ALL PROJECTS Then | Why Not? -Solo Art Projects Curated by Diana Campbell Then | Why Not? The Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation endeavor to transform the city of Dhaka into a hub for South Asian art and its excellence breaking conventional ideas about where the region’s centre lies. It has been important to reject logistical restrictions and reasoning to present this free three day art festival, that spans not only the 120,000 square feet of the Shilpakala Academy, but also the entire city with New Delhi based Raqs Media Collective’s 160 road-sign and billboard project, Meanwhile, Elsewhere. The lexical patterns produced by Raqs’s ticking Bangla clocks registers a “deeply felt, subjective experience of time and duration” that gives people the freedom to escape from what they imagine “real time” to be. One of the clocks strikes at Then | Why Not? It is possible that this exhibition was born at this “time” of openness to possibility. These Solo Projects are fourteen monographic exhibitions by South Asian artists from around the world, without a central unifying theme. One characteristic that all of these projects and artists have in common is that they demand the impossible. This is not in terms of the clichéd slogan for anarchism, but rather in their defiance of constraints that are imposed on creativity, their fearless approach to expressing themselves in the context of South Asia, and their daring acceptance of an unprecedented challenge of being part of a South Asia dedicated event within South Asia, in the midst of its current political realities. It is important to note that the artistic infrastructure that is widely established in the West is not available in this part of the world, and the Pioneer Panel on the 8th of February will delve into the current realities for contemporary art making in the region. There is no representation concept in Bangladesh, where galleries can support artists to develop their careers and help artists realise their ambitious ideas. Bangladesh is a developing country, and most artists cannot afford to have studios in which to work. One cannot just take an artwork and ship it to Bangladesh for an exhibition. The import tax on art is prohibitively high, and the expertise to handle this art does not exist; we have had to train and develop this skill-set locally. The simplest materials such as helium, wall washers, and acrylic sheets cannot be sourced domestically. The situation is slightly better in India and Pakistan, however the movement of people and goods between these countries and Bangladesh, is extremely restricted, especially during the political events that plagued the country in 2012 and 2013 at a time when this exhibition was being organised. Given the circumstances, logic (and border politics) would suggest that this type of South Asia focused exhibition could not happen. We cannot paint on or drill into the walls of this government building, so even the walls you see here were specifically constructed for this exhibition.0 The artists and organisers demanded the impossible, and this is what we now present to you. We all stepped up to take on the difficulties and the demands that were needed to put together what you see - yet fortuitous connections were forged across cultures and the projects evolved in ways that the artists might not have originally expected. There has been a steep learning curve for all involved, but sparks of creativity flew when the artists and production team found innovative solutions to present their works in this new context, embracing the local, even in terms of the Bangla language. The mediums represented in these projects show the wide breadth of practices existing in the region, and performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, video, photography are all represented here. The work that the artists and I chose to exhibit all have subtle but direct connections to the context of Bangladesh, and it is our honour and pleasure to share them with local and international artists during the Dhaka Art Summit. This is just the start of a much longer journey, and several artists are among us now who are embarking on their research for the next Dhaka Art Summit in 2016. --Diana Campbell Betancourt, Dhaka, 2014 Asim Waqif (b. 1978) Control, 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Asim Waqif has been interested in different forms of protest in his work, and he challenges the public to question the often-ridiculous rules imposed by societies and governments. For Waqif, how it is, is not how it has to be, and he is constantly challenging the ideas of the impossible, merging high-tech systems with the genius found in low-tech vernacular solutions. Waqif pushes the boundaries between humor and artistic practice with a uniquely critical edge and aims to bring art to the public in the widest sense of the word. Hyderabad-born Waqif has exhibited extensively internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and at Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in their project space, and will be a part of the 5th Marrakech Biennale. He has been receiving international acclaim for his work that pushes materials past the surface potential they are thought to possess. Bamboo becomes a channel for sound, left-over exhibition materials en masse become material for an entirely new exhibition, decaying dog carcasses become muses, and crumpled water bottles and LED lights floated in water to become beacons for environmental awareness. These examples are but a few of the artist’s fascinating choice and manipulation of materials that many people would simply overlook. Waqif is not interested in creating works that are technologically superior and immune to nature. His poetic work often documents the ways in which weather and time affect his work and almost collaborate with his sculptural structures. “Decay and destruction have an important role to play in adapting to the dynamism of society” shares Waqif. Like his talent for finding potential in everyday materials, Waqif also finds humor in the serious. In his 2012 public intervention in New Delhi entitled Lavaris Vastu, Waqif subtly transformed a common police announcement (which droned fear of “the other” into public spaces) into a jest-filled instructional audio piece that prompted the public with alternative ways to deal with unattended objects and unknown people, using a voice that sounded exactly like one in the police announcement. This intervention cleverly encouraged healthy curiosity in “the other” rather than the usual paranoid suspicion, and the work suggested that the Lavaris Vastu, or unidentified object, had the potential to be a treasure to be discovered and cherished. Waqif collected objects and baggage from the community, and created a pile of them that evoked curiosity and welcomed the public to engage with the objects and even take them home if they wished. In this, and many of his works, the artist rebels against the thought of the commercial value of experience of art eclipsing experimentation. Following the rabble-rousing spirit of his previous works, Waqif decided to make his message fly in his new commission for the Dhaka Art Summit, Control, 2014. This work is inspired by the intense protests that have been happening all over the world for the last few years, and specifically those in Dhaka, which Waqif has been following closely, seeing them as almost a continuous series. Last year, there were limited protests in New Delhi (where Waqif lives), but the police and security apparatus managed to suppress them through strong-arm tactics like water-cannons and tear gas. Large parts of New Delhi were shut down and people were not allowed to go near the India Gate, and nine metro stations were temporarily shut down. This made the artist think about police tactics in crowd control, and their manipulation of infrastructure and public space. Control is a continuation of Waqif’s humorous finesse in questioning “systems.” Using cane, rope, and thousands of helium-filled balloons, Waqif creates a levitating sculpture that upon closer view, reads “No Fly Zone.” Waqif’s choice of material, one of the most basic elements of furniture in South Asia (cane) and one of the most basic2adornments to a child’s birthday party (helium filled balloons), is interesting when juxtaposed with the charged phrase of “No Fly Zone,” a phrase that carries serious mortal weight during displays of political might. Waqif reflects “It is indeed ironic that the public cannot do much in a public space except leisure. In fact the really iconic public spaces are the most controlled. But what about the sky, does it belong to the public or the police-state? There are already a lot of controls on private aerial vehicles in most cities in the world, but there seems to be ambiguity about flying balloons in the sky and this is what I am trying to exploit. The text itself is ironic, like pasting a ‘Stick no Bills’ sign on a wall.” Waqif will set this work loose to fly across Dhaka on the first day of the Dhaka Art Summit (February 7th), subverting the control that the sculpture, and political forces, attempt to assert over the public. Adding more irony to the work, the artist and public will cease to have full “control” over the work once it is let loose in the sky. Volunteers and visitors who arrive to the venue on motor bikes will be instructed to draw attention to the floating installation by blowing their horns in unison, pointing toward the sky, an asking passer-bys to see what is in the sky. “It’s a bird…it’s a plane…no, it’s an artwork!”Viewers will be requested to take photos and videos and to upload them online, extending the life of the work past the Shilpakala Academy and into the city of Dhaka and the global world of the Internet. Jitish Kallat Event Horizon, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Samdani Art Foundation and the Dhaka Art Summit. Jitish Kallat is one of the most exciting and dynamic Indian artists to have received international recognition in recent years. Kallat’s works have often been described as distilled, poetic investigations of the cycle of life, interlacing several autobiographical, art-historical, political and celestial references. His work has been exhibited widely at museums and institutions including National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai), Tate Modern and Tate Britain (London), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Serpentine Gallery (London), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Art Institute of Chicago. While most widely known for his paintings, Kallat’s work extends far beyond this medium, and in recent years, he has been celebrated for the scale of his sculpture, installation and new media projects both in terms of their size, but also in terms of their research. Kallat hit a seminal point in his career with a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was here that he created the monumental installation Public Notice 3, a text-based work illuminated in the bright colors of US Homeland Security threat alert system, recalling Vivekanada’s speech delivered on September 11th 1893 at the Art Institute of Chicago building. Text has a long history in Kallat’s works, from the painted titles on his early paintings to his more recent installations that often use text as form. At the first Kiev Biennale in 2012, Kallat created another critically acclaimed work entitled Covering Letter, a freestanding fog screen projection that revisits a 1939 letter from Gandhi to Hitler, allowing viewers to physically traverse a piece of correspondence from one of the world’s