ALL PROJECTS Very Small Feelings Co-curated by Diana Campbell and Akansha Rastogi with Ruxmini Choudhury Very Small Feelings Co-curated by Diana Campbell (Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation) and Akansha Rastogi (Senior Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art) with Ruxmini Choudhury (Curator, Samdani Art Foundation) This exhibition is a collaboration between Samdani Art Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and has traveled to KNMA in July 2023. Curatorial Text Going completely blind in 1956 did not keep the Indian modern artist Benodebehari Mukherjee from teaching art in Santiniketan. Students recall his lessons in sensing space when he would lead the class to observe trees and particular spots on campus, elaborately describing how light must be falling and casting shadows and other minor events, as if he had observed and sensed this rhythmic relationship in nature a zillion times. Very Small Feelings (VSF) invites us to tap into our memories as Benodebehari did, continuing to feel, experience, and believe in the world beyond what we see with our eyes, beyond linear, sequential time. To feel the far away as near, the near as far, the minute as monumental, the monumental as minute, all with a sense of magic and awe. Playful and anecdotal stories change as they travel from mouth to ear and to mouth again, animating the uneventful repetition of daily rituals into something profound, amplifying the thud of a falling jackfruit that stuns two siblings, wafting smells of disappeared places, raising a swell of questions around gender that prod a young mind, amongst many other things. The exhibition seeks to encounter the eternal ‘inner child,’ and bind us to it strongly. Interested in the spoken word, and the generative space of orality built through the telling and retelling of stories, VSF gently holds and hosts the figure of the child and childhood play as a stage. Play in formative years where the self begins, and transforms. VSF approaches childhood as a place that we can enter and exit at will, examining it through our lived experiences and biases. While there is much that is hard to remember and to reconcile, we must return to our inner child to heal traumas we may carry as adults. Loving, permeable, ambiguous, and dazed; full of stories and fables, rituals and folklore, characters, popular cartoons, children's books and illustrations, memories, and actions that produce many kinds of surfaces, we call this hard-to-define space for intergenerational conversations and entanglements a ‘Spread’. One end of the Spread highlights pedagogical experiments and creative collaborations between artists and young learners, historically looking at children’s culture and practices of select South Asian modernists as illustrators and initiators of platforms for learning and arts mediation. The other end deeply engages with idea of ‘a child’ as instinct, curiosity, play, imagination, innocence, language, future, past, and much more – a whole person with emotions, germs, feelings, pursuits, questions, silliness, joyous wonderment, inheritance, memories, and innumerable things passed down genetically and culturally. Artists in the Spread appear as storytellers, researchers, provocateurs, educators, prisms, and makers developing different methods in their unique environments. We—the curators, mediators, and visitors—build further on that Spread and turn VSF into a playground and a generative space for learning and exchange. It is here that Who the Baer, Sambras, Bonna, Tokai, Meena, Bon Bibi, a stag, crows, two not-named siblings, a young boy, a mother with her toddler, and countless other characters who are real in the imaginations of many, tease out tales, histories, emotions, big and small, through their relationships with other bodies, with family, community, and the world around them. And also in relation to our own bodies as participants inside the exhibition. So, let’s enter gently, in pairs or with a chosen group. To play, to be the play, to do what we like. There are many rituals to choose from, stories to listen to, many ears to which to tell yours, too. It is all the rhythm of a day. Night shall bring its own hum. Location: First Floor Lobby and South Plaza Ahmet Öğüt Jump Up!, 2022 Audience-activated trampolines installed with Benodebehari Mukherjee’s works from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Collection hung above eye-level Exhibited with the support of SAHA Audiences encounter works by the Indian modernist master Benodebehari Mukherjee that were created in the final years of his life, after he had gone blind. Rather than being hung at eye-level, the artist Ahmet Öğüt placed these works above eye-level - just outside of reach to fully take in - even with functional eyesight. Museums and galleries assume an average height of a viewer to determine how they hang things, making many works out of viewing range for children, people in wheelchairs, etc. The way that Öğüt chose to hang these works of art contributes to a sense of a distorted horizon in the room, which refers not only to the balance shifted during the earth’s displacement, but also tо the disturbances that result from political shifts and their interconnections. Viewers become performers while their history-related memories that they collectively experience through their own physical experience is activated in a jump. Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist, and lecturer. Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, the artist often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on serious and/or pressing social and political issues. Öğüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in collective perception of society. b. 1981, Diyarbakır; lives and works in Istanbul, Amsterdam and Berlin David Horvitz Change the Name of Days , 2021/2023 Poster Edition of Artist Book published by Jean Boîte Éditions & Yvon Lambert Seventeen prompts to imagine the world differently pop up across the museum – on the glass facades, windows, restrooms, near the escalator and many unexpected places in the mall. These prompts are a selection from thirty-two lessons and short teaching units developed by David Horvitz, an artist and a father, with the help of his then 5-year-old daughter, originally published in an artist book entitled Change the Name of the Days . Each prompt provides DAS visitors with an opportunity to develop performative actions, and to build new personal collections of poetic instruments and thoughts. From instructions such as "welcome the night into your house" to “exchange breaths with a plant,” this artistic intervention invites reflection on the immateriality of the world surrounding us, unlearning what we know and have been taught and, instead, learning something else, something new. We invite all museum visitors to choose any prompt and perform. Performance, the idea of the game, and exchange with the public are central to Horvitz’s practice. The concept of time in relation to the body and to paired relationships, is found in most of his work, spanning art books, photography, performance art, and mail art as well as new media, often exploring the relationship between man-made systems and natural phenomena. b. 1982, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles Ade Dianita and Aditya Novali Significant Other , 2022-2023 Interactive installation with drawings on canvas, overhead projectors, and transparencies Commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation with the support of Roh projects Ade Dianita and Aditya Novali’s Significant Other is the newest iteration of an ongoing project inspired by the exchange between two artists, a sister and a brother. Ade is the younger sister of Aditya and lives with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as Down’s Syndrome, which impacts how she communicates and interacts socially with her family and wider society. Ade is a full-grown woman with the mental age of a 5-year-old and, through the development of their lifelong relationship, Aditya observed that Ade finds comfort in obsessively making drawings on a daily basis at home, drawings which bear a strikingly similar visual language and orderliness to his own abstract compositions exhibited at museums and galleries around the world. This work expresses a certain communication and bond between the two in a way that goes beyond words and intellect, a deep connection between siblings. This site-specific installation brings the brother and sister pair together where Ade’s drawings, translated into overhead transparencies, are projected over Aditya’s 365 permutations of identical-sized canvases containing complex abstractions that are almost counterintuitively based on the way both Ade and Aditya were taught to draw in school, following the most basic structures of colonial-influenced Mooi Indie paintings— the sun, two mountains, and paddy fields. The images represented on each panel recall a time in Aditya’s childhood that thereafter informs the current mental state of Ade, who in the (mis)perception of society, will forever be a child. Occupying the walls of an enclosed space, these canvases are interpolated with scans of Ade’s drawings printed on transparent paper, which are projected upon the canvases through a number of overhead projectors, establishing a contextual interrelationship between the works of both Ade and Aditya Novali. Novali makes sculptures and installations using complex methods of production as well as commercial materials. Influenced by his background in architecture, his work addresses themes such as structure, space, and urban planning. Using audience participation, Novali’s works act as investigations of social issues related to space with the help of methodological techniques and orderly systems. b. 1978, Surakarta; lives and works in Surakarta Afra Eisma Poke Press Squeeze Clasp , 2021-23 Yarn, ceramics, and textiles Organized with the support of Mondriaan Funds and Kunstinstituut Melly with curatorial contributions of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy and Rosa de Graaf Courtesy of the artist and No Man’s Art Gallery Drawing on literature by influential female authors from across cultures such as Begum Rokeya, Audre Lorde and Ursula K. Le Guin, Eisma interweaves characters from her imagination with ideas provoked by the work of the writers that she reads. Eisma creates a welcoming and lively gathering space where we can intertwine our limbs with those of the otherworldly and alien beings, taking delight in physical proximity, assembly, and embrace, core elements to our human experience. Gathered around a floor tapestry, these figures invite us to become entangled in their embrace and engage in conversation with their worlds and the worlds of other visitors, and to imagine new worlds altogether. Responding to an increasing experience of uneasiness, isolation, and uncertainty towards anything deemed extraneous to our familial environment, Eisma seeks to appease these maladies by fostering mutual understanding and shared experience through art. Using craft techniques in novel ways, Eisma explores and manifests personal stories through immersive and intimate installations of textiles, sculptures, and ceramics. Inspiring her works are characters or imaginary friends that interweave sensuality with lightheartedness. b.1993 the Hague; lives and works in the Hague Afrah Shafiq Nobody Knows for Certain , 2021-2022 Interactive Fiction and Archival Game This project was created with the support of the Garage Field Research program of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow for the Garage Digital platform Nobody Knows for Certain is an online narrative video game and an invitation to submerge oneself in a sea of stories. The project’s point of departure was an artistic inquiry into cultural exchange between the USSR and South Asia during the Cold War, and particularly into the phenomenon of Soviet children’s books translated into major Indian languages. Decades of intense Soviet diplomacy between South Asia and the USSR in the postwar period have led to the formation of a common space where culture was shared by South Asian and Soviet peoples— translated literature, bilateral film distribution, tours by ballet companies and circus troupes saturated the collective imagination and offered mutual insights for people living in a vast geographical expanse stretching “from the Volga to the Ganges” (to borrow from the title of Rahul Sankrityayan’s collection of historical fiction short stories.) In particular, Slavic fairytales and Soviet stories formed a significant part of the childhood memories of those who grew up in the Indian subcontinent from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. Today, in a number of South Asian countries, there is a thriving subculture of collectors of these now out-of-print books, holding onto a childhood nostalgia and a deep affection for a nation that was never theirs and which no longer exists. Going beyond the imagery associated with Communist propaganda, Shafiq draws from a variety of sources such as Eastern Slavic mythology and folk traditions, book illustrations, children’s letters to editors, sound archives, lacquer miniatures, textiles, and decorative arts. She melds these characters, fragments, and disjointed elements to make an interactive game. The unique blended narrative is enriched with the presence of original characters invented by the artist such as a cat without a tail and a matryoshka doll who is empty inside. Tapping into the emancipatory potential of a storytelling unloosed, Shafiq critically revisits the morphology of the folk tale and brings essential philosophical and political updates into the narrative, inviting audiences to dive into, play, make choices, and explore. Shafiq adapts the process of research as an artistic playground. She intertwines archival findings, history, memory, folklore, and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remixed cultures. Her work moves across various mediums, drawing from the handmade language of traditional folk forms and connecting them to the digital language of the Internet and video games. When she is not glued to her computer, she makes glass mosaics. b. 1989, Bangalore; lives and works in Goa Research, Script, Animation and Art: Afrah Shafiq Lead Programmer: Kushal Neil Lead Animator: Piyush Verma Additional Animation: Eeshani Mitra Original Score and Music Production: Rushad Mistry and Zohran Miranda Sound Design & Game Audio Implementation: Horacio Valdiveso Project curators : Iaroslav Volovod and Valentin Diaconov Garage Field Research Team: Oxana Polyakova, Daria Bobrenko and Ivan Yarygin Amitav Ghosh, Salman Toor, and Ali Sethi Jungle Nama, 2021 A book and audiobook imagined as an installation with scenography by GOLEM, 2023 Courtesy of artists and Harper Collins India They say when you retell a legend or listen to one, new voices come to it to haunt the narrative. The Sundarbans—where story, myth and reality meet—earned its name from the Sundari tree, and is the planet’s largest delta and mangrove forest. It spreads across the western coast of Bangladesh and the southern shore of West Bengal in India. The Bengali story-in-verse of the guardian of this forest is the legend of Bon Bibi and her fight with Dakshin Rai , a spirit who appears as a tiger to the natives. It is popular in the villages of the Sundarbans and often enacted in Pala or Jatragaan (local epic storytelling performances), and it erases religious boundaries between Hindus and Muslims as both venerate the forest and its goddess. The Sundari trees are known for their high-value wood and are at the brink of extinction. Jungle Nama, an adaptation of one episode of the legend by author Amitav Ghosh, was published in book form with illustrations by artist Salman Toor, and narrated by musician Ali Sethi. The verse is an allegorical exploration of human greed, ecological escapades, the relationship of a people with their forest and the resources around them, together resulting in the real crisis of climate change. Ghosh’s English-language, interpretation is told entirely in the poyar -like meter of twenty-four syllable couplets replicating the cadence of the original Bengali version. Within the story, the rhyme and meter of speaking out the words has a spell-like effect of invoking the goddess. This sound and visual installation reimagine the book as an immersive space for DAS visitors to access the world of mangroves, wetlands, alligators, the mighty spirit of Dakshin Rai , the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey. Salman Toor’s black and white drawings are haunting images that travel with you, along with pairs of eyes of creatures and beings, gleaming through the darkness of the mangroves. Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning author of historical fiction and non-fiction books that address colonialism and climate change, particularly how they affect the people of South Asia. Salman Toor is a painter known for his small-scale figurative works that combine academic technique and a quick, sketch-like style. Recurring color palettes and references to art history heighten the emotional impact of Toor’s paintings and add a fantastical element to his narratives drawn from lived experience, as well as the imagined lives of young, queer Brown men residing between New York City and South Asia. Ali Sethi is a singer, songwriter, composer, and author noted for his ability to blend Hindustani classical ragas with contemporary Western arrangements, combining live musical performances with historical narratives, cultural context, and critical commentary. Together, these collaborators have brought words, sounds, and images together to evoke a story experienced in public space, with scenography by GOLEM, an international architecture, art, and design studio based in Paris. Amitav Ghosh b. 1956, Kolkata; lives and works in New York Salman Toor b. 1983, Lahore; lives and works in New York Ali Sethi b. 1984, Lahore; lives and works in New York GOLEM design team: Ariel Claudet and Sara Layoun Anpu Varkey Summer’s Children , 2017-19 Selected drawings from the set of 92 works made for the graphic novel Felt tip pen and brush pen on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Set inside a rubber plantation in Kerala , Summer’s Children resides in the memory of a lost place and childhood seen through the eyes of two siblings as they traverse the day. Both run across the field, through ant trails, and rubber trees. They run to the river and to the rain, curious and observant, and looking alike. They pick leaves, wander into thickets, chase animals, swim and catch fish in the village pond, crane their necks to look up to the sky, trees, and adults. Dot by dot, episodic memory, plays, sounds and landscape of childhood come to touch and visit us. Childhood here is a new place of observation and inquiry, of nostalgia, smells, and stories. Made for a self-published artist book, reading these monochromatic drawings is to attune yourself to a slow, joyful, sensorial looking and passing of a day where many delicate, minor events happen around us. Up on the tree, a nutmeg pod pops. A jackfruit falls on the ground. Fire ants make a leaf-house on guava trees. Varkey took two years to complete this silent graphic novel, which is partly autobiographical and based on time spent in her grandmother’s ancestral village in rural Kerala. With each drawing, she creates a space she didn’t know she inhabited or still carries within her. Known for distinct graffiti and public murals in different cities of India, Anpu Varkey’s practice pulses with attitude: unapologetic, experimental, and not afraid to share her vulnerabilities. Over the years, she has contributed immensely to the vibrant growing street art scene in India. Graphic novels and bookmaking are another aspect of her practice. b. 1980, Bangalore; lives and works in Bangalore Anga Art Collective Khaal Gaaon , 2022-2023 Audio visual installation with bamboo, clay, earth, and jute elements Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art with additional support from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Contributors: Jugal Kumar, Anup Let, Devadeep Gupta, Gyanwant Yadav and Umesh Singh Cluster of different materials, interactive vehicles, seeds, books and intimate play spaces welcome you to Anga Art Collective’s new iteration of their installation Khaal Gaon, further evolved from its first occurrence in the Dhaka edition of the exhibition. They are inspired by sutal which in Assamese means a play-area that has multiple entry points. Creating a dense interlinkages of visual and sensory stories they have conceptually developed Khaal Gaon as a laboratory space where individual practices, observations and thoughts of members of the collective are in conversation with each other. With this evolving vocabulary of their collective kNOw school, they invite visitors to engage in the indigenous ways of knowing and further stretching the contours of Khaal Gaon. This project is derived from two Assamese words: Khaal, meaning low land or a small water body in and around a village settlement, and Gaaon, meaning village. Since the 1970s, regular floods and river erosion in the Rahmariya region of upper Assam (located in what is now India) have gradually erased water bodies, fertile fields, wetlands, vegetation, and a cluster of 35 villages, leading to villagers’ displacement and resettlement in distant villages. Submerged under the endless flow of the river Brahmaputra, Khal Gaaon disappeared from the physical geography and settled into the oral history of its people and their descendants. Remembered as an arena of community feasts, fishing festivals full of life and rural energies, as well as a music and performative space, the Khaal Gaon is now only present in stories of the elderly generation who once inhabited the land as young adults. It emerges in the exhibition as a place conjured from the collective memories of its displaced inhabitants. Members of Anga Art Collective take this invisible village and the childhood memories of its inhabitants as a lens to rethink the figure of the child as part of a depleting landscape in an ecologically and politically turbulent context. From their field trips near the site of this invisible village and conversations with the elderly generation, they invoke an immersive place loaded with the barter system practice, the playfulness associated with materials, architectures, and performances. Climate migration and seasonal displacements are common in this flood-prone region, and have altered the occupations, site, stories, and memories of the community. This installation navigates the collective psyche of a displaced community, and explores relationships connecting age and ecology, artistic language and memory, playfulness, and elderliness. Initiated in 2010 by a group of friends, Anga Art Collective came together with the vision to engage with the contemporary and the layered history of Assam in Northeast India through art. With 13 current members, Anga fosters a creative and collaborative space for practice, which is developed by sharing knowledge with other artists, village communities, ecologists, academics, and activists. Know School and the Granary are two such initiatives that are site-specific as well as pedagogical exercises in community-based learning and re-learning. For Anga, a collective is a growing process rather than a closed ensemble. Ashfika Rahman The Paper Box Gallery , 2023 Handmade paper from waste Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art The Paper Box Gallery is a futurist model idea of waste turning into an eco-friendly pop-up community gallery, where the structure of the makeshift gallery is made of small paper bricks created from underwater garbage. Every year, one-third of Bangladesh experiences floods during the monsoon season. The growing amount of garbage in the water choking drainage systems is a main cause. In collaboration with invited artist Mahmuda Siddika, architect Ar. Sayon Sur and the children from the artist’s grandmother’s neighborhood—the biggest wetland in Bangladesh known as Chalan Beel—the artist and her collaborators initiate a process of taking back garbage from the water. Waste transformed into usable handmade paper becomes both material for art and an exhibition space. The pop-up gallery is inspired by traditional installations that travel around different villages and exhibit household stories, part of vernacular Bangladeshi culture, but instead exhibited here in the middle of Dhaka Art Summit. The entire process explores questions of community collaboration, representation, community access in an exhibition, consent, and inclusive and sustainable ecosystems. Ashfika Rahman is a Bangladeshi visual artist, teacher, and art initiator, who explores systemic social issues in her home country through her work. Her practice straddles art and documentary. In each of her works, she tries to challenge mainstream perspectives on complex systemic social issues, especially the unequal treatment of minority communities in the periphery of Bangladesh, raising awareness globally about these alarming threats to humanity. B 1988, Dhaka; lives and works in Bangladesh. Blaise Joseph, Atreyee Day and New Education Group - Foundation for Innovative Research in Education (NEG-FIRE) Multilingual Education Material - Books & Charts in indigenous languages, 2014 – 2015 Handmade paper from wasteBooks in indigenous languages of Konda Dhoras, Kui and Adivasi Odia, Baigani, Poraja and Gadaba Inside the Belly of the Strange, oral traditions meet pedagogy playfully via the book-form and large wordless picture charts about seasons, rural ecology and rituals. With the intention of rethinking what ‘resource’ in education means, particularly for children belonging to indigenous communities whose access to books are always in not-their-own-spoken-language, a group of artist-educators, and grassroots organizations like Neg-Fire came together to develop and publish stories and poems for children in their mother tongues. They worked with tribal elders, government schools, primary teachers, drop-out youth, as well as students and program animators to make books that attempt to honor the spoken differences in each dialect and retain the earthiness of language of daily use rather than a codified grammar-bound singular language. Blaise Joseph and Atreyee Day present a cross-section from the set of nineteen books and seven charts they developed in collaboration with communities of Araku (Andhra Pradesh) and Koraput (Odisha). These multi-use materials cover a range of everyday encounters and stories that are centuries old as well as match the current realities of the inhabitants that speak the language – ranging from a good hunt story, the beauty of changing seasons, village festivals and community celebrations, daily chores and routines at home/school/field/forest, to personal joys, losses of the child, and animal-human encounters. Very Small Feelings exhibition and its expanded platform - Transnational Folklore Research Forum - intends a slow reflection of the collaborative spirit and journey of this multilingual book project, and a process of writing and illustrating which is not antithetical to the power of the oral but a fluid tool to connect and start conversations. Process: In 2014, Blaise Joseph and Atreyee Day were invited as art facilitators and consultants to the Bhopal Chapter of NEG-FIRE, with whom they had lead community workshops on art and education since 2009 with Bhil, Gond and Biaga tribes in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in Central India. Atreyee and Blaise approached indigenous communities via the workshop model to work with over a hundred participants from six tribal groups from the Araku and Koraput area. The first step was listening and gathering narratives and songs, local folklore, and versions important to each community. The next step progressed to editing, visualizing and storyboarding, transcribing, loosely translating, making rough drafts, cut-outs and collaging – again with the involvement of children and community members – in Telugu, Odia, Gadaba, Paraja, Adibasi/ Desiya Odia, Kondadora and Kui. This process helped the participants in this experiment reclaim their personal voice in retelling their brief human tales with humor and lightness. The freedom to express becomes primary motivation, winning over one’s oppressive situation or life conditions. Blaise Joseph is an artist, art educator, and a farmer. He has been facilitating art workshops, community-based projects, developing art based curricula for educational institutions and various social organizations for the past 12 years. He has been leading the Kochi Biennale Foundation’s Art By Children Programme since 2018. Atreyee Day is an artist educator and illustrator who draws for and publishes with independent alternate publishers in India . She was part of a small school where art was the main medium of teaching and taught in semi-rural towns in the foothills of the Himalayas, and led collaborative workshops with Blaise on art pedagogy from 2012 to 2018. Benodebehari Mukherjee Collages , 1957 – late 1960s Graphite, colored paper, newspaper and jute thread, pasted on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art ‘A man who has the power of sight need not be told what light is. And where there is light there is color.' - Benodebehari Mukherjee The sensory agility of these colorful collages draws one into the vision fields of Benodebehari Mukherjee. Made after he lost his vision at the age of 53, each collage was his attempt at re-constructing the world as he remembered it, re-building a visual language after a descent into complete blindness that he described as a “new feeling, new experience, and a new state of being.” Drawing from memory, sensing colors and textures, he pieced together scenes from the rural topography of Santiniketan, experiences of Jatra performances (a folk theater form of Bengal) and, responding to his environment and everyday stimuli, he created tactile surfaces with different materials like jute thread, newspaper, and smooth colored paper. With a child-like curiosity and playfulness, his inspiring daily practice of making and thinking visually, framed and re-framed the figure and its surroundings. Like the animated body of the Boy with Shell Nose, we see the fullness of the artist and what he was touching, feeling and imagining, an invitation for us to join in the act of sensing the artist’s world as well as our own worlds. An important modernist figure of pre-Independent India, Mukherjee was one of the earliest artists in modern India to use murals as a mode of artistic expression. He studied at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan in 1919, with Nandalal Bose and Rabindranath Tagore as his teachers, later becoming an art teacher there himself in 1925 and spending his most creative phase in Santiniketan until 1949. Like many of his peers, he was influenced by art from East Asia, and visited China and Japan between 1936-37 to learn different brush and ink techniques. In 1948, he traveled to Nepal as the Curator of the Nepal Government Museum, Kathmandu, and also spent several years in Mussorie and Dehradun training artist-teachers. As a pedagogue, he has influenced generations of students in Santiniketan and wrote critical and insightful reflections on pedagogy and arts education. b. 1904, Behala; d. 1980, New Delhi Chittaprosad Angels Without Fairy Tales , 1952 Linocut on paper Collection: DAG Modern and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Chittaprosad’s humanism makes us actors and witnesses to his questioning of unequal social relationships and ideas of progress in post-independent India. His figure of the child-worker undercuts the glorious image of childhood innocence. Angels Without Fairy Tales is an important linocut series that he first made in 1952, and later published by Danish UNICEF committee and dedicated it to the International Conference in Defence of Children . These tales of lost childhood highlight the atrocity of the daily labor of children from poor families or those orphaned and forced to share age-inappropriate responsibilities with adults. They speak of survival, deprivation, child abuse and premature adulthood: a boy-performer on the streets with a monkey, a kid with his box of shoe polish asleep on the pavement, a child rowing a boat to earn a living, another engaged in hard domestic chores of adults. Throughout his life, Chittaprosad remained an advocate of children’s rights. During his historically seminal reportage of the Bengal Famine of 1943, he documented the plight of children suffering from acute starvation, abandonment, abuse, and separation from family members, becoming beggars in order to survive. He visited orphanages that opened during the famine and reported on the conditions of children and the lack of medical supplies and relief for them. In his brush and ink famine drawings, he provocatively uses the gaze of famine-affected children with bloated stomachs, exhausted faces, malnourished bodies marked with wounds and disease to agitate the viewer into feeling empathy and taking action. Tell Me a Story Please!, 1960s Illustrations Made for Children’s Books, 1960s Kingdom of Rasagolla, Bengali Folktales Retold and Illustrated by Chittaprosad The Little Mermaid, Nov 27, 1968 The Angel, Nov 28, 1968 Holger and Dane, 1960s Linocut on paper Collection: DAG Modern Very Small Feelings exhibition literally and conceptually follows Chittaprosad’s prompt to “Tell me a story!”