buddhist performance heritage led to his renowned drama ‘Kittankhola’, which is still considered a milestone in the modern theatre history in Bangladesh. Dhaka Theatre and Aranyak among other theatrical groups were instrumental in staging dramas that either harked back to the theme of the Liberation War and the repression of the Pakistan junta, or aimed to expose the anomalies of military dictatorship. Some groups even attempted to poke fun at the then military ruler. Theatrical performances served as a means to educate and open the eyes of the masses. ‘Payer Awaj Pawa Jay’ is a case in point. First staged by Dhaka Theatre in 1976, it was written by the late writer and poet Syed Shamsul Haq (1935– 2016) and was themed around the atrocities of the Pakistan army and the abuse of power by the village elite in the name of religion. Film The Short Film Movement added a decisive layer to the cultural fabric woven since the early 1980s. Morshedul Islam and Tareque Masud debuted as young filmmakers in the 1980s and were part of a greater movement centred on the Bangladesh Short Film Forum. Formed in 1986 by a group of young independent filmmakers and activists inspired and mentored by Alamgir Kabir (1938–1989), the platform was created after years of activism and campaigning for creative and aesthetically pleasing cinema by collectives called film societies. When the forum came into being it featured some of the most notable young Bangladeshi film makers among its members at the time, including Morshedul Islam (b. 1957), Tanvir Mokammel (b. 1955), late Tareque Masud (1956–2011), Enayet Karim Babul, Tareq Shahriar, Abu Sayeed (b. 1962), Shameem Akhtar, Manjare Hasin Murad, Yasmine Kabir, Nurul Alam Atique, Zahidur Rahim Anjan, N. Rashed Chowdhury, and Akram Khan. The Forum, by way of a biennial and non-competitive International Short and Independent Film Festival, kept hope alive for independent filmmaking, beyond injecting the cultural scene with much-needed optimism in favour of cultural activism. The first festival was held in 1988 and was entirely dedicated to short films. The forum is still active and it continues to organise seminars and workshops on films and film festivals all over Bangladesh, in addition to holding film shows and film-related events at their permanent venue at Bangladesh Film Centre in Shahbagh, Dhaka. Tareque Masud and Morshedul Islam played a decisive role in the development of Bangladeshi film, they made films that at once drew critical appreciation and public attention, the former for his documentaries and latter for his short-length films. ‘Adam Surat’, a documentary on the legendary artist S. M. Sultan by Tareque Masud, and ‘Chaka’ by Morshedul Islam were among the most influential films of the era, while Abu Sayeed, an early enthusiast of short-length film, later took to making feature films. Chaka carried over the idea of the ‘witness’, a theme that runs across many of his works, from the 1980s to the new millennium while Sayeed attempted to bring ‘Kittonkhola’, a popular stage play written by Selim Al Deen, to the silver screen in the year 2000. Literature The Little Mag movement was the veritable crucible of talents where writers and poets willing to break the mainstream circuit gathered. Working as a platform for literary aspirants who were willing to look beyond already explored territories, the alternative publications that gave it its shape also created space for artists and filmmakers to work in alignment with the cultural political goals of the time. Among many who played a catalytic role, poet Sajjad Sharif (b. 1963) was particularly active in threading the literary world with the world of art and film as he was behind some specific moments of convergence between members of the Shomoy group and the filmmaker Tareque Masud. Sajjad Sharif’s contributions can be traced to the early editions of the ‘Anindya’ (meaning one who lived eternally without blemish) and ‘Gandeeb’, or ‘Gandiva’ (the bow of Arjuna, the central character of the Mahabharata). Little magazines were selfpublished zines; the writers and poets involved took turns in generating funds for printing. Sometimes they were sponsored by literary enthusiasts. They were cheap and contained works of prose and poetry by emerging poets and writers. Although not directly involved with any little magazine, Ahmed Sofa (1943–2001) inspired many in the alternative literary circuit with his outspoken nature and intellectual honesty, including Salimullah Khan (b. 1958). While Sofa was stationed at Aziz Market, a place where these magazines were conceived and sold, he nurtured a new breed of young poets and writers. These were the literary creatives of the time who fought against conventional patterns of thought that then pervaded mainstream culture. Among the little magazines that worked as nodal points through which artists, writers and poets made their presence heard, Anindya saw its beginnings in 1985 and Gandeeb had its start in 1987. Together they worked as an alternative platform where the possibility of cross-fertilisation first began to appear. The editors of the two of the most influential and long lasting alternative magazines (both are in circulation now) were respectively Habib Wahid (b. 1962) and Tapan Barua (b. 1956). Of the emerging renegades who helped develop their reputation, some became part of the mainstream at a later date.