greatest advocates of peace, who addresses Hitler as a “friend” under the ideology of universal friendship. Several of Kallat’s recent works take on a more personal mode of address, and call upon viewers to find themselves in the work. In a haunting untitled work in Sculpture at Pilane, Sweden from 2010, Kallat created a 100 foot long sculpture of cast resin fossils that spell the phrase “When Will You Be Happy” in a historical burial ground in Sweden, putting desires that are often driven by consumerism into the important context of our human mortality. Jitish Kallat’s recent work has focused on the idea of time and life-cycles and at the Dhaka Art Summit, Kallat invites viewers to find themselves within the work, placing the viewer between night and day, and between immediate and eternal. His internationally acclaimed 2011 work Epilogue explores the 753 moon cycles that Kallat’s father experienced in his lifetime using 22,500 photographs of moons that were made of roti (the most basic form of Indian bread) in various states of being eaten. Moon cycles are endless, and in the seven channel animated video Breath, presented here, the viewer can think of themselves within the infinite cycles that comprise the universe through the waxing and waning roti “moons.” Breath contextualises viewers within the universe and compels them think about time, life, death, and the relationships forged during one’s lifespan. Turning the corner from Breath, the viewer is returned to the immediate demands of daily life routines in the seven-panel rainbow-hued lenticular photograph Event Horizon (The Hour of the Day of the Month of the Season) that was commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation for this exhibition. Kallat began using this medium around 2006 in a multi-part text based installation titled ‘Death of Distance’ and photo-pieces such as ‘Cenotaph (A Deed of Transfer). Lenticular prints are a succession of images within a single frame, and a change of the viewing angle creates the illusion of three- dimensionality with a heightened sense of animation. The timeless dilemma of the collective versus the individual manifests itself in Kallat’s work, and leaves viewers with a sense of responsibility to instigate positive change before history repeats itself. In this work, several of the figures appear in multiple panels of the panorama (such as the nuns and the group of young men), invoking notions of recurrence and recursion, an experience that is often part of Kallat’s oeuvre. We do not experience the universe alone. In this mysterious cycle of life, you never know who you may meet in the hour of the day of the month of the season from the moments just gone past. The past awaits our arrival in the future. Mahbubur Rahman (b. 1969) A Space For Rainbow, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. The Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur Rahman has been instrumental in the development of contemporary art in Bangladesh both through his personal experimental practice, his activism, and also his work developing the Britto Arts Trust, which he co-founded with his wife Tayeba Begum Lipi in 2002. Rahman’s paintings and performances have been widely exhibited in solo and group shows in Bangladesh and internationally in several renowned institutions including the Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and the 14th Asian Art Biennale. In many of his performance works, the body plays a key role in the artist’s journey for knowledge. In his powerful and ongoing performance Transformation, Rahman wears a faceless hood with attached buffalo horns, and walks around the streets of Dhaka. The performance refers to local lore of the farmer Nuruldunner Sarajiban, whose resistance to British colonial forces ruined him and resulted in having to pull his own plough in the place of buffalo, crippling him to a point where he is left powerless and braying like a cow. The Triangle Arts Trust has remarked, “Rahman's perfor- mance plays with a sense of impotence, contrasting the symbolic value of the horns with his blind and helpless wanderings.” Rahman is interested in how norms in society are created, and what forces cause certain acts to be forbidden. Rahman opines, “The norms in the diverse culture of societies are usually created according to the local atmosphere, weather and time. Many illogical norms coexist bringing about conflict and compelling us to decide how we ought to act. The larger part of the community chooses the social norms.”Gender norms are something that have interested Rahman from a young age. The artist is one of 8 siblings, and the first male born after his 5 elder sisters. He was always curious why he was the one that was always doted upon even though he wasn’t the youngest child. He grew up in old Dhaka, and in the early stages of his career, his early interest in gender politics extended to the lives of sex workers and cross-gendered people he encountered around the neighbourhood. The tragic rapes during the war in 1971 also keep popping to the forefront of his mind, and looking at how gender norms can lead to violence. Rahman has recently become extremely interested in the treatment of the minority LGBT communities both at home, and abroad. The repeal of Section 377 in India in December 2013 repealed a 2009 ruling that decriminalized same-sex marriage in the country. This highly publicized ruling provided yet another example of the barriers to gay marriage and gender equality that are rampant in South Asia, and the rest of the world. In Bangladesh, LGBT people face extreme discrimination and verbal and physical abuse, and same-sex intimate relationships are illegal. People who support the change of these restrictive rules are battling a powerful system, and Rahman sees these peace lovers as a kind of warrior. In his solo project, A Space for Rainbow, the artist provides a space for warriors to become lovers, and to think about a covenant of peace and happiness, reflecting on the multiple meanings of the symbol of the rainbow from Christianity to gender equality. Rahman designed a common washroom on the third floor for warriors in which he projects videos depicting scenes of masculinity on urinals made of surgical scissors, a medium which has threatening undertones to virility. Washrooms are places where people are their most vulnerable, and by looking at this shared vulnerability, perhaps prejudices could be diminished. Sounds of singing bowls and bells create a sense of calm and safety in this charged space. The artist shares that the “intention of this rainbow room is for the public to disconnect from their regular destructive life and rather give them a breathing space to convene and think about peace and happiness.”The artist believes that people lose identity in a washroom because it is a space where one tries to become comfortable and cleanse them self. Common warriors can join forces here with peace lovers to fight for equality. The artist has also curated an exhibition around the same theme at Britto Arts Trust. Mithu Sen (b. 1971) Batil Kobitaboli (Poems Declined), 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artists, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. In addition to being internationally acclaimed as one of India’s best visual artists, and winning the country’s inaugural Skoda Prize in 2010, Mithu Sen) is also recognized among connoisseurs as one of the finest Bengali Poets. Sen’s visual art practice stems from a strong drawing background that has extended into video, sculpture, installations, and sound works that further draw the viewer into her psyche. Sen has been invited for numerous international residencies and exhibitions, and as the artist travels, she attempts to draw in new publics to her work that often reflects how these new locations have affected her psyche.Sen has been returning to poetry in her recent work. In 2013 she realized a project entitled I am a Poet at the Tate Modern project space and at Khoj, where she invited viewers “to embrace ‘nonsense’ as resistance and comb out utterances from [their] subconscious; thereby, giving voice to all those moments that exist but are not realised or lived.” Many of Sen’s works aim to give glimpses at secret psychological moments, and to debunk ideas about hierarchies that exist in the creative world. In one such project, Free Mithu (2007 onwards), the artist offered free artworks to anyone who would write her a personal letter, making direct connection with the public without an intermediary such as a private dealer or an art gallery and using her artwork as an emotional response to correspondence from strangers. In another work, she took up a very prominent wall and filled it with the text that read “Artist – Unknown, Medium – Life,” celebrating works of unsung creative individuals whose names might have never made it into the consciousness of the art world. This desire to give importance to marginalized people, emotions, and ideas is a common thread in her work.Rather than celebrate her success or importance as a South Asian artist, Mithu Sen created a project that celebrates the work and efforts of poets whose work was not previously given prominence or attention, to those whose work was actually declined or rejected. In her experience in Dhaka, Sen realized that poetry was not limited to poets, the Bangla language itself was poetry, and poetry itself is a language in Bangladesh, sharing that “In Bangladesh, the language is not Bengali but Poetry.” In the process of creating the multi-media installation Batil-Kobitaboli (Poems Declined), Mithu Sen traveled to Dhaka to impulsively meet, collect, read, and study unpublished/rejected works by aspiring Bangladeshi poets, trying to recover the marginalized emotions of poets whose words could not cross institutional barriers. The artist personally met about 30-40 poets, but corresponded with over 100 poets who gave her more than 1,000 poems. Sharing rejection requires relinquishing one’s ego, and through her research and communication and artistic prowess, Sen has smashed traditional psychological and systematic barriers to these poets’ works and is presenting them in a prominent space in Dhaka in the Shilpakala Academy, and binding them in a nearly two foot thick book elevated on a golden pedestal. Rather than keeping the marked up manuscripts tucked away in a drawer or closet, Sen treasured these self-edits and suggestions of inadequacy and struggles to find one’s voice (which were given to her by the poets, even from their personal diaries), and elevated these corrective markings and psychological symbols of the creative process (doodles, etc.) into the realm of drawing. Placing a spotlight on these annotations, Sen projects their shadow into the space. Behind every successful project is another that failed, and we grow from these failures. These moments of feeling inadequate or grappling to find oneself fuel our growth, and at times, they may be something to celebrate. These self-corrections can also show a sense of self-reliance as they were corrected by the author, rather than by an institutional hierarchy. The sound element of this project is a poetic expression of Sen’s, which invites anyone to stand on a dedicated pedestal and read their poetry aloud. Through this gesture, Sen is attempting to transform her project into a space where creative people are encouraged to think past fears of rejection. Naeem Mohaiemen Shokol Choritro Kalponik, 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, theDhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Since 2006, the London born, New York and Dhaka based Bangladeshi