—inviting its artists and visitors to find spaces to tell, retell and listen to stories that are crucial to them. Chittaprosad created joyous and playful illustrations and prints for children’s books picturing a utopian and animated world of birds and animals, a stark contrast to his grim depictions of the ‘real world’ through images of child labor also present in the exhibition. Known for his socialist conviction, political fervor, and agitation, after his disassociation from the Communist Party in 1949, Chittaprosad spent most of his time in Bombay, expressing himself mostly in the medium of prints as well as making and experimenting with puppets and puppet theater. In Khelaghar (Playhouse) , he wrote, directed, and designed costumes for plays and comedy shows for children of the informal settlements around his Andheri residence, which witnesses describe as being full of hope and laughter. Whether working with Bengali folk tales or the stories of famous western authors like Hans Christian Andersen, Chittaprosad’s illustrations were designed and approached with a folk-like simplicity, carrying the rhythm of nursery rhymes, while weaving in aspects of village life to evoke immediate familiarity and intimacy. Chittaprosad was a radical artist from undivided Bengal, who spent his early years in Chattagram, Bangladesh, formerly known as Chittagong. He was greatly inspired by the Chittagong Uprising of the 1930s. His visual accounts of death, illness, poverty, and strife in pre-independent India remain relevant even today. His iconic sketches of famine-stricken children, families, and dispensaries from the Bengal Famine series (1944-45) became eye-witness accounts disseminated through communist newspapers. He was a member of the undivided Communist Party of India until 1949 and contributed immensely to its cultural wing which involved many iconic writers, poets and artists. b. 1915; Naihati; d. 1978, Bombay Driant Zeneli No wise fish would escape without flying 2019, HD Video, color, sound, 07’10” How deep can a dragonfly swim under the ocean? 2021, 4K film, color, sound,12’23’’ The firefly keeps falling and the snake keeps growing 2022, color, sound, 11′46” Courtesy of the artist and Giorgio Persano Gallery In this trilogy of films, Zeneli harnesses a narrative structure, following the model of the contemporary fairytale, to amplify human feelings such as fear, failure, isolation, and envy. These internal feelings impact how humans form the external world through politics and architecture. The chapters are developed and filmed in iconic architectural spaces of Brutalist origin in three capitals of the Balkan Peninsula: The National Library in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo, The Pyramid in Tirana, Albania, and the Post Office in Skopje, North Macedonia. In the first film, a fish is trapped in a net, part of the architecture of the façade of the National Library of Kosovo, trying to escape from a shark. A group of children who worked with the non-profit institution Bonevet—which considers technology as a method to learn science, understand life, and increase imagination—played a game with Zeneli to imagine a solution to release the fish from the net to escape the shark. Together, they composed a narrative that portrays the Brutalist architecture of the National Library as something transformable into malleable matter, and the nature of the fish as being like a bird that can float in the sky. The film offers us a story where the art of being wise is entrusted to children and the architecture of the National Library in Kosovo becomes a network of possibilities which are there for all of us to imagine. The second film tells the story of a dragonfly that, despite being able to move its wings, is condemned to never fly, thus failing to get away from the ocean. The dragonfly, a symbol of spiritual depth, power, change of perspective, and adaptation recalls the real experience of Rilond Risto, who spent 21 years of isolation in Albanian prisons, creating mechanical insects capable of flight from various circumstantial tools during his last period of imprisonment. The dragonfly moves inside the Pyramid of Tirana, a memorial monument to the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha built in late 1980s, and is held by it without the possibility to fly and escape from the Pyramid, a metaphor for the existential quest to escape the confines of externally imposed rules. The third film is set in the Post Office of Skopje, Macedonia, whose concrete structure, modeled in the shape of a lotus flower and completed in 1974, became the symbol of the reconstruction of the city after the devastating earthquake of 1963.The film is inspired by the fairytale of the firefly and the snake in which the snake, struck by the brightness of the firefly, tries at all costs to eat it, and reacts to that feeling of powerlessness in front of its bright glow— an allegory for the senseless, often ego-driven violence we experience in the world today. Zeneli’s work challenges physical and intellectual limits by staging and performing ironic and dreamlike situations, which are often absurd. His performative approach makes us question how we experience time and identify with dreams, playing with reason while utilizing the wider public’s participation in the creation of his work. At the core of Zeneli’s performative actions, as well his films, is the redefinition of ideas of failure, utopia, and dream that open up possible alternative readings of the world. b. 1983, Shkoder; lives and works in Turin Ganesh Pyne 10 Illustrations from Shataborsher Roopkatha/Hundred Years of Fairy Tales , 1983 Pen and ink on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Saat Bhai Champa Rajkumari Poncho Pushpa Mone Mone Maniraj Ramdhanur Golpo Chandrachur Rajputra Pori-r-Golpo Buro Angul Kheede Untitled Well-known as the master of tempera technique, Ganesh Pyne’s painterly world full of dreamscapes, mysterious figures, and motifs emerges from the fairytales of Thakurmar Jhuli and similar sources.* Pyne’s childhood was spent in a crumbling mansion in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), listening to his grandmother’s make-believe world of fairytales, folklore, and mythical stories from epics and witnessing jatra performances that sparked his imagination. He passionately drew animated illustrations and picture books for young children, a strong aspect of his practice which is only now gaining art-historical attention. He worked in an animation studio as an illustrator for almost two decades. His inclination for drawing and re-drawing figures from popular stories and mythology, rendering them into philosophical and vulnerable caveats, comes across in this unique suite of illustrations. These drawings were made for an anthology celebrating fairytales by iconic Bengali writers, from Sukumar Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and many others. Each illustration captures a poetic moment from the tales: the lonely woman at the window in Kheede , the queen nursing the ill in Rajkumari Poncho Pushpa , the prince smelling the flowers Mone Mone , or the king encountering seven of his children who turned into champa flowers in Saat Bhai Champa . By creating visual parables, Pyne creates spaces for the reader to enter the stories and build their own joy, grief, and intimacy with these timeless tales. His larger body of work reflects upon the magical, mysterious world which is poetic and equally full of fear, death, darkness, and the unknown. As fellow artist Paritosh Sen beautifully observes, Pyne’s world is “where feeling becomes more important than seeing.” * Thakumar Jhuli (1907) was one of the earliest published collections of indigenous Bengali folk and fairytales, edited and compiled by Dakhinaranjan Mitra Majumdar. It was one of the earliest attempts to document and publish the indigenous folklore of Bengal to reclaim the space encroached upon by the rise of popular English fairytale books. Dakhinaranjan traveled across many villages recording verbal narrations of the folktales with his phonograph, and later edited and published them in several books. b.1937, Calcutta; d. 2013, Kolkata Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts Bonna , 2022 Video, loop. Duration: 5 minutes Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and World Weather Network Bangladesh is a place where girls named Bonna live, play, and grow with living and non-living beings of every gender orientation. Bonna literally translates to flood, but not all floods are bad. Many storms are named after people but, here, a person is named after a weather pattern. Bonna is a free spirit, and she brings chaos to the world. Sometimes chaos enables new possibilities to emerge as it breaks apart rigid structures. Violent destructive flooding in Bangladesh and other South Asian countries, due to climate change and man-made structures, is now a pressing concern and we can learn from stories that have been floating around for thousands of years in this land of rivers. The Bonna character encountered in this video was imagined by a group of children in Bangladesh whose community elders are climate migrants, many of whom have never left Bangladesh, but who acutely feel the impact of the world's carbon emissions while contributing very little to them. The children’s lives are intertwined with the community elders and their journeys of environmental migration to Thakurgaon, Bangladesh. They wrote the script for this video work interpreting the theme of the 2023 Dhaka Art Summit, re-contextualizing what it means to live with extreme weather. As a conceptual carryover from the Dhaka Art Summit 2023, Bonna joins many other characters that activate and anchor Very Small Feelings exhibition. Ghazaleh Avarzamani Stuck-in-time Time Wall , 2022-2023 Soap installation, Commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation. Project supported by Canada Council for the Arts. Stuck-in-time Time Wall uses soap as a tool for both agency and discomfort. Exploring the political and domestic associations of soap as a material turned art object, this project examines the politics of education, the process of colonizing the mind and cleaning the body. It is triggered by the Point Four Program, a colonial post-war educational program to help developing nations “help themselves.” In 1949, as part of Cold War policies to combat the influence of the USSR, the Truman administration came up with the idea for a technical assistance program as a means to win the "hearts and minds" of countries “in the developing world,” sharing American know-how in various fields, especially agriculture, industry, and health. This program introduced a variety of materials, machines, and ideas through documentaries etc. Avarzamani’s intervention responds to the propaganda of the program and offers ever-changing blocks of soap as a quiet meditation on the human condition. The soaps were sourced from Cosco, one of the oldest soap-making companies in Bangladesh, and the production of this project was realized in collaboration with the organization TransEnd which supports the diverse transgender, non-binary and queer community in Bangladesh, and with further support from the team in India. Avarzamani’s practice is committed to challenging hegemonic and epistemological structures by investigating the rules and methodologies used to shape power in society. Grounded in ideas of deconstruction, replication, and transformation, her research examines how education shapes psychosocial constructions of knowledge and cultural practices. Primarily working in sculpture and installation, she often explores games and play as tools to understand power dynamics and systems that are inherent but often hidden within our shared relationships. b.1980, Tehran; lives and works between Toronto and Margate 14a Guam Bus The Guam Bus is run by brothers Michael and Jack Lujan Bevacqua from the Kabesa and Bittot clans of Guam. When both were children growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Guam, there was very little media related to being Chamoru, or telling the stories of their people and teaching them their language. In 2015, after Michael had become a university professor and teacher of Chamoru and Jack had started a career as an artist, they decided to use their talents to create books, flashcards, comics, and games telling Chamoru stories and teaching the Chamoru language. Their initial inspiration was to create for Chamoru children today resources reflecting their heritage. To date, they have published three bilingual Chamoru-English children’s books, three comic books, produced three sets of flashcards for young learners of Chamoru, and released a Chamoru language bingo game in 2021. Today, the mission of the Guam Bus is to revitalize the Chamoru language and empower the Chamoru people. They aim to do this primarily through the production of creative and academic works designed to inspire and educate the Chamoru people about their heritage and future possibilities as a people. Irushi Tennekoon Animated Films Studying Blue Whales (featuring Asha de Vos, Marine Biologist), 2019, 3 minutes The Umbrella Thief (featuring Sybil Wettasinghe, Children's author and illustrator), 2020, 3 minutes Colombo Wetlands and the Urban Fishing Cat (featuring Anya Ratnayaka), 2022, 6 minutes Irushi Tennekon’s ongoing series Animate Her interviews a group of exceptional women living and working in Sri Lanka, sharing their paths of work and life, to lay out alternatives to patriarchal structures created (primarily by men) for women to fall into. Through modes of stop-motion and experimental animation, the series brings to life the stories of a marine biologist, a children’s author and illustrator, a wildlife conservationist, a lawyer and activist, a traditional dancer, an architect, and an ICT entrepreneur. Responding to the invisibility of working women in public spaces and the idea of future heroines and role models with brown skin and dark hair, Tennekon’s heroines come from diverse fields in the arts, sciences and technology who challenge the norms and biases of their fields. As they share their journeys, risks taken, challenges embraced, the larger social and environmental ecospheres that govern one’s life choices become apparent, along with other topics including how Colombo wetlands prevent floods and disease. Working as an artist, experimental animator, and storyteller, Tennekon strives to inspire more open-ended futures for women in Sri Lanka. While she has a background in English studies, her work seeks to bring visibility to heroines indigenous to Sri Lanka rather than imported from Euro-centric colonial traditions. b.1989, Sri Lanka; lives and works in Colombo and London Jani Ruscica Not-knot (to stain), 2023 Wood cut and mixed printing techniques The inked and their Incandescent Irreverence (New Delhi) Site-specific mural, 2023 Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art with support from the Finnish Cultural Institute Potentially familiar, yet only provisional, symbols, stretch, twist and contort themselves towards the very limits of recognition, extending themselves across the gallery space, almost holding it in an embrace. Like tattoos or graffiti on the skin of a building, appropriated linguistic signs start to take on human, animal, and plant-like qualities, seemingly performing for an audience as they turn and stretch. Refusing their intended meaning and gesturing towards new, freer ways of existing, through illegibility, fragmentation and incoherence, these signs and symbols playfully embody the slippery nature of language and its codifications. Jani’s site-specific mural playfully responds to the architectural spaces of the museum and other installed artworks in the exhibition. Ruscica’s work spans a variety of mediums, using not only video, sound, and performance, but also sculpture, murals, and woodcuts. Looking for common ground between different and seemingly disparate art forms, their practice explores the mutability