artist and writer Naaem Mohaiemen has worked on a series called The Young Man Was, a long-form project in multiple chapters that traces the history of the “ultra left,” and its complicated legacy of disappointment and failure in Bangladesh. Using a mixture of whimsy and actual events, he has also linked these histories to that of the radical left in other countries, especially Germany and Japan. Each chapter has been in a different medium, and published in heterogeneous platforms. Some of the chapters are Guerillas in the Mist [Maoist underground in Dhaka], Sartre comes to Stammheim [Andreas Baader meets Jean Paul Sartre], Live True Life or Die Trying [dueling leftist-Islamism rallies], and War of 666 against six million [kidnapping of Hanns Martinn Schleyer]. The two latest chapters are the films United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1) [hijack of Japan Airlines], which was recently acquired by the Tate Modern, and Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was Part 2), which is scheduled to premiere in MoMA’s New Directors New Films series in the Spring of 2014. The language of these projects are somewhere between research, whimsy, and humour. Because of the ironic tone, the projects have sometimes been read in Bangladesh as “overly critical” of the left, including people Mohaiemen considers allies in the search for left alternatives. In discussions about the projects, Mohaiemen has stressed that he makes work as a believer in left futures, but with the understanding that tracing where things went wrong in the part of the process of building such futures. As he writes in the text for Live True Life or Die Trying: “A lover tries again, flower in hand.” Yet he also acknowledges that irony and distance are complicated devices to use in the context of Bangla- desh, where history is never past and things continue to matter. The pressure for creating what Naaem has elsewhere called “shothik itihash (correct history)” is immense, and he considers the visual arts a space where ambiguous, open- ended conversations have more space. Parallel to his interest in conducting research, Naaem has been investigating a minimal aesthetic that often veers towards the non-image. Thus United Red Army is a film where a majority of the story takes place in darkness, forcing the audience to replace the expected image with their own imaginary about what may be there. Sinking Polaroids into resin until they explode from heat, running VHS tapes through a VCR until on-screen snow appears, enlarging flip phone photos until the grain is the whole image (a project done before the advent of smart phone cameras)– all these techniques have produced works where the image refuses to give visual pleasure to the audience. Since (or even before) the time of Duchamp's intervention, the idea of the "everyday” inside the gallery has blended with other ideas of arte útil. Many decades later, so much sediment has gathered over the original provocation, that bringing an everyday object into a gallery or a museum would have no transformative valence. The commoditization of this gesture can be seen in recent museum projects where the "R. Mutt" signature was attached to an actual museum urinal (instead of bringing it into the white box. Mohaiemen writes that “at a time when art education, international interest, and media linkages, are commodifying, commercializing, and flattening art practices in Bangla- desh, there is a useful space for the idea that "everyone is an artist," most importantly the audience in their reading (or rejection) of the object on the floor, wall, or atrium.” The artist continues, stating, “The ultimate everyday object is the daily vernacular newspaper (not the English edition, within which my own writing has been trapped for many years), distributed, sold, shared, pasted, and finally recycled.” At the Dhaka Art Summit, Mohaeimen has married his writing and recent minimalist artistic leanings into a single- issue newspaper with the full title of "Shokol Choritro Kalponik,”– "Jodi shone polao khai, tobe ghee diyei khabi" (If I eat pulau in my dreams, I may as well eat it with ghee). This 8-page issue includes imagery reminiscent of the style of newsprint in the 1970s. The newspaper presents fictional news items, along the lines of news that many people would wish to see: the news that would have been the everyday if the ultra left had come to power in the 1970s and built a different utopia. These stories are so far outside the realm of the possible that they fall into the category of "I wish, but I know this is not possible in this world." A Sample Headline includes: Indians Protest Smuggling of Cows from Bangladesh. Rana Begum No. 473, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit, the Samdani Art Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Belonging to the second generation of artists who turned Minimalism into something completely theirs, Rana Begum claims Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, sacred geometry in Sufism, and Islamic art and architecture as her influences. To this, she adds cues gathered from built and urban environments – from noticing patterns of colour, line and form as they collide in a city. A relatively new influence to her work was visiting the Cathedral-Mosque in Cordoba, Spain in 2008/2009. The spiritual experience from the repetition of arches and domes has been an inspiration for her recent work. Begum’s work becomes something new with every shift of light. Reflecting on the work, the artist shares that “My hope is that the work can almost be viewed as a lesson in seeing, because upon leaving the work, perhaps the viewer starts to see these moments around them, and notices anew the odd and often uncharacteristic glimpses of beauty that living in a city can provide.” The bright colour palette that is characteristic of Begum’s work reflects the rich visual culture of South Asia, and these colours blend into one another in unique ways through the folds and shadows that the artist creates with her sculptures. While many female artists in the region are known for their use of organic materials and feminine craft, Begum masters the “masculine art” of working with metal, defying the norms that her conservative Islamic background imparted on her. However, the geometric lines and repletion used in traditional Islamic arts have influenced the precision and purity of Begum’s practice. Folds and bending are important facets of Begum’s works. She folds paper and even thin aluminium sheets into forms that are reminiscent of kites, with a sense of lightness that gives the feeling that a gust of wind could blow the sculptures away. Her recent body of work blends into the wall with the new use of white as a base, with glowing colours in the background that seem to radiate in the space between the sculpture and the wall. The illusion that light can create is something Begum has mastered over the years with increasing sophistication. Elaborating on her current work, Begum shares that it “is mainly fabricated from powder-coated and painted metal extruded sections. The language these materials use is at first inspection one of mass production. But then as the complexity of pattern that flows across these linear hard-edged forms is made visible, something far subtler is revealed.” In her first major exhibition in Dhaka, Begum moves away from surface ideas of mass-production and brings focus to the handmade. Begum revisits her childhood fascination with basket weaving, an activity she enjoyed when growing up in Bangladesh, and which also uses a similar process of bending and folding that she is known for. For Begum, the idea of architecture evokes memories of reading the Koran in Bangladesh and watching simple streams of light seeping in through the windows of the mosque. Using these vivid childhood memories as inspiration, Begum transforms the Shilpakala Academy with over a thousand locally woven baskets, which she weaves together to create a monumental sculptural dome that references light in the Koran. The work immerses the viewer in an innovative play between light and shadow. The complex intricate pattern creates a weightless and contemplative space through repetition. Begum was born in Sylhet, Bangladesh in 1977 and moved to England in 1985. The artist studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London where she currently lives and works. She has exhibited extensively internationally including exhibitions in the UK, the USA, Mumbai, Beirut, and Dubai, and she was the recipient of the 2012 Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts and nominated for the Jameel Prize at the V&A in 2010. She has created numerous public art interventions all over the globe, transforming cityscapes with her unique use of colour and light. She was also a past Delfina Foundation resident artist. Rashid Rana A Room From Tate Modern, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Rashid Rana is one of the most important Pakistani artists of his generation. Rana’s work deals with everyday images drawn from pop culture, art history and urban surroundings, as well as more abstract themes of faith and religion. He is known for his style of constructing large images out of “pixels” of other smaller images. In addition to his own work as a visual artist, he is the head of Fine Art Department and one of the founding faculty members of the School of Visual Arts and Design (SVAD) at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. His work is in the permanent collections of the Asia Society, Devi Art Foundation, the Queensland Art Museum, the Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art, and many other distinguished public and private collections around the world. He recently completed a mid-career retrospective at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi, a ground-breaking exhibition in the history of contemporary art in Pakistan. The artist contextualises his interest in Western art history by negotiating it with his time and location. Fellow artist and critic Quddus Mirza wrote, “Rana’s work deals with globalisation, reflects on its impact, as well as serves as a critique of it. His use of digital media signifies the altered fabric of our societies, which function on the pattern and necessity of transnational operations. Here a work is conceived in Lahore, produced in Düsseldorf, displayed in Cairo and is collected in Chicago; spreading across four corners of the world.”1 One of Rana’s most talked about recent works that speaks to the global nature of his practice is A Plinth from a Gallery in Lahore (2010-2011), a photo sculpture that he exhibited at his first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London in 2011. The artist took photographs of a pedestal at a gallery in Lahore and transformed this documentation into an impactful sculpture. “I wanted to extend the historical journey of this object as a work of mine,” reflects Rana, “historically a plinth has been used as an object to place figurative sculptures, until it became so close to becoming an art object itself as part of the minimalist movement of the 1960s and white cube gallery aesthetics. These aesthetics and their manifestations have travelled to other parts of the world…I wanted to photographically document a plinth from a gallery in Lahore and produce it as a three-dimensional object (print on aluminium) and take it back to the white cube gallery place to symbolise my own journey as an artist.” A Plinth from a Gallery in Lahore can also be read as the rendering of a Western idea of an exhibition model placed in the context of South Asia, where it has not been fully downloaded and remains pixelated. Another work which speaks to the artist’s mental space, that is found between the hallowed halls of international museums and the local buzz of the rapidly developing city of Lahore, is the 2010-2011 photo sculpture The Step. The geometric arrangement of a group of bricks outside of a small village grocery shop (selling only five to six essential items) reminded the artist of Carl Andre’s work, inspiring him to record and dislocate this experience in his work using the same photo sculpture technique as A Plinth from a Gallery in Lahore. Rashid Rana’s solo project A Room from TATE Modern (2013-2014) extends Rana’s practice from three-dimensional photo sculptures into the scale of architecture, something that Rana had wanted to do for many years, and that he mentioned in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Resulting from a discussion with curator Diana Campbell Betancourt over a long distance call from rural Sweden to Lahore, the artist decided to realise this longstanding dream for his solo project at the Dhaka Art Summit. The work is based on photo documentation of a room at Tate Modern, made to look empty with the works of art eliminated, but with spotlight effects and remnants of labels and wall-texts of works that make the viewer imagine what could have previously hung there. Rana elaborates that, “essentially, the work is a portrait (always an illusion) of a place which itself is used for the exhibition of art.” “My work is often a three-way negotiation between myself, my immediate physical surroundings and what I receive – whether through the internet, books, history, or collective knowledge,” Rashid Rana recently shared in an interview with Art Review. The artist exists in a current reality of being an artist from Pakistan, but integrated into the Western exhibition model of the white cube. As a teacher and as an artist, Rana is one of the pioneers in building artistic infrastructure in Pakistan. The fact that he is injecting a Western exhibition model into the central atrium of the government property of the National Academy of Fine Arts of Bangladesh, while appropriating the model into his own work, speaks to the larger needs and potential for the region. The work also opens up interesting questions about experiencing art virtually. In this project, viewers will be looking at a three-dimensional photograph of a room at Tate Modern. While looking straight at the blank wall (which contains an image of a wall), viewers won’t necessarily question it as an illusion. When looking at the other walls, however, the view of doors that open into adjacent gallery spaces will create an illusion that the walls extend into new dimensions. At its formal core, this work is about the conflict between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. To enhance this “dimensional conflict” and heighten the sense of a space in between truth and fiction, the photos on the wall and ceiling (pasted onto the walls and ceiling) are pixelated; something that we normally associate with two-dimensionality. The exterior of this work is a temporary structure that reveals the methods of the project’s construction: MDF joined with a wooden-frame to form a grid-like structure that references the work of Sol Lewitt. The grid has played an important part in Rana’s larger body of work, which evolved from grid paintings to painting pixel and matrix-based digital prints. Reflecting on his earlier works, Rana shared with Obrist, “It’s ironic though, that my fascination with formal concerns to do with two dimensionality are manifesting in three-dimensional works.” The artist collaborated with Dhaka architects to create a photo sculpture of a room at Tate nearly to-scale. The artist dislocated his project from the grid of the South Plaza’s geometric layout, tilting it in a manner that the audience must walk around the structure, to discover a hidden door at the back of the outer MDF structure. Rana draws viewers into his work, forcing them to look past the surface, and rewarding them if they take the time to fully take in and understand the rich illusions and allusions in his work. Rathin Barman (b.1981) Landscape From Memory (Situation 1), 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Indian artist Rathin Barman was born in 1981 surrounded by Bangladesh on three sides. Tripura, India’s third smallest state, shares close historical ties with Bangladesh. These close ties cause strife between the regions, and trade was recently suspended due to protests against tariff hikes. Barman’s parents, as well as many other people he grew up around, are originally from Bangladesh and fled the country post the riots of the 1950s and 1960s. When thinking about the relationship between India and Bangladesh, the artist reflects that “people in my village can speak several Bangladeshi languages. Apart from political issues things are almost same. So, I assume, it’s the same land which is just politically divided.” Tripura is geographically cut off from the rest of India, and due to the economic disadvantages of its isolation, many youth people from Tripura such as Barman have to migrate to cities like Kolkata to make their way in the world. The artist has experienced first hand the transforming effects of globalisation, and looks at it with a close lens in his work, which while seemingly contradictory is both site-specific and universal. Despite his young age, Barman likes to look deep into present realities, shifting his gaze to the foundations for the issues we experience today. Rathin Barman had initially been trained to become mechanical engineer, but soon with the help of his brother, abandoned his courses to join the University’s Fine Arts department. Barman has used his engineering knowledge how to create ambitious structures that break moulds and force the audience to look at the world in new ways. He creates new structures, but ones that are primarily based on structures that had been put together in different ways by someone else. His practice has focused on this fascination with old buildings, and their fate after their redevelopment,in rapidly changing urban spaces in the subcontinent and other parts of the developing world. Similar to building new structures, Barman explores building a new mold out of a material that once had a different use, such as his corrugated paper works employing removal boxes, now re-assigned to creating entire living rooms to illustrate the ideas of quick and mobile living which forgets roots. This lifestyle often comes at the expense of historical buildings and Barman tasks himself with documenting the old buildings of Kolkata, imagining what will become of them after their scheduled demolition. One body of work which has earned Barman international acclaim is his series of sculptures transforming iron reinforcement bars and found rubble into structures which comment on the constant pressure for urban development - rural areas are transforming into urban centres, much like his own. Barman made his international debut at the Frieze New York Sculpture Park in 2012, curated by Tom Eccles, with Untitled, currently on view at the DeCordova Sculpture Park, Massachussets, USA, making Barman the first sculptor of Asian origin to exhibit at the park. DeCordova describes Barman’s work as both universal and site specific. While the iron reinforcement bar structures travelled from India, the rubble that fills the sculpture must be collected from the local area where the work is being exhibited. When the work was shown at Frieze New York, the rubble came from New York City, when the work was shown again at DeCordova, the rubble was collected from Lincoln, MA. Urbanisation is a universal and increasingly homogeneous issue, but the crumbled residue beneath new developments shows the breadth of history that developers are paving over. While previous works highlighted the distinctions between different urban centres through the physicality of the wreckage filling his structures, for his commission for the Dhaka Art Summit, Barman expects the rubble he finds in Dhaka to be strikingly similar to that which he finds around his studio in Kolkata, pointing to shared history between the two Bengals and paving over the differences in between, which become fewer and fewer through globalisation’s effects on both urban India and Bangladesh. The form of this work draws the viewer into the sad reality of many cities in urban South Asia. The desire to expand and grow overrides the need for adequate urban planning and building codes; entire cities are being built in ways that defy any idea of a sustainable urban landscape. Recent disasters, such as the highly publicised Rana Plaza incident, as well as other incidents with less media attention in Mumbai, Kolkata and elsewhere, speak of the high human cost of industrialisation gone wrong. Methods and planning behind many new buildings in the region are questionable and Barman’s work uses the language of development and the debris of its past, to raise these questions. In Landscape From Memory (Situation 1), the mammoth iron and rubble structure stands as a monument that bears the memories of several tragedies that are marked by architectural evidence of poor urban planning and civil negligence. It is a tragically ordinary urban visual of failed dreams of transforming space. While the way in which this work pierces space and calls to mind Chris Burden’s Beam Drop, Landscape from Memory (Situation 1) critiques the liberties that builders subject the public to, rather than celebrating freedom from the modern urban grid. Many developers in South Asia want the look of the grid without properly planning for it, and this is where many of the region’s problems arise. Like the work of Lida Abdul, Barman’s work provides hope that we can rebuild from the crumbling ruins around us, and heal and progress without repeating history’s tragic mistakes. Shahzia Sikander Parallax, 2013 Courtesy of the artist, Sharjah Art Foundation The Dhaka Art Summit is pleased to exhibit Shahzia Sikander’s incredible three channel high-definition animation Parallax (2013), which will be the first work of Sikander’s exhibited in Bangladesh. This work was commissioned for the Sharjah Biennale, and as Sharjah’s labor force is comprised of a significant population of Bangladeshis, a large portion of the audience in Dhaka will have a connection to Sharjah through the migration patterns of their relatives. Focusing on Sharjah’s unique location at the Strait of Hormuz, and the area’s historical power tensions Parallax is inspired by the idea of conflict and control. Visual vocabulary is culled from drawings and paintings to construct the animation, giving the motifs and symbols a shifting identity as they come together to cultivate new associations within the digital space. The soundtrack was composed by Sikander’s frequent collaborator, Du Yun. Exhibiting this work in Dhaka is made possible in part by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976) Untitled, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Shilpa Gupta is a Bombay based artist who uses facets of everyday life to create artworks that ask questions about methods of control and the ideas behind boundaries and borders that shape our perception of world order. While these works are deeply rooted in the Indian context where the artist lives and works, they grapple with universal issues such as freedom and security, and Gupta’s work is enjoyed and exhibited all over the world, in important exhibitions such as the New Museum Triennial, Yokohama Triennale, Lyon