of meaning, the ties and slippages between interpretation and representation, questioning categories and binaries, and playfully collapsing boundaries of language, animacy and meaning. b. 1978 Savonlinna; Lives and works in Helsinki Jessy Razafimandimby Si Seulement les souvenirs parvenaient du futur , 2022 Found object, bed sheet, pencil on paper Courtesy of the artist and Sans Titre, Paris Chants hirsutes , 2022 Found objects, woven straw, acrylic on bed sheet Courtesy of the artist, private collection, Paris and Sans Titre, ParisPresentation supported by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Jessy Razafimandimby is interested in the stories behind objects and what they have to say about human behavior. He employs notions of the household as a metaphorical framework to question notions of taste, belonging, and power. An avid collector of domestic objects, his work has been described as an “archive of anecdotes,” where the rituals and traditions (of making) of their previous owners meet the personal history of the artist, coming alive in gestural, hybrid works that carry with them the artist’s childhood memories growing up Madagascar. Textiles are a common motif in the artist’s work; they link ornamental practices from paintings to bedsheets and play a role in concealing and revealing fictions and truths in theater and in life. These works are inspired by the artist’s childhood experience as an altar boy in Madagascar as well as his contemporary experience in Geneva. His mother continues to enact imported Christian rituals in her adopted home today when decorating altars for family ceremonies. The act of transmission fascinates the artist; many religious ceremonies use white cloth as part of rituals to purify and seal commitments to higher spiritual powers and to other human beings, as in the act of marriage. Transmission is also part of our hope for transformation, and the artist interprets ritual objects in straw, a kind of alchemy where “poor materials” can become precious through the act of belief. Razafimandimby’s multidisciplinary production encompasses painting, drawing, installations, and performance. Often, these practices converge, finding the artist manipulating fragmented decorative objects and textiles, which extend the work beyond its frame. These extensions reveal a clash between sculpture and painting, staged by the artist, as well as clashes of culture. He pays particular attention to the history of interior decoration and ornamentation, as well as social conventions of “good manners” that are traditionally linked to a conservative way of life and promoted by a classist bourgeois system. b. 1995, Madagascar; lives and works in Geneva Joydeb Roaja প্রজন্ম কল্পদ্রুম ও অনু দ্রুম, Generation-wish-yielding trees and atomic tree , 2009-ongoing Photo-drawing collage print Courtesy of the artist তরল শিকড়, Liquid roots , 2022 Pen and color pencil on paper Collection: Samdani Art Foundation Go Back to Roots 39, 2022 Go Back to Roots 43 , 2022 Ink pen on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Belonging to the Tripura community from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Joydeb Roaja’s childhood was not like that of most Bangladeshi artists. He grew up seeing army boot prints on the hills, and tanks haunted his dreams. Generation-wish-yielding trees is a response to his traumatic memories, a series which began as a performance with his daughter in 2009. His performances turned into drawings and his drawings turned into performances. These photo-drawing collage prints are mainly made from the desire to see performance documentation and drawings side-by-side as one work. The only source of water in the hilly area of Roaja’s village in Rangamati is a small stream running between two hills but, for the sake of development, the natural forest was cut down and re-planted with teak plantations. As a result, many streams in the hilly areas are drying up. The stream Roaja used to bathe in as a child now has no water except during the rainy season. This is the reason why this jhiri (stream) in Liquid roots transforms into ever-running roots in his drawings, flowing with hope for more autonomous futures. Roaja has an interconnected performance, painting, and drawing practice that highlights the challenging social and political landscape of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. His works are tied to the experiences of indigeneity, often emphasizing the deep and symbiotic connection of indigenous people with their land as well as the fight for recognition and rights. His work is an empowering call to demand autonomy and ensure preservation of minority cultures. b.1973, Khagrachari; lives and works in Khagrachari Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty The Story of Water and Labor Pain , 2022-2023 Charcoal and watercolor on paper, performance Collection: Samdani Art FoundationCommissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation Through drawings and body movement, Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty explores a story of the flood created at the confluence of the Padma and Brahmaputra rivers. People living on the banks of the hundreds of rivers in Bangladesh and India have always depended on the sediments that come with the river, traveling all the way from the Himalayas. Combining mythological events and characters from the region, Chisty created his own narrative of the delta and its natural phenomena of flooding. Chisty works with performance, poetry, drawing, and animation. Based in Narayanganj and Dhaka, he explores through his art the depths of the human psyche. Often working through the intricate meshwork of the relationships between mind and body, body and matter, myth and reality, time and space, his practice attempts to install in everyday surroundings a window into imaginary spaces, dreamscapes, and parallel realities. b. 1976, Narayanganj; lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh Kelly Sinnaphah Mary Notebook 12: the Fables of Sanbras , 2022 Acrylic on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery Notebook (2) of No Return , 2018 Acrylic on paper From the Collection of Albertine Kopp Through the lens of science fiction, Kelly Sinnapah Mary often explores the so-called feminine universe; working with floral themes, soft materials, and fairytales, she uses techniques contrasting with her poignant and politically charged subject matter. From this friction, Sinnapah Mary traces her ethnic heritage, while questioning her roots as someone caught in two nested worlds— confronting concepts of ‘negritude’ and ‘coolitude’. ‘Coolie’, an expression coined by Caribbean poet Khal Torabully, is a pejorative name given to Indians who migrated to the Caribbean. Sinnapah Mary invented a character named ‘Sanbras’, a young girl who perhaps stands in for the artist as a young girl, and tries to connect the past, present, and future as a protagonist with agency over her life’s direction. Sometimes she is a schoolgirl on the run who takes a critical look at society and dreams of creating an alternative community with other children. She questions the relationship between human and animal, and thinks of the animal as an ally to build and remake the world she wants to live in the future. Sinnapah Mary creates images through drawing, painting, sculpture, and tapestry-making that refer to the tales and biblical stories of her childhood, mixing cruelty and enchantment, while exploring postcolonial dilemmas and resistance to self-invention. She embraces her own ethnic heritage as a descendant of Indian indentured laborers, and draws in sexuality, a love of craft, and the social injustice she perceives around her to create mini-worlds with science fiction and fairytale undertones. b. 1981, Guadeloupe; lives and works in Guadeloupe Lapdiang Syiem Laitïam , 2022-2023 Video and Performance Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum and Art Dubai This body-based performance by Lapdiang Syiem, which visitors can experience as a video, explores the Khasi folktale U Sier Lapalang , a story of the stag who climbs up from the plains of what we know as present-day Bangladesh into the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya to find the wild herb U Jangew Jathang , only to be captured and killed by hunters. His mother also ascends in search of her son and encounters the kill. She releases a dirge, a lamentation which is said to be a sound that has taught the Khasi people how to mourn and grieve. The work focuses on memory and retelling, landscape, and grief as an emotion that drives the narrative of border-crossing and how it resonates in the Khasi community. Syiem’s embodiment of the innocent and adventurous spirit of U Lapalang and his journey to the frontiers beyond his learned geography, speaks to us on multiple levels. The performance-video made on site captures the landscape of Sohra, Sohbar (the village between Sohra and the Bangladesh border), and Wahrew (the river flowing between Meghalaya and Bangladesh) which are undergoing a process of tremendous change and erasure with aggressive urbanization, mining, and other interventions. Syiem’s practice is deeply physical, drawing on techniques from her diverse training in theatrical arts. She presents and revives indigenous Khasi folktales with a contemporary vision, engaging with questions of gender and identity. She locates her theatrical expression in her minority matrilineal community’s oral traditions, using folk as a resource and performance as a form toward the expression of the oral— where the act of performing means taking part in the passage of those traditions from one generation to the next. b. 1988, Shillong; lives and works in Shillong Leela Mukherjee Recalling Leela Organized with the support of Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation ‘The Peacock Stage’ mural at Welhams Boy’s School, 1968. Photograph taken in 2023. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Archival material from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Archive Set of six wood sculptures, 1950s - 1970s From the Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Very Small Feelings creates a space to grasp, position and reflect on the life-long work of a pioneering sculptor and educator, Leela Mukherjee. Her art-making practice and contribution to arts pedagogy remains under-researched and overshadowed by the grand gestures of male-centric modernism; her works and her shifts were small, intimate, irregular, and in constant dialogue with her environment. Her career marks a shifting register of practice that liaises between her domestic life, her dedicated teaching practice, and her artistic journey as a life-long learner. Her bold personality, directness, and her dedication to her art—which we only know of anecdotally—becomes a starting point to recall Leela Mukherjee today. As an artist whose practice, ideas, and work are only now being archived and researched, Recalling Leela is set as a proposition inviting you to think with us on ways of approaching her practice, work, and ideas. As we continue to imagine this space in different iterations of VSF , we follow the anecdotal, incline towards the referenced, and all that can be pieced together from the memories of Leela Mukherjee’s students, colleagues, and friends, to gather details of her influence as a teacher and person of immense resource. It is a real yet conceptual leap that we take to imagine ways of approaching an artist’s body of work about which history knows very little. Recalling Leela first dives into Mukherjee’s idea of the Art Room that she instituted at the Welham Boy’s School in Dehradun, at the Himalayan foothills, upon joining the institution as an arts teacher in 1953. She is credited to have modeled the art room similar to art studios of practicing artists, accessible to students at all times including late hours, and with access to a variety of mediums. Embedding such an open invitation into a school curriculum, she shifted arts from a hobby class to a life pursuit for many of her students, filled with discovery, experiences of looking and learning together, and of course the discipline for which she is well remembered. Recalling Leela recognizes the simplicity and impact of such pedagogical efforts and gestures that move arts beyond the rigidity of class hours, percolating into life; and of art as a central motif to engagement with the world, especially for early learners. While her classes in the Art Room often spilled outdoors, having her students repeatedly sketch the hills surrounding the school, her art practice which occupied the same spaces as her students came to find permanent residence on the walls of the school. VSF anchors this reimagined space for Leela via one such work, The Peacock Stage , an onsite mural made by her in 1968 at the Welhams Boy’s School at the behest of Ms. Oliphant, the founder of the institution. The alumni, her students and the school remember it as an iconic space of “memorable gatherings, assemblies and speeches,” where “the peacock waits silently and patiently, in all its grandeur, with its wings spread wide to welcome all.” This sets the stage, both literally and figuratively, for the presentation of her archive and her work for us to ponder. Dotting this Peacock Stage in the exhibition are photographs of her students holding their drawings, school notice-board exhibitions, and figurines made from soap and wood, and her own documentation of her works. Six wood sculptures by Leela Mukherjee animate this backdrop, with animal figures complimenting the soap sculptures that one sees in the photographs. In these sculptures she draws references from the toy-making tradition and culture of rural artisans of South Asia, and her dedicated study of nature and bodies imbibed during her education at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. Mukherjee learned the skill of wood carving from the famous master artisan Sri Kulsunder during her stay in Kathmandu, Nepal from 1948 to 1950, and became one of the few female sculptors of her time to actively work with wood, and later with bronze. Together this assemblage of a presentation blurs the line between her practice as an artist and as an educator. She approached teaching art to children not as an isolated classroom exercise but as a laboratory for experimenting with learning methodologies and structures, from passing of skills and techniques to attitudes of engaging with the world through art. Leela Mukherjee started working at the Welham Preparatory School in Dehradun in 1953, and continued to create her own work in the same studio as her students until 1974. A graduate of Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, she took in early on the Tagorean philosophy of the study of nature and life, and later extended this attitude into the development of her arts curriculum and classes. She was a student of Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. She married artist Benode Behari Mukherjee in 1944 and assisted him to create the famous mural based on the life of medieval Indian saints at the Hindi Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1947. b. 1916, Hyderabad, Sindh Province; d. 2002, New Delhi Lokesh Khodke Selected pages from Comic Series The Speaking Mountain , 2022-2023 With research inputs and materials from Asia Art Archive (AAA) Co-commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Samdani Art Foundation and AAA Khodke’s imaginative leaps into the archive and interest in storytelling is part of a cluster of works that explores different children’s art practices, highlighting local art teachers’ life-long work and institutional histories focused on children’s arts and education. Khodke shares selected pages from his ongoing fictional comic series conjuring, through the artist’s use of humor, a rich ground for exploring different artistic practices and dialogues across geographies. He entangles Hong Kong, Bhopal, and the landscape of the children’s literary world of comics from India in the 1990s with personal insights and episodes that pull in his own earliest memories of the art scene in his native city of Bhopal. The protagonist of the comic, a young boy from Bhopal, travels through time and space, meeting real and imagined characters. He meets artist Ha Bik Chuen in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, and also Nagraj and other popular characters from the comic worlds of India, Hong Kong, and America, traveling onward into the current moment. These encounters spark many ideas and