Biennale, Sharjah Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, and Sydney Biennale. Her works are also part of prestigious institutional collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, and the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi. Soap, microphones, sign hoardings, books – these are some of the familiar materials that the artist uses to engage audiences with wider and deeper issues. The artist studied sculpture and worked part time in graphic design and she has a remarkable ability to transform mundane imagery into something profound. In her 2009 work Threat, Gupta created a sculpture with 4,500 bars of soap, engraved with the word ‘Threat.’The audience is invited to take a bar of soap away and use it if they wish, washing away any trace of any imagined threat by the end of the exhibition. Fear is a tool often used to manipulate groups of people in power struggles, and Gupta’s works, often harnessing participation and interactivity, shake up our ideas about why we are asked to act the way we do. Those in authority are able to control the media and what information gets disseminated to the public. What if the microphones that pundits speak into were able to speak truth and drone out lies? Gupta created a body of work of ‘singing microphones,’ which use Gupta’s voice to amplify issues that are often silenced. In 5 Singing Microphones from 2009, Gupta attempts to count the countless number of individuals who disappeared during times of political unrest such as Partition, creating a sense of urgency to remember those who transformed from people into mere numbers. In the same year, she also created a series of works using chalkboards, conventional tools to teach children about counting, and these chalkboards show the sign of countless markings, complete with accumulated chalk dust from writing and erasing, demonstrating the Sisyphean task of trying to count the people that governments want you to forget about. The phrase “Will we ever be able to mark enough?” leaves lingering questions in the minds of her audience. Stimulating memories, on both an individual and a collective basis, is an important part of Gupta’s practice. In her 2008-2009 work 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, Gupta asked a different person each day to draw a map of their country, and none of the drawings matched. Gupta’s works shed light on the problem of imposing borders on groups of people whose history on the land is much older than that of new nation-states. In her 2011-2012 work 1:14.9 which is part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection in New York, Gupta wound the idea of the 1188.5 meter long fence between India and Pakistan by manipulating thread into an elegant ball at a 14.9 to 1 ratio, nimbly caging this 1947 imposed border which symbol of violence and religious prejudice. Interested in the formation of territories under the project of nationhood, the artist traveled to chhitmahal, Indo-Bangladeshi enclaves with a combined estimated population of 51,000 people who are technically foreigners in another country. In other words, there are landlocked islands of India within Bangladesh, and Bangladesh within India. In her poignant floor-based sculpture, Gupta describes the situation poignantly with the use of a mark on carved stone. Depending on which side of this marking you may now be, you may or may not have an identity card, you may or may not need to take a fake name to enroll into a school, you may or may not be able to deliver your child with the real father’s name in the neighborhood hospital, you may or may not still be able to have electricity this evening even though the cable passes through your house, irrespective of the fact that your family may have lived here before countries were formed one night. The people in these enclaves believe that they are there because their communities were part of valued kingdoms, making them special and unique from their neighbors who have access to national public services that are granted from having an identity card. People who live in the chhitmahal do not have identity cards, so in order to give birth to a child in a hospital, or to enroll their children in school, they have to use the identity of someone with an identity card as the father, so there are several children with false identities. One of the works in this solo project obscures the names of a mythical classroom, showing how a name in these regions may likely not be just what it seems. Most of the people in the chhitmahal have been living there for centuries, and can easily ask their close neighbors with identity cards to lend false names as “relatives.” Gupta presents a work reflecting on the longstanding relationship between these “illegal” people and their ancestral land, showing images of feet firmly planted on the ground that they “belonged to” for centuries. Border markers can be anywhere, even floating in water as Gupta shares with us with her photographs. A painted photograph poignantly renders the situation that being born into an enclave makes a night and day difference: electrical lines may run through the enclave, but only certified areas on either side of the chit will have light when they turn on the switch. Tsherin Sherpa The Fifty-Four Views of Wisdom and Compassion (Untitled I), 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Historically, Tibetan art only existed in a religious context. Lha dri ba in Tibetan means to draw a deity, and it is the only expression available to describe “art,” as art was often used for meditation or paying tribute. Nepalese Painter Tsherin Sherpa extends this expression into a global contemporary art context, and created three new paintings that explore the relationship between Tibetan tradition and identity in the 21st century for the Dhaka Art Summit. The artist is based between Oakland and Kathmandu, and he created these works in his studio in Nepal. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally, including the landmark exhibition at the Rubin Museum in New York, “Tradition Transformed - Tibetan Artist’s Respond.” Born in Kathmandu to a Tibetan Buddhist family in 1968, Sherpa apprenticed with his father Master Urgen Dorje Sherpa in the thangka painting tradition. Sherpa’s practice has preserved the meticulous detail of the canonical thangka but his figures are distilled from the structured, underlying grid systems and symbols that bring the traditional deity’s form to life. In recent years his emphasis has shifted from traditional subjects to more contemporary concerns, including imagining what traditional Tibetan spirits would now look like if they too had left Tibet and journeyed with him to California (where he now lives). By exporting his figures out of their context Sherpa explains, “[t]hrough centuries of reproduction, the essences of many of these spiritual tools have been lost. Bits and pieces have been chopped away or forgotten to be included due to the patronage of a tourist class that doesn’t know the ritual usage of the painting. By consciously deconstructing and abstracting the deity, I’m interested to see what parts of its essence will be revealed and reinvigorated through the process of exploring meaning, form, and identity.” Bangladesh shares a deep connection with the history of Sherpa’s Tibetan Buddhist faith. The founder of the Kadampa school of Buddhism, Atisha (980-1054 CE) was born in East Bengal (in an area that is now in Bangladesh). Like the Buddha, Atisha is believed to have been born into a royal family and grew to espouse the ways of the cloth than that of the sword. Celebrated for the brilliance of his teachings and his unparalleled abilities in debate, Atisha was soon appointed abbot of Nalanda Monastery, the greatest of all Buddhist monasteries in India. So great was his reach that he was invited to teach in Tibet. There he composed the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, a text that distilled all of the Buddha’s eighty four thousand teachings of Dharma into a clear simple guide for practice. Atisha stayed in Tibet for 17 years in total, and his teachings were passed down to subsequent generations, including to the great Je Tsongkhapa, whose Atisha inspired lam-rim texts remain the cornerstone of Tibetan Buddhist teachings to this day. Atisha’s teachings reached Sherpa’s grandparents in Tibet, which were subsequently taught to Sherpa in Nepal, and now travel back to Bangladesh through Sherpa’s technically fascinating and richly colored multi-paneled paintings. Atisa’s legacy has been the driving force behind the three works presented here. As Sherpa points out, “as a person viewing him from a historical vantage point today, we glimpse at different perspectives of him depending on our cultural boundaries. Through globalization, these different boundaries come up next to each other physically and virtually to expose a form that is greater than its individual parts. Through time, countries are always reestablishing new geographic borders which in turn assist cultures to re-invent itself. By seeing the links and gaps between these forms, I hope one can contemplate the whole.” The Fifty-four Views of Wisdom and Compassion (Untitled I) consists of separate pieces (20 x 20 inches each on canvas) that compose the whole. The central deity, Chakrasamvara, exists in fragments throughout the work. These pieces are depicted from different vantage points; some show portions from a zoomed-in perspective while others are from an eagle-eye view. Charkrasamvara, translated in the West as “Highest Bliss,” is one of the principles of istha-devatā, or meditational deities of the Sarma schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Typically depicted with a blue-coloured body, four faces, and twelve arms, the deity is represented embracing his consort Vajravarahi in the yab-yum position. Their divine embrace serves as a metaphor for the union of great bliss and emptiness, perceived as one and the same essence. The other two works on paper are a continuation of Sherpa’s Protector series. As thangkas are either destroyed, lost, or moved away from their natural environment of monasteries and private altars, they begin to take on a new context. As a whole, this series explores how these abstractions of deities will function and be perceived by a new set of viewers in secular space. In the previous series, the individual deity recedes into an elegant swirling form. The familiar structure of a grid system is no longer used to stabilize and support it. At the same moment that the traditional is becoming ungrounded, something new is arising. This is the first time that Sherpa works with multiple intermingling deities, and he wanted to explore how “the energy changes from a single form to that of a space consisting of multiplicity and repetition.”

ALL PROJECTS ART BASEL HONG KONG 2018 RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN 27-31 MARCH 2018 | ART BASEL HONG KONG HAVING NOTICED THAT THERE ARE NOT VERY MANY PUBLIC MONUMENTS THAT CELEBRATE NON-WHITE OR NON-COLONIAL FIGURES, RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN TRIED TO ENVISION A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAY OF MEMORIALISING PEOPLE WHO SLIP THROUGH THE CRACKS OF WHAT IS CONSIDERED ACCEPTABLE. Following their debut at the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Ramesh Mario's, Idols (2016-2018) travelled to Art Basel Hong Kong where they formed part of the Art Fair's Encounters , curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace, Sydney for DAS 2018 with support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Artspace Sydney, and Sullivan + Strumpf.