questions in the young boy’s imagination. This comic series was developed from Khodke’s online artist-educator research residency at Asia Art Archive in 2021, where he was inspired by the photo contact sheets of children's artworks and exhibitions rigorously documented by the artist Ha Bik Chuen in Hong Kong in the 1990s. This visual research material led him to initiate conversations on comics, children, and art with artists Ronnie Wong Lai Keung and Professor Oscar Ho. He also met artist Vinay Sapre who taught and worked at Jawahar Bal Bhavan from the 1980s, teaching aeromodelling and art to children and young adults throughout his life. Engaging with the archival material and stitching his research with popular visual material like children's illustrated magazines, comics, films, news articles, Khodke connects many divergent threads, and plans to further develop the comic and continue his research on Bal Bhavans in India. Khodke has been making illustrations for children’s books and comics for almost two decades. As a practicing comic-book artist and educator in the visual arts, he co-founded Blue Jackal, a platform for creating and publishing visual narratives, comics, picture books and interactive tools and programs for learners of different ages. He is also co-founder and co-editor of Drawing Resistance , a Hindi/English zine reflecting on the current socio-political climate. b. 1979, Bhopal; lives and works in New Delhi Marzia Farhana with 270 young Bangladeshi students The Equilibrium Project , 2022-2023 Video of a multipart project and installation made in collaboration with 270 young students (classes 6, 7, and 9) from Jaago Foundation, Bangladesh Presentation realized with additional support from Unilever, and was commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art The Equilibrium Project began with Marzia Farhana conducting several online workshops with children engaged in Jaago Foundation learning programs living different parts of Bangladesh, including Dhaka, Habiganj, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Teknaf, Bandarban, and Gaibandha. The installation in the Dhaka iteration of ‘Very Small Feelings’ exhibition was a result of a collaborative process developed over several months, and it drew upon historical examples of artist-run pedagogical initiatives in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Reflecting on the figure of artist-educator, and interpreting the relationship between society, art-making and young children, she explored what engaged pedagogy may mean in resource-deprived contexts. Working with underprivileged and hard-to-reach children associated with Jaago, Farhana’s work questions as well as brings into focus aspects of innovative art practice to create a platform of emancipation and resistance for those who are outliers in society. This video documentation captures some aspects of the project as it was showcased in Dhaka Art Summit 2023. Farhana works with several media including painting, installation, and video. Her practice is time-and-space based, facilitating collaborations, participation and reinforcing the possibility of co-authorship on works of art that reinvent empathy and emancipation. The pedagogical turn of her artistic practice emphasizes fostering social and environmental justice and empowering marginalized vulnerable communities. b. 1985, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka and Richmond Matthew Krishanu Safari , 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the private collection and Jhaveri Contemporary Playground , 2020 Oil on canvas Courtesy of the private collection and Niru Ratnam Gallery Verandah (Girl and Boy), 2022 Oil on canvas Courtesy of the private collection and Niru Ratnam Gallery Presentation realized with the support of Jhaveri Contemporary While these paintings contain a sense of childlike innocence, they also speak to fraught power dynamics between white children and brown children and their parents. In Playground, the white bodies ascend over the brown ones on the see-saw— perhaps a metaphor for South Asia and other parts of the world as colonial playgrounds. In Safari , also set in Bangladesh, the two brown brothers are placed between an elephant in the distance and their towering white father in the foreground, equally alien to the landscape. Despondent, they seem unsure of who or what to aim their bows and arrows at. Krishanu’s painting practice employs shallow pictorial depth and backgrounds that often veer into abstraction, creating paintings that seem to occupy a liminal zone. His paintings exist somewhere between the precision of a photograph and something looser. He works from his imagination, which he sketches and maps out as preparatory drawings, from photographs given to him from people familiar to these scenes from the past, and from inspirations from the history of painting. This lack of specificity opens up a field “outside of time” and invites viewers to bring their own experience and readings into the work. The institution of Christian-missionary-led education links many present-day and former colonial contexts; reflecting on the indigenous knowledge and systems of producing, preserving and regenerating knowledge, via contemporary artists, scholars and practitioners' work is a noticeable part of Dhaka Art Summit and Very Small Feelings . b.1980, Bradford; lives and works in London Matthew Krishanu Crow (profile), 2018 Crow (Mumbai, green), 2019 Crow (Mumbai, light), 2019 Crow (turning), 2019 Crow (wings), 2019 Crow (Mumbai, purple), 2020 Crow (stance), 2021 oil on board Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Crows are ubiquitous in the South Asian landscape, understandably becoming iconic subjects in the mythology, art history, and literature of the region. Matthew Krishanu paints crows as singular figures which, like two-legged humans, also come together in groups when installed in museums and exhibition spaces, almost like groupings of relatives. These mischievous birds are inspired by the artist’s childhood growing up between the physical landscape of Bangladesh and the educational landscape of England, where Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, Ted Hughes’ crow, and other iconic trickster birds flock together as part of western cultural literacy. These crows flock to us from London, where the artist has been observing and painting this subject for the past eleven years. They are joined by other crows imagined by Joydeb and Ishaan Roaja and Murari Jha in Very Small Feelings. Krishanu’s painting practice employs shallow pictorial depth and backgrounds that often veer into abstraction, creating paintings that seem to occupy a liminal zone. His paintings exist somewhere between the precision of a photograph and something looser. He works from his imagination, which he sketches and maps out as preparatory drawings, from photographs given to him from people familiar to these scenes from the past, and from inspirations from the history of painting. This lack of specificity opens up a field “outside of time” and invites viewers to bring their own experience and readings into the work. b.1980, Bradford; lives and works in London Mong Mong Sho Songs of The Fishermen’s Children , 2022-2023 Ink on rice paper Collection: Samdani Art Foundation Co-commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation Childhood in Moheshkhali is strange. In many cases, children become child laborers to help their fathers and family members earn a living, losing their childhood in the process. They touch money before touching books. They live in conditions of which urban society can never dream. Their lives are intertwined with the fishermen’s boats and the island on which they live. Songs of the Fishermen’s Children depicts the lives of such children who work and live in Moheshkhali, an island in Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh. Born in a Rakhine family, an ethnic group found in Myanmar, South Bangladesh and India, Sho also spent his childhood on the coastal island of Moheshkhali. The sea determines the island people’s future professions. Some grow up to be fishermen, moneylenders, fishmongers, salt gators, tenders, brokers, laborers, boatmen, finding their destiny among hundreds of occupations around the sea. Mong Mong Sho became an artist, studied watercolor techniques in China, and currently makes art and teaches there. b.1989 Moheshkhali; lives and works in Dhaka and Kunming Murari Jha Returning to Earth, A kinder search for home , 2022-2023 Bronze, M-seal, granite, aluminum, wood, water, clay, and mirror Co-commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation Murari Jha stages a seen, felt, and absorbed landscape that we carry within us. Equally, it is an invitation to approach the space around us with an intuitive, symbolic, ecological, linguistic, and psychological understanding. For the artist, landscape and the idea of return become a performative and exploratory form. He developed this work while reflecting on the desperate return of the millions of migrant laborers who started their against-all-odds homeward journeys even at the cost of their lives during India’s first Covid lockdown. Thus, a return to earth is a kinder search for and knowing of home. Jha prompts us to insert our bodies into his scattered arrangement, replenishing the memory of the landscape of one’s growing up, and our relationships with the sun, moon, mountains, earth, trees, water, and animals. Jha’s installation accumulates observations, stories, personal and social associations with each element, colloquial phraseology and idioms used for describing a landscape, such as chanda mama (moon as uncle), billi massi (cat as aunty), samay ka pahad ban jana (an insurmountable sense of time as a huge mountain to cross), zameen ka jamm jaana (sedimentation of soil). Jha works in a range of mediums, including performance, sculpture, and painting. His work opens up aspects of the personal as political, the performativity of objects/body and the psychological processing of everyday occurrences and environments. b. 1988, Darbhanga; lives and works in New Delhi Neha Choksi and Rachelle Rojany Swing for friends (used in Faith in friction), 2017 Silicon rubber and stainless steel Samdani Art Foundation Collection In the spirit of their friendship, Neha Choksi and Rachelle Rojany’s Swing for friends… incorporates 12 swings in a closed circle— as a sacred space, a chora , a well for all to draw from, a drum circle hypnotizing us with its rhythm. It is a prop for harmonizing movement used in Choksi's film Faith in friction, 2017. The circle was inspired by thinking about the self as coming into being through community energy, cooperations and tensions. 12 seats were chosen for the 12 positions of a clock face, 12 months of the lunar and solar cycles, 12 sections of the fingers, the Mesopotamian counting system, and the ancient count of a dozen. The swing has been characterized by Choksi as a baroque kibbutz. This prop evokes and epitomizes the spirit of the many friendships and interpersonal vectors underlying and refreshing Choksi’s ambitious multi-channel work, Faith in friction . Faith in friction features the artist and her friends gathered at the construction site of an expansive and modernizing Jain ashram in India. The swing was installed in the raw concrete shell for the meditation and prayer hall. Even though there are 12 seats on the swing, Choksi always intended less than 12 participants, enjoying the idea of empty spaces waiting to be occupied. With Faith in friction , Choksi tests her conviction that, to learn to be oneself, one always needs others. Working across performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, Neha Choksi disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of all things— from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Embracing a confluence of disciplines, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural, and social contexts to revisit entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization. Trained as a sculptor, Rachelle Rojany has interests in philosophy, text-based arts, sound, and performance. In her work, she explores existential and ethical questions about one’s place in the world, relationships forged with the self and others, and the times and places one inhabits. Neha Choksi b. 1973, Belleville; lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai Rachelle Rojany b.1976, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) Raani’r uggo Khowab (A Queen’s Dream) , 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestries based on a Rohingya folk tale shared by Kosar Begum translated by Mohammed Rezuwan Collaborative curatorial support from Sadya Mizan Project realized with the support of IOM and the EMK Center, Bangladesh Participating artists: Roshida, Mobareka, Morijan, Shahnur, Dildar, Shonjida, Yasmin, Rokeya, Sobika, Nurnahar. Nearly a million Rohingya refugees are living in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh after having been violently driven out of Myanmar. While they cannot return to their homeland, the Rohingya are working hard to hold onto their stories and oral traditions through creative interventions by folklorists, artists, designers, and other creative practitioners. The Rohingya language is primarily spoken, without a standardized written script. Mohammed Rezuwan, a young Rohingya Folklorist (part of the Transnational Folklore Research Forum of Very Small Feelings ), spent seven months traveling the camps looking for Rohingya elders who themselves are the living repository of Rohingya oral folklore. Rezuwan spoke to 35 elders, making recordings of their oral retellings, which he later transcribed, translated, and collected into the first-ever English language book of Rohingya folktales, helped by his American collaborator and friend Alex Ebsary. More than just stories, folktales are used to teach morals and lessons to the next generation, many of whom were born in the camps. With support from Rohingya artists Enayet and Mayyu Khan, a group of ten Rohingya embroidery artisans rendered the story as a series of tapestries. Relevant for today, the story depicted in these tapestries is about a powerful queen who has a vivid dream about torrential rains following a period of drought. Everyone who drinks the rain lose their minds. When she wakes, the queen sends advisers to warn the people not to drink the rain. But no one listens, and everyone drinks and goes mad. In the end, the queen decides to end her suffering and isolation, joining her people in drinking the rain herself. According to Rezuwan, the moral of the story is that, if the majority of a people are wrongdoers, they have the power to force an entire nation into a disaster. Embroidery workshops at the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre provide an essential outlet for women artisans, who gather to share personal experiences that are then stitched into tapestries. The embroidered tapestries presented here are references to their resilience, and an effort to add joy to their life. Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty Belly of the Strange III , 2023 Immersive wood structure Commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation The Belly of the Strange is a transactional object/space for children and the child in you. It holds within it strange books from different geographies, both real and fictional, inviting you to add to the stories in your imaginations. Belly’s voluminous space with stage-like stepped access, is a poetic ascent to another register, to very small feelings. It becomes a place for daydreaming, a performative functional ground for multiple activities, exchanges and kinships with strangeness, strange forms, and ideas. In its first iteration of the Belly of the Strange at MACBA, Barcelona in an exhibition curated by the Raqs Media Collective, the belly took the form of a strange bulbous fruit softening the high-modern masculine space of the European gallery. The second iteration at the Dhaka Art Summit 2023 in the exhibition ‘Very Small Feelings’ was made of a bamboo skeleton and fleshed with paper mache. It responded to the carnivalesque energies of the summit with feminine form and a womb-like space that invited everyone within. Now, in its third iteration at KNMA, the Belly assumes the form of a giant toy awkwardly fitting within a tight space, creating a confusing sense of scale. One doesn’t know whether this is a large object or a diminutive space. Its whale-like interior invites you to sit in its warmth and glow, to tell and listen to stories and imagine worlds far and near. In doing so the work draws on the absurdities of transactional objects / spaces in cities that often bypass conventional narratives of capital to create logics of strange convivial encounters. Visitors are invited to enter, read aloud and project their voices from the gaping orifices of the installation. Different projects and references within Very Small Feelings exhibition find home and resonances inside the Belly. Such as the books in reference to Afrah Shafiq’s research and interactive game on Soviet Books translated in Indian languages, books in indigenous languages resulting from workshops led by Blaise Joseph and Atreyee Day, Amitav Ghosh’s Junglenama , Anpu Varkey’s Summers’ Children , among others This large commissioned work draws on Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty’s works on ‘transactional objects’ as the city settles, blurs and produces multiple trips and kicks through these transactional objects. Extension to shops, folding shops of street vendors, porting devices, resting apparatus, fixtures fixed on boundary walls that help occupy them, things used to claim space, orphaned furniture left for wanderers, etc. are all transactional objects. Gupte and Shetty trained as architects and urbanists. They jointly run Bard Studio, a multidisciplinary practice that traverses between architecture, art, and urban studies, and are founder members of the School of Environment and Architecture in Mumbai. Their research and practice sit at the intersection of experimental pedagogy, exploring different aspects of urban form and experience and building environments and objects inspired by functional everyday urban forms. Rupali Gupte b. 1974, Mumbai; lives and works in Mumbai Prasad Shetty, b. 1975, Mumbai; lives and works in Mumbai Sanjoy Chakraborty Shades of Flowers , 2022-2023 A participatory space based on 1950-70s children’s culture in Bangladesh Archival prints, canvas, tools Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Sanjoy Chakraborty sets up a participatory, tactile, color-coded and material-based provocation for children visiting DAS, inviting them to draw, sketch and paint. He imagines this space as a resting post in conversation with the rest of the exhibition. This invitation and intervention is based on his research on the historical formation of children’s pages in prominent newspapers in pre-liberation Bangladesh (East Pakistan), revealing their connections to the social and political situation of their time. Initiated by artists, writers and intellectuals, these children’s pages— Mukul Mahfil (Daily Azad), Khelaghor (Daily Sangbad) and Kochi Kachar Mela (Daily Ittefaq) —transformed into forms of organizations with their own focus on different activities for children over the course of several decades. This slow and everyday embedding of powerful cultural practices related to children brings to light the under-researched relationship between modernism, the new nation state, and young children as cultural citizens, and how artists and creative practitioners addressed this relationship. Drawing from his fieldwork, research, and interviews of practitioners who continue to lead these organizations, Chakraborty creates a participatory space for children to engage by drawing on a red surface, a symbol of unity in his artistic practice, giving a glimpse of the historical development of the cultural movement for children, focused on these three organizations, and the regular contributions of many iconic modernist painters, writers, and cultural figures who illustrated and conceptualized content for them. For the exhibition and its future iterations, his research developed deeper engagement into the work of each of these children-focused organizations in Bangladesh and their ideas related to the cultural citizenship of children. As an art historian, Chakraborty has a keen interest in finding new narratives of the history of Bangladesh in relation to art and its deeply rooted culture. He is also an artist who explores drawing, installation and performances derived from his research practice. b. 1984, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Simon Fujiwara Once Upon a Who? Installation with stop-animation, 2021 Duration: 5 minutes Who is la Femme Cubiste? (Female Panic!), 2022 Who's a Blooming Fool? (Icon Appropriation Anxiety), 2022 Pastel and charcoal on canvas Who is She? (Biological sex procreation), 2022 Who’s Who? (Gender Questions), 2022 Who’s Patriarchy? (Distressed Diagram), 2022 Gesso, acrylic, pencil, charcoal, pastel and acetate on wood panel Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper Who the Bær is a cartoon character created by the artist Simon Fujiwara taking inspiration from fairytales, fantasy literature, animation and theme park worlds. “Who”, as they are known, seems to have not yet developed a strong personality or instincts. They have no fixed identity, no gender, and no sexuality. Who does not even seem to have a clear design but is a being in the making, a self-creation. Who only knows that they are an image, and they seek to define themselves traversing a “Whoniverse” of images. Who the Bær’s world is a flat, online domain of pictures, yet one full of endless possibilities. Fujiwara created Who the Bær during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 as a “childlike, dada-esque response to the increasingly nonsense world of hyper-capitalist entertainment culture.” The artist elaborates that “Who is really a fairytale, in the end, one that asks ‘What if…?’ and allows us to imagine things we are not really allowed to imagine or question at the moment.” Who is la Femme Cubiste? (Female Panic!) and Who's Screaming at Who? (Eternal Influencer) are from Fujiwara's series of works recreating iconic artworks by famous, historically significant artists through the perspective of his cartoon figure Who the Bær. The former is painted in a style recalling the oeuvre of Spanish modernist painter Pablo Picasso, specifically his portraits of female models painted in a distinctly late cubist style. The depiction of Who the Bær draws on images of Picasso’s portraits of women, especially long-time companion Dora Maar. Despite the work being heavily stylized, Who’s characteristic features are clearly visible, namely their prominent pink tongue from which yellow liquid emanates in one form or another in almost all of Simon Fujiwara’s depictions of the cartoon character. Who's a Blooming Fool? (Icon Appropriation Anxiety ) is based on Vincent van Gogh’s series of sunflower still life paintings, an iconic recurring motif in the post-impressionist artist’s body of work. Closest to an iteration of the motif painted in 1888, Fujiwara’s work depicts a vase with a bouquet of sunflowers against a blue background. Who the Bær’s shape can be recognized in the depicted bouquet of flowers, with the cartoon figure’s characteristic enormously long pink tongue that circles the composition and seems to wrap around their own head. Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers have become one of the most popular images in the canon of Western art history. The paintings have been reproduced countless times in a large variety of media, ranging from books to consumer goods and merchandise. Who the Bær has been described by Fujiwara as lacking any form of concrete identity. Therefore, Who being integrated into images of existing works of art can be seen as part of the character’s ongoing search for identity. Who’s Patriarchy? (Distressed Diagram) depicts Who in an abstract style. The geometric lines may recall styles of expressionism or cubism, but also are reminiscent of statistical graphics and charts. The drawing is paired with a print on acetate, a diagram explaining the patriarchy’s reproduction cycle within society. Who is She? (Biological sex procreation), shows Who as a pregnant woman, rendered in a few expressive pencil strokes. The drawing is paired with an anatomical diagram printed on acetate, showing the development of a fetus. Who’s Who? (Gender Questions) presents Who in a few abstract broad strokes. Their facial expression seems to be perplexed or questioning and it is paired with a printed chart mapping the overlapping of various gender identities. Working across video, sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, Fujiwara’s practice is a personal exploration of human desire that underpins tourist attractions, historical icons, celebrities, ‘edutainment,’ and neo-capitalism. In this seductive yet fraught arena, his work reveals the paradox of our simultaneous quest for fantasy and authenticity in the culture we consume. b. 1982, London; lives and works in Berlin Susanta Mandal Odds and Ends of a Place called ‘Memari’ , 2022-2023 Performance installation with rotating stage, circuits, sensors, and motor. Duration: 6 – 8 minutes Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Acknowledgement Movement Programming: Himanshu Bablani Audio Editing: Anupama Srinivasan Voice Over: Sarbani Mandal Press the button to start the show. Settle into your seat and get ready to meet a string of imaginary characters from a place called ‘Memari’. The repertoire of the show consists of a magician, a tailor, a shopkeeper, a girl, a teenager, a cat, and a few unknown characters. Sometimes their gender identities are blurred. Follow the clues and feel free to take imaginary leaps. This theatrical experience unfolds on three distinct color-marked stages/scenes that are structured into two episodes. All invisible characters of the repertoire have their names marked with letters of the alphabet, and travel from one scene to another through spoken words. Sometimes the characters may not follow the described locations and, at times, appear to be glitches. These characters register themselves (or make their presence) slowly on the stage, with specific descriptions and conversations. Playing with the idea of memory and staging, or rather how memory stages itself, Susanta Mandal creates an elaborate assortment of characters that allows viewers to develop their own associations and references for each one. He maps and controls these different characters, their appearances, absences, and traces through fade-in and fade-outs, kinetic mechanisms and automated circuit programming. Inspired by the rawness of early technology of magic lantern and moving image making, Mandal constructs immersive interactive environments with spotlights and kinetic mechanisms. His works take on narrative and performative elements, echoing the tradition of vernacular storytelling in India. b. 1965, Kolkata; lives and works in New Delhi Satyajit Ray Two - A Film Fable/Parable of Two , 1964 Courtesy of the Academy Awards Film Archive Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project at the Academy Film Archive This short film shows an encounter between a child of a rich family and a street child, observed through the rich child's window. The film was made without dialogue and displays attempts of one-upmanship between the children in their display of their toys. This film was part of a trilogy commissioned by PBS (American public television) and, rather than accept the proposal to create a film in English set in Bengal, the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray decided to pay homage to the genre of silent cinema. Dealing with themes like loneliness, industrialization, materialism, war, inequality, and mankind’s thirst for power, this film, like many other works of Ray, could be read as an allegory for the Vietnam War, speaking to how the impoverished farmers of Vietnam put up a brave fight against America as a bullying superpower. Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker, widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, calligrapher, music composer, graphic designer, and film critic, and authored several short stories and novels, primarily aimed at children and adolescents. His style of storytelling relied on emotions and humanism, connecting India to the world in new and nuanced ways. b. 1921, Calcutta; d. 1992, Calcutta Thảo Nguyên Phan Tropical Siesta , 2017 Two channel video with sound; 13 minutes 41 seconds Courtesy of the artist Speedily painted images of students sleeping on their school benches quickly appear on two screens, emerging from a rural landscape in Vietnam. A text speaking of how the communist regime has placed agriculture at its economy’s center accompanies the scene. The script tells of how children have access to only one book History of the Kingdom of Tonkin (1650) by Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit missionary, who converted not just the religion of the Vietnamese people’s but also their relationship to their own language through his introduction of Romanized script. This work recalls a dark period during which many people were deported or executed— a history that was not written, the amnesia of a people to which the innocence of children responds. Nguyên is an artist who uses painting, installation, video, and performance to depict historical events, narrative traditions, and minor gestures that challenge received ideas and social conventions. Through literature, philosophy, and daily life, she observes ambiguous issues in social convention, history, and tradition. The artist is expanding her ‘theatrical fields,’ including what she calls performance gesture and moving images. Nguyên is also a member of the collective Art Labor, which explores cross-disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the Jrai indigenous community of the highlands of Vietnam. b.1987 Ho Chi Minh City; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Yasmin Jahan Nupur Home, 2022-2023 Participatory performance Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art with the support of Bagri Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Exhibit320 Home is a safe space for conversations around childhood and memories of places, landscapes, people, objects and stories that one deeply misses. Yasmin Jahan Nupur invites all DAS visitors to pause, rest, and acknowledge those lost, disappeared feelings, connecting with other visitors and strangers, listening to their expressions and stories and while sharing their own. As prompts to build these conversations, Nupur extends and choreographs certain gestures and intentions beyond her own body to the overall collective body of DAS visitors. Be the carrier and feel free to transfer them to other corners of the exhibition. Nupur hopes that this slowness and loose passing of ephemeral shared moments, instructions and knowledge will add to our collective re-learning of how to relate to others, as we all slowly learn how to be in public spaces after the pandemic isolation. You can also join the artist as she herself searches for the smells, trees, particular fruits and roads, people, and very small feelings that she associates with her childhood in her ancestral village home, sensations that she lost when she grew up and moved away. Over nine days, as this re-constructed landscape swells with collective yearning for particular foods, games, playtime, and favorite objects from childhood that have now disappeared, readings from Thakurmar Jhuli , and many other triggers, asking what we will make of it. Nupur works with sketches, installations, and performances. Her work explores human relationships from various perspectives, reflecting her belief in democratic rights regardless of social position. She explores social discrepancies such as those of women and migrants in South Asia, hoping to support increased understanding between peoples of different backgrounds. b. 1979, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka

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

ALL PROJECTS Experimenter Curator's Hub The Samdani Art Foundation supported Bangladeshi artists Munem Wasif, Mohammad Wahiduzzaman and Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty to travel to Kolkata to attend the Experimenter Curator’s Hub in July 2014. The Hub is a platform for exchange of thoughts, views & possibilities of collaborations between the curators, public and private organizations and various institutional frameworks that coexist in the art world. Several of the presenters at ECH were part of the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit jury and speakers programs. Adam Szymczyk was one of the speakers and his first trip to South Asia was his trip to the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit, which he mentioned in his talk.

ALL PROJECTS The River Remembers at Islamic Arts Biennale 2023 Jeddah Kamruzzaman Shadhin was commissioned to show his new project The River Remembers (2023), for the Islamic Arts Biennale 2023, curated by DAS 2023 artist Sumayya Vally. Samdani Art Foundation has supported the transportation of the project.

ALL PROJECTS Art Mediation Programme Workshop A BRIEF REVIEW OF THE PREPARATORY ART MEDIATION WORKSHOPS FOR DHAKA ART SUMMIT 2018 by Dr. Rachel Mader, Head of the Competence Centre for Art and Design in Public Space, HSLU in Lucerne, Switzerland Most, if not all of the participants of the workshop on art mediation in Dhaka were hearing this term for the first time. Their persistent questioning of what exactly the term art mediation meant, was therefore not only an expression of a deep interest in the subject, but proved to be a fruitful start to discussing how art mediation could be practiced in a context like the Dhaka Art Summit. The point of departure for our workshop wasn’t to explain or clarify what art mediation is, or should be - although we obviously intended to initiate a couple of discussions on what it could be. Our discussions were primarily based around insights into practical experiences on a variety of chosen tools already existing, tested and adopted during our first workshop on art mediation, implemented during the Kochi Muziris Biennale 2016. The intention of the tools developed were not to teach people about art, or specific art works, but to enable and foster each individual's perspective. This approach was not obvious to the participants at first, and took some time to communicate, but when we were concerned with trying to situate our attitude, which obviously is nurtured by a critique on traditional formats of art mediation (e.g. guided tours), the participants began to get more of an idea of what should (and could) be mediated. The participants came from very different professional backgrounds, which composed a multi-vocal set of ideas, and nourished the debate and activities in a most fruitful way. With a total of 25 participants, the group was rather big, but this made the discussions lively and every once in a while, a little bit wild. The enthusiasm about the idea of offering the Summit's visitors the possibility of engaging with the exhibited works in a more direct and individual way was overwhelming. Quite a few of the participants formulated proposals on how they could adopt art mediation strategies within their professional contexts. It was this kind of engagement, not at all limited to performing as an art mediator during the art summit, but re-appropriating the exchange for all different kinds of activities, which was an inspiring experience and an aspect of our time in Dhaka that I will include in future initiatives on art mediation. This series of workshops was collaboratively organised by Lena Eriksson (Lucerne), Ruxmini Choudhury (Dhaka), Rachel Mader (Lucerne). SKETCH ESSAY: DAS 2018 ART MEDIATION TRAINING WORKSHOP by Lena Eriksson, Lecturer, Lucerne School of Art and Design, and DAS 2018 Art Mediation Workshop Leader In September 2017, the Samdani Art Foundation placed an open call for Bangladeshi art enthusiasts (over 22 years old) to apply for the opportunity to participate in a unique art mediation programme. The idea of Art Mediation was very new to Bangladesh, but from a pool of 65 applicants, 25 art mediators were selected from a diversity of backgrounds, to be trained as art mediators by Dr. Rachel Mader and Lena Eriksson in a series of workshops between the 2 - 6 October 2017. The Art Mediators were selected on the basis of their interest in art and culture, availability, and commitment, for the duration of the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, rather than their academic background. Dr. Rachel Mader and Lena Eriksson arrived in Dhaka on 1 October 2017 and began their 5-day long intensive workshop on the 2 October 2017 in the Seminar Room of the National Gallery, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Below is an illustrated essay of their time in Dhaka, during, and outside of the workshops they led. On the first day, Rachel and I arrive half an hour late. The room has already been set up for our workshop. All the participants are waiting. On the second day we arrive on time, but most of the participants turn up late. On the third day, we agree that we will henceforth start with the programme exactly half an hour after its announcement – one way or another, a sort of punctuality. I have imported: 2kg potatoes, 900g pasta, 1.2kg cheese from the Swiss mountains, 8 medium onions, 3.6kg apples, 5 sticks of cinnamon, one can of pear syrup, 1 litre of cider, and 25 pinches of dried alpine flowers. On the first evening we all cook, Alpine Herders Macaroni. At least this is concrete. Rachel has imported: 25 fondue forks, 2 fondue pans and 2.5kg of dark chocolate. The fruit she buys from the dealer near the hotel. The artist and workshop-participant Tarana has succeeded in negotiating a good price for her – which Rachel says, is very tough. The chocolate fondue brings joy to everyone. Dhaka Art Summit expects about 35,000 visitors per day. I notice that many visit the exhibitions like they would a park. Only, instead of trees, bushes and flowers, they are looking at art. One can be as organized as possible, use all the foresight one has, plan everything to the last detail – but in the end, it is the traffic that dictates the agenda and the beat. Tarana reveals that, in the mornings, it takes her two hours to get to work. In the evenings, it can take twice as long for her to get home. In Bangladesh, ‘Art Mediation’ is not a common term. At night, merchants throw a tarpaulin over their booth and their goods, and tie them up together. I am amazed that this is adequate protections from theft. On the last day of our workshop, the seminar room is occupied, so we move into one of the vacant gallery spaces. The improvised setting makes communication more difficult. To sit on the floor is bad for the bones. Everything is strenuous, everything is more chaotic. Nonetheless, the discussions are animated. On the way back to the airport, our taxi travels along the railway line. I see people travelling on the roof of a train, and I ask myself why on earth they do that. I have so much more to understand about this country.

ALL PROJECTS Shoni Mongol Adda Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open-membership artist-led initiative Shoni Mongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Café, and which is walking distance from the DAS venue. Here, the collective presents a new question every day at DAS in a sign-based format for the audience to consider and debate in addas organised in the discussion area of this amoeba form. It also invites visitors to join them for addas at Komor Cafe on 8 February and 11 February when they will host artistic delegations from Nepal and Australia.

ALL PROJECTS B/DESH Curated by Deepak Ananth B/DESH is shorthand for Bangladesh, of course, but also, bidesh , the Bangla word for abroad, a foreign land, an extraterritorial elsewhere. Desh, on the other hand, designates a homeland, accompanied by a sense or semblance of a national identity, however notional or real. So the home and the world are conjoined and separated by the most tenuous of lexical and phonetic expedients: the slender slash differentiating desh and bidesh that could also be seen as a marker of everything that lies between them. And ‘in between-ness’ is, if anything, a perenially shifting ground, a provisional state that might itself be an image of that potential undifferentiation of identity and alterity, ‘self’ and ‘other’ symptomatic of the globalised present. To have a sense of rootedness and yet not be insular, to acknowledge the feeling of homelessness (the spiritual malaise par excellence of the modern condition) and find new ways of negotiating it in the face of the neutralisation of difference that is the cultural logic of globalisation - these are some of the burdens faced by those once relegated to the margins and now deemed to be ‘emerging’ on the world scene. The tragically fraught history of Bangladesh’s coming into being as a nation, the chronicle of political turmoil and violence that has marked its relatively short existence as an independent state, cannot but be salient in the consciousness of the country’s intellectuals and artists and in their attempts to make sense of the vicissitudes of the present. To be a witness to their times is for many of them an ethical stance. For artists this imperative is doubled by another, namely, the need to find the form and medium most appropriate to their vision of the reality in which they find themselves. For many years now documentary photography has proved to be particularly compelling for a range of practitioners in Bangladesh, and the subjects they have tended to focus upon would seem to demand such an approach. But often their eyes have been schooled in allegorical or conceptual ways of seeing, and questions of ‘objectivity’ that underlie the documentary stance are subtly callibrated to the degree of empathy or distance they bring to their approach, as in Shumon Ahmed’s ongoing project within the ship graveyard on the Chittagong coast, reputedly the largest in the world. For Gazi Nafis, on the other hand, the camera has been the instrument to capture intimate moments in the lives of a range of sexual minorities, in images that betoken an engaging complicity with these social outcasts. In contrast, the anthropological nature of some of the subjects explored by the Australian Bengali artist Omar Adnan Chowdhury (the juxtaposition of a Hindu and a Shia festival in old Dhaka, for example) in his large scale audio-visual installations becomes the occasion for a slow, immersive and contemplative sensory experience. For some artists working in media that are not lens-based, the fix of the real is less than imperious. The peculiar assortment of creaturely forms that people the paintings of Ronnie Ahmed, for example, are the denizens of a parallel world that is gleefully awry and somewhat hallucinatory all at the same time. The oneirism of his work couldn’t be further removed from the cool detachment that Ayesha Sultana brings to her pictorial representations of familiar urban spaces, their blank allure a façade for something verging on the uncanny. Another aspect of her work dispenses with representation altogether, the more to explore the poetics of graphic inscription and the material qualities of surface and texture. This interest in investigating the rudiments of form is shared by Rana Begum, who was born in Bangladesh but grew up in Britain. Her interest in the pristine geometry of sharply angled coloured planes (in paper or aluminium) and the ways in which these might become receptacles of light inform her sculptural practice ; her rigorous and yet sensuous abstraction hints at the subtle coalescence of the Islamic architectural ideal of emptiness as a numinous space and the pared-down unitary forms of Minimalist sculpture. The formal ‘syncretism’ of Begum’s work could be contrasted with the exercises in cultural translation and critique undertaken by the conceptual artist and writer Naeem Mohaiemen, who divides his time between Dhaka and New York. Working with photography and film, he has sought to recover and critically reframe certain key emblematic moments and events (both private and public) in the tragic history that led to independence and the creation of a sovereign state. As a writer and as an artist, Mohaiemen’s work has dwelt perceptively on the political, ideological and cultural implications of B/DESH and the complexities of its current trajectories. Artists Naeem Mohaiemen Rana Begum Omar Adnan Chowdhury Ronni Ahmed Shumon Ahmed

ALL PROJECTS Citizens of Time Curated by Veeranganakumari Solanki The future is yesterday’s tomorrow. The ephemeral elements of time are permanent frames that layer perceptions, and everything that one refers to is in context with a time frame that determines the existence of a moment. Whether it be seconds, minutes, hours, centuries or light years, change is an inherent factor of time; nothing can be preserved forever. There is a desire to hold time, to let time go, to want time to stay or to disappear. ‘Citizens of Time’ are the keepers of these universal borders of time. They explore the variables in time folders while realising the crucial existence of an alternative presence and engagement within their time vaults of space and works. The impermanence of time filters in-and-out of landscapes, glass jars, homes, objects and the mind’s perceptions. The contemporary perception of telling time has been transformed from its history of division through sundials, shadow clocks and light. ‘Citizens of Time’ are divided into four time pockets – the residue of time through natural elements, memory traps from spaces and personal environments, translated time maps of imagination and mindnarratives of distorted time. Each of these edited spans of created moments is layered with elements of the artist’s personal rendition of time. They exist as analogies of experience that differ from created utopias to documentations of timed reality. Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time” renders time from the evolution of the Big Bang Theory into the futuristic possibility of time travel and alternative realities. He further explains Einstein’s theory of time as the fourth dimension of our three-dimensional world. The artists of ‘Citizens of Time’ explore the minute details and texture which make up this fourth dimension. These are elements that build up relationships, societies, cities, countries and eventually the universe. Time goes beyond its metaphysical existence to translate into visual forms of a new aesthetic of time in fantasies, nostalgia and memories. These personal capsules of time plant themselves into a universe of subjective interpretations of history and the future. Time, in the form of natural elements, parallels global warming to an unknown land; and bottled time with notes of precise minutes and thoughts captured, converse with an artist’s rendition of personal notes in timeless frames of landscapes of a mountain and lake. The places and works, similar to the nature of time straddle between timelessness and the precision of moments. Taking time into personal spaces, the second pocket explores the location of the body and frozen time frames. Here one experiences a revision of working processes, frozen time and peeled memories from homes and histories. Time seeps in through wallpapers, refrigerators and windows. A visual distortion of created realties follows to change the tradition of the history of time. The third pocket sees time repeating itself in created environments which are subject to the viewer’s imagination. History layers itself with contemporary happenings and loops into renditions of the artists’ compositions. In the final section, there is a departure from the material into a distortion of the present, through the past in time frames of the mind. Here, the property of time and places are blurred to become the ownership of the mind’s soul and time returns back into the personal universe. These time deposits carry forward into memories as experienced time frames, which pulse into the past, history, experienced present and travelled future. Hemali Bhuta Hemali Bhuta (b. 1978) is an internationally recognised artist whose works are closely related to architectural elements. Her interventions in space research through ephemeral materials, time, into the history of sites, and her minimal approach using imitation, deception, impermanence and concealment are seen in ‘The Residual Diameter’. In this work, Bangladeshi muslin cloth is time-consumingly and painstakingly crafted into a wallpaper roll. Bhuta says, “It is a transformation that involves Recycle as a phenomenon… The manifestation enables one to measure time by mapping the history of itself. [Here, it is the] exclusivity of the weavers’ craft, as [opposed to] the mass production of the roll!” Remen Chopra Remen Chopra (b. 1980) combines drawing, photography, painting, sculpture and installation to create works that are visually as layered as their conceptual depth. Elements of Renaissance art and architecture, central to Chopra’s works, are further layered with references to historic time periods merging into contemporary ones, through composed collectives of her imagination, as seen in Lives Within Time If Time Lives Within It . Through the reference of time as a moral concept, where past, present and future merge, Chopra addresses “the New Renaissance”, while drawing strongly from elements of history. Kiran Subbaiah Kiran Subbaiah (b. 1971) includes object assemblages, site/context-specific texts, short stories, videos, and proposals for utilitarian objects in his work. He has been working with digital art / media since 1999 and has constantly questioned the use of objects and their presence, while placing himself as a protagonist in most of his works. The process of the existence of the required object and fictitious realities in his series or videos and in ‘Doing Without’ deliberately places the artist in situations beyond the practical. His works raise existential questions of the necessary presence of another with relationship / relating to procrastination, convenience and time. Baptist Coelho Baptist Coelho (b. 1977) is a multi-media artist whose projects merge personal research with collaborations across cultures, geographies and histories. ‘Gurgaon to Panamik, 2008-09’ (a part of the multi-disciplinary project, “You can’t afford to have emotions out there…”) focuses on the life of the soldier; not as a machine of war but as a man coping with daily complexities of conflict. A collection of bottles and corresponding handwritten notes from soldiers and locals Coelho encountered on his research trip act as time capsules. The works become a testament to existence and the effect on people’s lives due to the Siachen conflict, while also drawing together a strong connection between air, natural space and thoughts of common / ordinary people. Vibha Galhotra Vibha Galhotra (b. 1978) employs various media, from photography to installation and sculpture to create, conceptually and symbolically, experiential spaces. She has worked with dimensions of art, ecology, economy /economics, activism, surreal time and created utopias. ‘15 Days of May’ was realised within a time-frame of 15 days. With a mundane act of leaving a clean white rope outside her studio, the artist documented the effect of the polluted air of her city as displayed on the rope. The harsh alterations of reality through the subtle passage of time are reflected along with the artist’s primary concerns of global warming and its effect on ecology. Nandan Ghiya Nandan Ghiya, (b. 1980) in his practice builds upon his background in fashion, with antiques and new technology. Ghiya refers to the 21st century as one of emulation, competition and pressure. Here one is striving to address routine challenges and adversities, which the artist refers to as ‘Glitches”. Ghiya’s work reflects these ‘glitches” through visual interventions, distortions and transformations of old photographs, sculptures and objects. The set of two wooden figurines in ‘Peer- Pressure Glitch’ is a distortion of ideal beauty, in a state of limbo, evolution, transformation and transition, from old to new or from physical to digital. Sonia Jose Sonia Jose (b. 1982) relates to the environment and personal/social history in her work, and this stems from a need to preserve and acknowledge lived experience that surrounds routine life practices. The ‘Untitled’ (Rug) with the screenprint of hand-written text – So Much to Say – was inspired at a time when the artist was looking for a solution to calm her mind. Jose chose the words ‘so much to say’ as a meditative repetition and response to eclipse her needs, desire or compulsion to have anything to say at that time. Manjunath Kamath Manjunath Kamath (b. 1972), a collector of images, draws his initial inspiration from Indian Nathdwara paintings and collages, juxtaposing them with a living room, animals and displaced imagery. He gathers images from various sources to create narrative panoramas that weave in-and-out of an amalgamation of history, experience and imagination, layered with constructed myth, fantasy and evidence of overlapped time. In ‘Familiar Music from an Old Theatre’ he plays with time and space to create a magical realism that is both subjective and unique in experience. Riyas Komu Riyas Komu (b. 1971) focuses upon the political and cultural history of Kerala; the artist is a co-founder of the KochiMuziris Biennale. ‘The Last Wall’ is a narrative of a man from the artist’s neighbourhood, who lives within time frames of his mind, disconnected from the maze of a city. Working mainly at night, this man’s mind time is seen through his graffiti which is more text based than visual. By documenting this through video, Komu creates a twelve-minute experience of a visually distorted perception of time narrated through sound. Nandita Kumar Nandita Kumar (b.1981) works with a range of media including new-media, technology, video and painting to create immersive environments. Through her artistic research and interactive works, she explores the elemental process through which human beings construct meaning. ‘Birth of a Brainfly’ is a surreal narrative dealing with the process of a person’s individuation of a mental-scape. Similarly, ‘Tentacles of Dimensions’ is a journey of a brain that has unplugged its cultural programming and is indulging in the senses. Both these flights into self-constructed labyrinths of ego and creative utopias deny all construct of time. Ritesh Meshram Ritesh Meshram (b. 1975) is inspired by everyday objects which he explores through painting, sculpture, video, installed assemblage and kinetic work. The series of sculptures and prints are related to the detail of transitional spaces and time in a home, where the residue of time is seen through passages, window frames and photographs. This abstraction and fragility of time is carefully crafted in this series which the artist describes as a process against his temperament. Prajakta Potnis Prajakta Potnis (b. 1980) enquires into the seepage of time, life-span and aura around mundane objects from daily life, through photography, painting and site-specific installations. While ‘Still Life’ explores the process of degeneration, ‘Capsule’ explores the idea of freezing time and age. Potnis uses the refrigerator as a connotation of controlled temperature, which enables one to create a sterile enclosed space similar to the one in a mall or an airport. She likens these capsuled, sometimes transit spaces to zones that are not affected by the outside. They appear to be cloned, sterile centres within a city. Gigi Scaria Gigi Scaria (b. 1973) works with painting, sculpture, photography and film to explore his interest in issues of urban and economic development, issues surrounding migration and urban architecture. The delusion and anonymity of the geographical locations he uses, makes the spaces he works with universal. Further incorporating objects that cannot be attributed to an identifiable time or space, the artist places his works within the frame of timelessness. In ‘Camel and the Needle’, and ‘Clueless’, barren landscapes of salt and sand, void of habitation are mirages of recognition. They go beyond any inclination of recognition of time and place. The large photographs leave the viewer to collect traces of memories in this ‘Dust’, which is the title of the recent series of the artist’s works, to which these photographs belong. Kartik Sood Kartik Sood (b. 1986) creates photographs, paintings and new-media installations that share autobiographical, invented and dislocated memories of a story-teller. The works are patterns of memories through photographs and personal notes, which work themselves into an idea of a timeless setting of space. Sood’s images are constructed with the idea of time -- outside and inside. The artist describes the locations as “spaces of contemplation, where one often stops by to introspect. While the outer time goes on running at the usual speed, there are inner time transitions at such spaces. Is it really an illusion of time shifting, or does time really bend on our day to day lives?”

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 Art Mediation Programme 2023 Dhaka Art Summit The 2023 Art Mediation Programme, led by Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury and assisted by Swilin Haque, was a remarkable success. Artist, art educator, and art mediator Tarana Halim played a pivotal role in managing the programme, which brought together an impressive team of 123 skilled art mediators. With an audience exceeding half a million over the course of just nine days, the mediators expertly guided visitors through a vibrant and inclusive Dhaka Art Summit experience. Their efforts ensured that the diverse range of activities offered at the summit was accessible, engaging, and enriching for all attendees.

ALL PROJECTS One Hundred Thousand Small Tales Curated by Sharmini Pereira One Hundred Thousand Small Tales took its name from a poem by the Tamil poet Cheran, where he writes about how a "‘bridge, strengthened by its burden of a hundred thousand tales, collapses within a single tear.” This exhibition was imagined as an inventory of materials that bring about the bridge’s collapse. In so doing, the exhibition imagined how the burden of countless tales might be archived into an exhibition before a single tear - in this case, of a page from a history book - renders them forgotten. To this end, this exhibition addressed the artistic output that bore witness to the many narratives, episodes and accounts of what has taken place in Sri Lanka during it’s recent history. While the exhibition, like the bridge in Cheran’s poem, gained its strength by the weight of tales it carries, it simultaneously acknowledged how the burden of representation threatened to bring about it’s own downfall. Part archive and part inventory, One Hundred Thousand Small Tales aimed to provide a starting point for mapping out the various paths of art production in the country from the lead up to Sri Lanka’s independence - which took place in 1948 - to the present. This exhibition included several generations of artists and incorporated archival materials in addition to works on paper, paintings, photographs, film, sculpture and animation. Artists List: A. Mark Anoli Perera Arjuna Gunarathne Aubrey Collette Bandu Manamperi Cassie Machado Channa Daswatte, Asanga Welikala and Sanjana Hattotuwa Chandragupta Amarasinghe Chandraguptha Thenuwara G. Samvarthini Godwin Constantine Ieuan Weinman Jagath Weerasinghe Kannan Arunasalam Kingsley Gunatillake Kusal Gunasekara Laki Senanayake Laleen Jayamanne Lionel Wendt M. Vijitharan Manori Jayasinghe Muhanned Cader Nayanananda Wijayakulathilake Nilani Joseph Nillanthan Pradeep Thalawatte Ruhanie Perera S. H. Sarath Sarath Kumarasiri Stephen Champion Sujeewa Kumari Sumudu Athukorala, Sumedha Kelegama and Irushi Tennekoon Tilak Samarawickrema Tissa De Alwis Tissa Ranasinghe T. Krishnapriya T. Shanaathanan T. P. G. Amarajeewa W. J. G. Beling

ALL PROJECTS Beyond Borders May 2017 - June 2018 | Whitworth Art Gallery Yasmin Jahan Nupur Performance | A tailor is sewing the dress of Tipu Sultan 19 - 20 May 2018 Beyond borders, explored south asian textiles bringing together four artists working on issues around post-colonial identity, ruptured spaces, authenticity, displacement and belonging. Beyond Borders highlighted the changing landscape of the subcontinent in the 21st century, post independence and partition, across the Whitworth's main textile gallery. Each artist’s new work is debuted alongside textiles and/or objects from the Whitworth's textile collection. Pattern books and vibrant textiles are selected to responded and resonate with themes captured in the artist’s own creations. As part of this exhibition, there will be a special two-day performance by Bangladeshi artist, Yasmin Jahan Nupur. In this performance, Nupur used specially handwoven muslin-jamdani as a signifier of power and consumption embedded in the contested and violent history of the subcontinent. A highly revered, translucent cotton cloth from Bengal, muslin embellished with jamdani (woven pattern) has been celebrated over the centuries for its mesmerising allure and feather-light texture, often compared to moonlight or the morning dew. This fine cloth made from a labour-intensive process historically adorned the richest of rulers in the subcontinent and attracted a lucrative overseas trade. Growing up in Bangladesh Nupur was aware of how muslin had been celebrated across the world but equally, was deeply affected by the legacies and impact of British colonialism. “There are entire generations of Bengali men and women who have grown up with legendary stories of how the British cut off the thumbs of weavers so they could no longer produce muslin and were forced to buy British goods. This history constantly hurts me”. The exhibition was part of the New North and South, a network of eleven arts organisations from across the North of England and South Asia celebrating shared heritage across continents and develop artistic talent. Performance Still of A Tailor is sewing the dress of Tipu Sultan (2018). Photo courtesy: Ashley Van Dyck and Whitworth, the University of Manchester.