The Samdani Art Award, Bangladesh's premier art award, has created an internationally recognised platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi Artists to an audience of international arts professionals. Since it was founded in 2012, the Samdani Art Award has steadily developed into an internationally recognised platform, highlighting the most innovative work being produced by young Bangladeshi artists. Created to honour one talented emerging Bangladeshi artist, the award does not issue the winner with a monetary prize, and instead funds them to undertake an all-expenses paid, six-week residency at the Delfina Foundation in London: a career-defining moment for the artist to further their professional development. The award’s latest winner, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, travelled to London earlier this year in July to undertake his residency. Providing him with the time and space to revisit old ideas, and explore new, while expanding his networks. I caught up with Chowdhury while he was in residence to discuss his ongoing practice and how winning the award has impacted his career to date. Samdani Art Award 2020 INTERVIEW: MIZANUR RAHMAN CHOWDHURY Emma Sumner: You initially studied printmaking, how did your practice evolve to become what it is today? Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury: It is very interesting for me to talk about this shift. When I studied printmaking at Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. I tried to embrace the fact that many of the printing processes I learnt were all steeped in tradition, but no matter what I tried, I never felt that the process fitted with what I wanted to achieve and communicate within my practice. While I was studying, I tried to experiment with mixing and matching various print making techniques and introducing found photography into my lithograph prints, although it was prohibited in our academy at that time, so in parallel to my studies, I continued my own experimental art practice. ES: So, printmaking did not allow you to communicate what you wanted to get across to your audience? Did this change at all after you graduated and had more freedom with the way you were able to work? MRC: Even after graduating I was never really convinced that printmaking would give me the tools to communicate what I wanted through my practice. The sensibility of printmaking was a way to develop my ideas, but the outcome always became something else, like a form of assemblage, or an installation. During my study, I became interested in the moving image—especially the genres of psychedelic and experimental film—and wanted to explore them in my practice. Later, after graduation, I also began to experiment with performance, photography, collage, object sculpture and video installation. These multiple approaches helped steer my practice into the direction it has taken today. ES: Do you still make prints now? MRC: I love woodcarving, and I did begin working in this way during my graduation but my lifestyle doesn’t allow me to practice like this anymore. Its partly for this reason, and the limitations of the media itself, which have moved my practice in a very different directioN. ES: Your practice today is interdisciplinary and embraces installation and many other media. How do you decide what media you want to work with? Do you keep objects of interest to you in stock that you feel you might use later, or you source everything after you have devised an idea for a project? MRC: My work has always been sensitive to the time and space in which I create it so my processes are never fixed and I allow my intuition to guide me when developing new works. I usually find an object which forms the basis of an idea which I then begin to ‘open-up’ through my working processes to explore its core subject in greater depth I only ever select objects that appeal to me, a process which is very subjective as the same object might not appeal to others in the same way it does to me, making the process very much about my connection to the objects I work with. ES: Where do you go to source your materials? Is there anywhere particular where you feel more inspired? MRC: I find my materials in all sorts of places but generally I never go looking for things as I tend to just come across things as I go about my daily tasks, making most of the objects I source ephemeral. For one of my more recent projects I collected a lot of boxes over the period of Ramadan. The boxes contained oranges which had been imported from Egypt, but I was drawn in by the striking logo on the front of the box. Ramadan was the only time that the boxes had been in stock in my local market. As I was already familiar with the store owners, I took the time to talk to them and gained a lot of information about how the boxes had come from Egypt to Bangladesh, making me question the ideas of globalisation and international trade and how these matters might affect the everyday person. This formed the foundation for a new work which I am still developing the work in my studio now. ES: So the conversations that you have with other people as you develop your ideas are also a key part of your working process? MRC: In my project The Soul Who Fails to Fly into the Space (2017), which I exhibited during the Dhaka Art Summit, the chairs on which the television was placed were rented from a local company in Dhaka. The man who owned the company was very open and welcoming towards me, and he was very excited to be playing a small part in my project. But when he showed the chairs to me, every chair had a very shiny sticker of his company logo placed prominently in the centre of the back rest, which wasn’t part of how I’d originally envisaged the work. I thought about it all night but slowly realised that I couldn’t remove the logos, as the interactions between us had helped us to build a relationship of respect, a love that had an impact on my decision making and led to me keeping the logos as they were and allowing in the unexpected. In the end, the logo fitted magically on that installation. All the interactions and discussions that I have with the people I meet during my working process are very important to me and often influence my work in positive ways. The curator, Simon Castets also played an important role while installing the works as we discussed at length about how my work could respond to the space to create a more meditative and playful exhibit. ES: Since arriving in London for your residency at the Delfina Foundation have you started work on any new projects? or is there anything that you are working on now? MRC: I lived in London previously back in 2014 when my wife was undertaking her MA. During that time, I was struck by how many road signs there were and I began taking photos of the streets. I had began working on a project called Land, and now I am back in London for this residency, I have had a chance to restart and develop the ideas I was working on further. While I have been here, I visited the National History Museum and I saw that they had analysed Bangladesh by looking at the structure of our land, particularly our rivers, and the types of our soil. What interested me most about this display, was seeing how Bangladesh is divided by a tectonic plate that goes through the centre of the country which means that my native land could, at some point in the future, be shifted by nature dispelling the concept of land that we conventionally perceive through mapping. Overall, I am more interested in the land inside us, our spirituality and how this connects us to the cosmos and defines who we are and which land we ultimately belong to. SAF: After you have finished your residency at Delfina Foundation and return to Dhaka, what’s next for you? Do you have any upcoming exhibitions or are you planning to work on any new projects? MRC: It’s a big question, currently I’m a little overwhelmed by the spotlight of winning the Samdani Art Award and having many curators and fellow artists wanting to meet me, but it has been a great opportunity to develop my network which I know will be helpful in moving forward with my career. I am very thankful to Samdani Art Foundation and Delfina Foundation for establishing such a valuable platform for young artist in Bangladeshi artists. While I have been here, I’ve had the time and space to open up new critical perspectives on my practice and developed my approach to research and new projects. After developing them further in Dhaka, I am hopeful to show them in exhibitions soon.

ALL PROJECTS When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away (2025) A collaborative film project developed at Srihatta, exploring Bangladesh’s six seasons through a poetic collaboration between Driant Zeneli and young Bangladeshi artists. Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, came to life with the ideation and production of When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away (2025), a new film by Italy-based Albanian artist Driant Zeneli, created in collaboration with Md. Tasnimul Izaz Bhuiyan, Pulak K. Sarkar, Rafi Nur Hamid, Sondip Roy, and Sumaiya Sultana, with a special contribution by Mahmudul Hasan Dipu. The film was co-commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation and Museo Castromediano, Lecce. As part of this project, Driant conducted an intensive Master Class at Srihatta, exploring storytelling and the aesthetic influences of Baroque theatre while encouraging participating artists to draw on local cultural elements such as the proverbs of Khona, the legendary Bengali astrologer and poet, and the iconic Parliament Building by Louis I. Kahn. This collaborative process brought together a group of emerging artists whose contributions were central to shaping the film’s distinctive and visionary expression. The work draws inspiration from the “July Revolution, 2024,” during which more than a thousand people lost their lives in a series of protests that led to significant political change and the downfall of the autocratic regime in Bangladesh. Developed at Srihatta: The Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, this cross-cultural project reimagines the four seasons of Baroque music through Bangladesh’s six seasons. The project is supported by the Samdani Art Foundation (Bangladesh), EMΣT – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (Greece), the Art House of Adrian Paci and Melisa Paci in Shkodër (Albania), the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Italy), and the Museo Castromediano with the Region of Puglia’s Department of Tourism, Culture, Economy and Territory Valuation (Italy). The film’s first screening took place at CineFIX, hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, on September 4, 2025. The second screening was held on October 15, 2025, in Lecce, Italy, at the Church of San Francesco della Scarpa, accompanied by an exhibition on the film hosted by Museo Castromediano. The third screening was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at the Goethe-Institut on October 29, 2025. The fourth screening took place at the Pavilion, Bastion Bungalow, followed by a conversation with Driant Zeneli and Pasquale Auricchio, as part of the public program of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, India. Screening at CineFIX, hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, 2025. Photo: Melitini Nikolaidi. Screening in Dhaka at the Goethe-Institut. Photo credit: Ahadul Karim Khan. Public screening and a conversation with Driant Zeneli and Pasquale Auricchio at the Pavilion, Bastion Bungalow, as part of the public program of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Kochi, India. The fifth screening will be presented as part of Double Takes , KADIST's screening programme at the Nine Elephants Festival in Sofia, Bulgaria. The film will be screened on July 16, 2026, at Swimming Pool Projects and on July 18, 2026, at the Botanical Garden of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

ALL PROJECTS Below the Levels Where Differences Appear Curated by Vali Mahlouji The first iteration of an ongoing transnationally roving amphitheatre, as part of A Utopian Stage, artists, performers and filmmakers were inclusively incorporated within a collective arena of experimentation echoing the progressive pitch of the Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-77), and the highs and lows of universalist utopian ideals. Amidst resurgent forces of cultural and political reactionism around the world, below the levels… proclaimed a radical site of collective exchange. During the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, below the levels… drew upon the music, theatre, dance and politics that informed the utopian aspirations and contradictions of the original festival, with contributions by Hassan Khan, Goshka Macuga with Vali Mahlouji, Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham Trust), Reetu Sattar, Yasmin Jahan Nupur with Santal performers and Lalon Baul singers. GOSHKA MACUGA AND VALI MAHLOUJI | LIKE WATER ON HOT ROCKS (2018) An inaugural performative collaboration in which a procession of known characters from the Festival of Arts, Shiraz – Persepolis protested and occupied. HASSAN KHAN | PURITY (2013) What is it that is so comforting about the narrator’s voice? And is conflict always predicated on some sort of agreement? What does the hammer strike when it does? And why do I hate this word yet choose to speak of it? REETU SATTAR | HARANO SUR (LOST TUNE) Performance with 30 musicians and 30 harmoniumsHow do we encapsulate time via our shared past? This performance engaged visitors with the sound people grew up within South Asia, simultaneously recognising the receding path into so-called ‘modernity.’ This project was co-commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation and Liverpool Biennial, in association with Archaeology of the Final Decade and the New North and South. SILAS RIENER | FIELD DANCES (1963), BY MERCE CUNNINGHAM Silas Riener engaged with the local audience and leading them through Merce Cunningham’s Field Dances workshop, culminating in a site-specific performance. Inspired by children’s carefree, unstructured play, Field Dances was first performed in 1963 to music by John Cage with costumes designed by Robert Rauschenberg. YASMIN JAHAN NUPUR AND SANTAL PERFORMERS Collaborating with the Indigenous Santal people and Lalon Baul singers, Yasmin Jahan Nupur’s performative dance and video series broke down language barriers through a process of body movements and participatory dances, telling stories about life, spirituality, and culture, to create a bridge between city and local dialects, cultures and lost languages.

The Samdani Art Award, Bangladesh's premier art award, has created an internationally recognised platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi Artists to an audience of international arts professionals. Khaled Hasan born 1981 WINNER Khaled Hasan (born 1981) began working as a photographer in 2001. At a young age he realised that photography is not just a camera play but a play of life with light and darkness. He chose to take this path and experience, culture and life at its fullest. Photography then became part of his identity—a force that makes him think, feel and understand human beings, life and more. Since then, Khaled has been working as a freelance photojournalist for several magazines in Bangladesh and internationally. His works were published in the New York Times, Sunday Times Magazine, American Photo, National Geographic Society, Better Photography, Saudi Aramco World Magazine, The Guardian, Telegraph, The Independent, The New Internationalist, Himal Southern, and many more. As an indigenous photographer, he tells narratives of the land that shaped him. Documenting stories about people and their interaction with nature, healing and surviving from times of distress, fighting for rights and toiling for food, and standing against injustice are the primary issues he features in his works. For Khaled, a story never ends; it just continues to develop, fades or becomes part of history but may still be documented through photography. This is why he believes that it is highly important to crystallise changes in life, especially the ones that would transcend times. For Khaled, being a photojournalist is not just being a very good photographer but being a socially responsible person too. He constantly finds fulfilment whenever his works benefit his community and the greater good. His involvement with the National Geographic Society, Inter-Press Service and other non-for-profit organisations in documenting cultural concerns show this passion. Samdani Art Award 2012 INTERVIEW SELECTION COMMITTEE Kyla McDonald (Assistant Curator, Tate) Deepak Ananth (Professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, France) Elaine W Ng (Editor and Publisher, Art Asia Pacific) Bose Krishnamachari (Founder of the Kochi Biennale) Ravinder Reddy (Artist) Shahabuddin Ahmed (Artist) The first edition of the Samdani Art Award had two prize categories: the Samdani Artist Development Award and the Samdani Young Talent Award. From 29 shortlisted artists, the jury selected artists Khaled Hasan and Musrat Reazi as the recipients of the 2012 awards. Hasan continues to practice and is now based in the United States. Reazi has recently stopped practicing to pursue other interests. 2023 2020 2018 2016 2014 2012 Award Archive Musrat Reazi born 1981 WINNER Khaled Hasan (born 1981) began working as a photographer in 2001. At a young age he realised that photography is not just a camera play but a play of life with light and darkness. He chose to take this path and experience, culture and life at its fullest. Photography then became part of his identity—a force that makes him think, feel and understand human beings, life and more. Since then, Khaled has been working as a freelance photojournalist for several magazines in Bangladesh and internationally. His works were published in the New York Times, Sunday Times Magazine, American Photo, National Geographic Society, Better Photography, Saudi Aramco World Magazine, The Guardian, Telegraph, The Independent, The New Internationalist, Himal Southern, and many more. As an indigenous photographer, he tells narratives of the land that shaped him. Documenting stories about people and their interaction with nature, healing and surviving from times of distress, fighting for rights and toiling for food, and standing against injustice are the primary issues he features in his works. For Khaled, a story never ends; it just continues to develop, fades or becomes part of history but may still be documented through photography. This is why he believes that it is highly important to crystallise changes in life, especially the ones that would transcend times. For Khaled, being a photojournalist is not just being a very good photographer but being a socially responsible person too. He constantly finds fulfilment whenever his works benefit his community and the greater good. His involvement with the National Geographic Society, Inter-Press Service and other non-for-profit organisations in documenting cultural concerns show this passion.

ALL PROJECTS Rewind Curated by Amara Antilla, Beth Citron, Diana Campbell and Sabih Ahmed Rewind was built on the Dhaka Art Summit’s mandate as a research platform by assembling works from public and private collections in Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States that chart the diverse manifestations of abstraction in pre-1980s South Asia. Rewind featured more than 90 works by 13 artists associated with Bangladesh (Safiuddin Ahmed, Rashid Choudhury, S.M. Sultan), Burma (Germaine Krull, Bagyi Aung Soe), India (Monika Correa, Nalini Malani, Akbar Padamsee, Krishna Reddy, Arpita Singh), Pakistan (Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Anwar Jalal Shemza), and Sri Lanka (Lionel Wendt). The exhibition explored how three generations of artists have responded to shifting cultural, political, and social contexts with experiments in abstraction, or the relationship between representation and abstraction—even when some of their primary practices are or were firmly rooted in figuration. The majority of the works on view were produced between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, a period that witnessed the Independence of India and Pakistan from Britain and the devastating Partition of the subcontinent, followed by several major conflicts including the 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh. Transnational modernism provided fertile ground for many artists in the face of unstable borders. From the pared-down calligraphic scrawls of Aung Soe, Shemza, and Singh, and the distillations of natural and human form undertaken by Reddy, Ahmed, Sultan, and Krull to the experiments with light, pattern, and flatness of Choudhury, Malani, Padamsee, the works in Rewind embody some of the ways in which modernism has played out within and beyond the region. For some of these artists, abstraction signified participation in an increasingly international, even global, modernism that developed in the wake of World War II. Gestural abstraction, most often related to expressionist movements, enabled artists to adapt or even discard figural iconography. Others turned to folk motifs linked with traditional practices and materials to explore how modernism and national independence might coexist. Yet others, inspired by achievements such as Le Corbusier’s design for the city of Chandigarh, turned to geometry and the visual logic of industrialisation or, in defiance of a universal rhetoric of progress and modernisation, revived elements of the pre-modern. Acknowledging the focusing of, art and ideas on cosmopolitan sites in South Asia; the growth of exchange between Europe, Latin America, and the United States; and the concomitant rise of cultural and political isolationism, Rewind seeks to create new affinities between artists and artworks that transcend temporal and national affiliation, while dislodging the West as the central point of reference. The Bangladesh, Burma, East and West Bengal, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, and East Pakistan, where these works were made have solidified into new geopolitical formations with some of the tightest and longest borders in the world today. These realities have prevented many of the works shown from travelling freely; in many cases, they are being shown publicly here for the first time. The exhibition offered conceptual and formal perspectives that challenged the way we define South Asian abstraction and the larger history of mid-century modernism. Safiuddin Ahmed and Nalini Malani Rewind, installation view, works by Safiuddin Ahmed, courtesy of Ahmed Nazir Collection and Nalini Malani, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Rewind, installation view, works by Safiuddin Ahmed, courtesy of Ahmed Nazir Collection and Nalini Malani, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Nalini Malani Rewind, installation view, works by Nalini Malani, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Saffiudin Ahmed Rewind, installation view, works by Safiuddin Ahmed courtesy of Ahmed Nazir Collection. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Krishna Reddi Rewind, installation view, works by Krishna Reddy, courtesy of the artist and the Samdani Art Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Monika Correa Rewind, installation view, works by Monika Correa, courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Rashid Choudhury Rewind, installation view, works by Rashid Choudhury, courtesy of the Bangladesh National Museum, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Anwar Hossain Manju Collection, Dhaka and Farooq Sohban Collection, Dhaka. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Anwar Jalal Shemza Rewind, installation view, works by Anwar Jalal Shemza, courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza, Eastbourne, UK. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Zahoor Ul Akhlan Rewind, installation view, works by Zahoor ul Akhlaq, courtesy of the Inayat Ismail Collection, Karachi, the Estate of Zahoor Ul Akhlaq, Lahore and Toronto, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and Pakistan High Commission, Dhaka. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter S.M. Sultan Rewind, installation view, works by S. M. Sultan, courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation Collection, the Bangladesh National Museum, Farooq Sohban Collection and Enam A. Chaudhury Collection, Dhaka. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Lionel Wendt Rewind, installation view, works by Lionel Wendt, courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and Mahijit Singh and Nalin Tomar, New Delhi. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Germaine Krull Rewind, installation view, works by Germaine Krull, courtesy of The Museum of Folkwang, Essen, Germany and the Germaine Krull Estate. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Bagyi Aung Soe Rewind, installation view, works by Bagyi Aung Soe, courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation Collection, private collection Singapore and Bagyi Lynn Wunna collection, Yangon. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Rewind Installation views Rewind, installation view. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface

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

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun The Bay of Bengal once supported an amphibious life. Water was not a force to keep at bay, but an entity to live with, and through. In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather , mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans Delta of Bangladesh that has soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. Mud complicates the relationship to liquid, which is no longer delineated, discrete. The attempt to extract oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees as a result of the resulting effects of global warming. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them; a catastrophe on one hemisphere inevitably impacts the other. With colonialism came the attempted erasure of muddiness as condition – amorphous zones became hardened into coastlines; lines were even drawn in the muddy space between the human and the non-human. The time of stones, of tides, of swamp, of earth, became subsumed to the relentless measure of the clock. Omer Wasim and Saira Sheikh’s drawings and text in The Impossibility of Loving a Stone (2017) reconstitutes the human in geological time, where the present stretches back two million years – they soil the skin between the Earth and us, slowly moving us like shifting mud through the present. Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st century. He transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the 19th century colonial surveyor morphs into today’s corporations that are exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this haunting essay film. Moving further away from the generation of knowledge as mere data, Neha Choksi turns her attention to the sun, both as planetary sustenance and a point of reference for dialogue across generations and within the self through multiple modes of narration. The artist’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Choksi invited ten Bangladeshi children to embody a fictive dream of a child obsessively drawing suns, and to consider the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They considered the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities. They imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Each day of the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Choksi invited a different adult professional to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature drawing the visitor back to their primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as they morph from atoms into beings and back. Artists Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) 2 or 3 Tigers, 2015 2 Channel CGI Video, 10-channel sound courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery Technology supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Presented here with additional support from the National Art Council Singapore and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/Shanghai Taking inspiration from 19th Century wood engraving, Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st Century. The wood engraving chronicles the story of George Dromgoole Coleman, the then Government Superintendent of Public Works in Singapore who was surprised by a tiger who was determined to attack not Coleman and his entourage of convict laborers, but rather the theodolite (surveying instrument) they were using to conduct a survey on the unexplored forests of Singapore. Post-colonial historians have noted that the imperial methods of data collection, through census reports, and land surveys, were directed at the control of the lands and bodies of subjugated populations. The creation of these data sets belied the complex inter-relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of a place. Village folklore from South and Southeast Asia describes a symbiotic relationship between humans and tigers, where tigers assume roles of ancestors, gods, protectors, and even estranged brothers of man. The powerful figure of the were-tiger, or a person who can become tigers, and a tiger who can become a person and live in the village, points to the strong bond between man and animal. Contemporary versions of these tales often use the trope of the colonial census taker who asks about the number of tigers in a particular area. In myths such as that of Haru’r Pishima (Haru’s grand-aunt) in the Sunderbans and of Tsaricho in Nagaland, the villagers respond “sometimes 5, and sometimes 6”, alluding to the presence of the were-tiger in their midst, to the bafflement of the census taker. Producing confusion through untranslatable knowledge becomes a weapon of resistance against colonial control. Introducing the were-tiger into Coleman’s story, Ho Tzu Nyen transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the Coleman of the 19th Century morphs into today’s corporations exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this essay film. Ghosts and spirits can often move easily across lines drawn by man, and by transfiguring the agent of colonialism (Coleman), the tiger collapses the gap it attempts to create between man and nature. Neha Choksi (b. 1973 in New Jersey, lives and works in Mumbai and Los Angeles) Every Kind of Sun, 2017-2018 Installation activated with daily live performance involving 10 children and 10 adults Interaction from 1-2pm on February 2, 6:30-7:30pm daily Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Project 88 Neha Choksi’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Her latest salutation to the sun, Every Kind of Sun (2017-2018) debuts as a Solo Project, bringing to life her emotional piece of short fiction, which starts: Now and then…I have a repeating dream of me as a child coming home from school and sitting down to draw. And I draw suns. I use every crayon in the box. I draw every type of sun…A rainbow sun, a hollow sun, a scared sun, a new sun, a neat sun, a dirty sun, a magic sun, a spinning sun, a poem sun, a danger sun, a boss sun, an open sun, a tired sun, a breathing sun, a clapping sun, a mirror sun, a funny sun, a sour sun. Choksi invites ten Bangladeshi children to embody these dreams, drawing suns daily in the exhibition space, considering the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They consider the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities (such as a rock, the wind, or even a lizard). They also imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Venturing deeper into the fictive dream that inspires this work, the mother worries about the obsessive nature of her child’s drawings, and consults an ayurvedic doctor to interpret the meaning of these stacks of suns. Choksi invites a different adult professional each day to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature draws us back to our primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as we morph from atoms into beings and back. Omer Wasim (b. 1988 in Karachi lives and works in Karachi ) & Saira Sheikh (b. 1975 in Karachi, d. 2017 in Karachi) The Impossibility of Loving a Stone 2017 Drawings on paper Courtesy of the artists This work situates the makers amidst the changing peripheries of the ocean. Once porous, continuous, the coastline—carved over millions of years by the love of water for land and stone—is ravaged, pushed out, to make room for concrete. The mother—sea and adjoining land—and/or bearer is continuously mined for animate and inanimate beings. Hence, The Impossibility of Loving a Stone is indeed, or signals, the impossibility of loving the land, water, and other beings, hinting at colonial and neocolonial modes of knowledge construction and production, value, consumption, and bio-power. The desire to decipher, to fully understand, to grapple with the physicality of the stone is also informed by the need to get closer to the father—a geologist, a displaced body. His didactic words directed at deconstructing the physicality of the stone, allow the makers to traverse through boundaries, both permeable and impermeable, and make them visible on paper. And in this manifestation, with the original text next to its Bangla translation, the work comes full circle. A little part of the father returns home, albeit only as words and lines on paper for a short while. The father in this work is also a biographical reference, as Wasim’s father is a geologist and was born in Bangladesh. He lived there until November 1971—and has not been able to go back since. Ursula Biemann (b. 1955, Zurich; lives and works in Zurich) Deep Weather, 2013 Video Essay Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather (2013), mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans- the deltaic regions of Bangladesh that have soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. The attempt to conjure oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to massive displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the very insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them and naturally environmental catastrophes on one side of the earth impact the other.

ALL PROJECTS Metropolitan Museum of Art Donation The Met, New York, 2019 An untitled tapestry by Rashid Choudhury (1932–1986), recently gifted to The Met by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, is the first work of art made by a visual artist in independent Bangladesh to join the Museum's collection. While The Met does hold pre-modern works that are attributed to the region of Eastern Bengal, Untitled (1981) is a significant and major addition to the Museum's collection of modern and contemporary art because it broadens the department's remit of collecting and preserving important modern works from South Asia. Untitled, now on view in gallery 399, presents an abstract and multifaceted twist of earth tones, with hints of orange and sections of light blue. I find that there is an arresting dynamism to the central component of the tapestry: it appears as a symphony of elongated and fragmented vertical shapes, which intertwine with each other in a way that is remarkably evocative of a body—or perhaps numerous bodies—in motion. This important work is a telling example of Choudhury's visual language, which is distinctly modernist and aesthetically innovative, but is also situated within a particular historical and cultural context. Choudhury dedicated himself to the modern art movement in his country through his work as a teacher and community facilitator. In his own work he sought expression through a medium that was very demanding in practical terms and that was less-highly regarded as fine art when compared to painting and sculpture at the time. Nevertheless, he developed his own visual idiom, which drew from the rich, historic traditions of South Asian iconography as well as his studies in Europe. As is evident in his three tapestries at The Met, Choudhury distilled these varied pre-modern and modern forms to create works with a phenomenological impact—one that feels not only effortless, but also transportive. The whole text written by DAS 2016 curator Shanay Jhaveri can be found here. This is the second donation from the Foundation's collection, distributing the knowledge of Bangladeshi art history through the research conducted during the Dhaka Art Summit. Image: Installation view of three tapestries by Rashid Choudhury. At center is a recent addition to The Met collection, and at left and right are two loans from The Samdani Art Foundation. Image credit: MET

ALL PROJECTS Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts Dhaka Art Summit 2020 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’ is realized in collaboration with Jolputul Puppet Studio and was performed inside of Taloi Havini’s ‘Reclamation’ installation at 4pm on 7, 8, 9, 14 and 15 February, with periodic interventions within the puppet theatre within this amoeba. The children also conducted 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.

ALL PROJECTS World Weather Network Formed in response to the climate emergency, the World Weather Network is a constellation of weather stations set up by 28 arts agencies around the world and an invitation to look, listen, learn, and act. From June 21, 2022, to June 21, 2024, artists, writers, and communities shared observations, stories, reflections, and images about their local weather, creating an archipelago of voices and viewpoints. Engaging climate scientists and environmentalists, the World Weather Network brought together diverse worldviews and different ways of understanding the weather across multiple localities and languages.