ALL PROJECTS Rehearsing The Witness: The Bhawal Court Case, A Talk By Zuleikha Chaudhari Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, 21 April 2017 The Bhawal court case was an extended pre-independence Indian court case that revolved around the identity of a sanyasi (or Hindu religious ascetic), claiming to be the second Kumar of Bhawal (the heir of one of the last large zamindari estates in Dhaka), who was presumed dead a decade earlier. The claim was contested by the British Court of Wards and by the widow of Ramendra Narayan Roy (the second Kumar of Bhawal) Bibhabati Devi. The case was in trial from 1930 – 1946. Over the course of sixteen years, the physical attributes, birthmarks, portraits and testimony were collated as forensic evidence to establish the claimant/sanyasi’s identity as being the Kumar. Hundreds of witnesses, including doctors, photographers, artists, prostitutes, peasants, revenue collectors, tenants, holy men, magistrates, handwriting experts, relatives and passers-‐by were deposed. The case went from the District Court in Dhaka to the High Court of Calcutta to the Privy Council in London, finally ending in 1946 with a victory for the plaintiff, who died a few days after the verdict. Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case uses this trial about a possible impostor to re-examine the enormous archive that the case produced, through performance as a means of problematising the notions of evidence, archive and identity. Both the domains of the law and theatre/acting frame larger questions that pertain to the production of truth and reality, assumptions of stable, consistent and believable identities and the construction of a credible narrative. The project explores the questions of law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. The talk at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute described the three-day performance at the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 which drew a relationship between re-enactment, (crime-scene) reconstruction and retrial; the complex tension between forensic evidence, the act of speculation/imagination and truth-finding and truth-making. . Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer. Her current research uses archival documents (texts and photographs) to develop theatrical performances as a way of thinking about the relationship between production of memory and the role of the archive and how this pertains to the retrieval and reliving of an event. The constructed narratives within the works looked at the relationship between personal lived experience and memories and larger historical events and narratives. These works use a combination of reportage, portraiture, documentary and fiction - the editing, re-interpretation and re-positioning of speculative ideas, opinions, beliefs and anecdotes towards the production of new narratives is central to these investigations about the relationship between history and theatre. Her ongoing research considers the structures and codes of performance as well the function and processes of the actor as reality and truth production. It investigates the tension between looking or watching and doing or acting. Her current projects include three court trials – The Bhawal Court Case (1930-46), The Trial of Bahadurshah Zafar (1858) and the India National Army Trials (1945-46) within the framework of law as performance; the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. Her works have been shown at performance festivals, galleries and exhibitions in United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Vienna, South Africa, South Korea, China, Japan, The Netherlands, Pakistan and India.

ALL PROJECTS Film Programme Curated by Shanay Jhaveri Image: Ayisha Abraham, I Saw A God Dance, India, 2011, video still, 19 minutes, courtesy the artist, ©Ayisha Abraham Passages Shanay Jhaveri Nirad C. Chaudhuri was born in 1897 in the small town of Kishoreganj in the district of Mymensing, now a part of Bangladesh. A tiny and frail man, standing at five feet and weighing just about 43 kilograms, Chaudhuri was a writer and scholar, who took himself and his experience of life as his primary subject. Chaudhuri died in 1999 three months before his 102nd birthday. He published his first book The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian in 1951 at almost precisely the halfway point of his life. Chaudhuri witnessed a flourishing empire, its decline, the birth of a ‘new’ modern nation, its initial socialist incarnation and then its eventual transition into a capitalist behemoth. Very productive, he penned several polemical books, and moved to Oxford in 1970 and never returned to India. He was 57 years old when he made that journey, one that he had prepared for his entire life. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is a ground-zero account, apparent almost from the very first pages, of how an ordinary citizen of India interfaced with the British Empire, physically, emotionally, as well as intellectually. Chaudhuri, when writing the book, was literally the unknown man of his title, living modestly in Delhi, writing scripts for All India Radio. What makes the book so distinctive is that Chaudhuri wrote with no literary model or precedent. The life of the common Indian, unacknowledged in any sphere, had not until the middle of the twentieth century been scripted on a page. Not being born to privilege, or granted its advantages, Chaudhuri assembled his knowledge of all things European at Calcutta’s Imperial College and by purchasing books at tremendous personal cost. Committed to cultivating his intellect, Chaudhuri consciously shed certain traits and habits. For instance, once he began to live in Delhi he gave up writing in Bengali (it is completely absent from The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian ) and, for the first time in his life, started wearing Western clothes and eating non-Indian food. Chaudhuri’s book leads with a dedication to the British Empire, which occasioned much controversy on publication, but he was no apologist for the British, frustrated as he was by their resistance to Westernised Indians. On the other hand, he shared with the British little enthusiasm for nationalist leaders and Indian nationalism. His views on India were often unpleasant, and at times unjustified. Clearly, Chaudhuri was not writing for the fallen Empire, nor was he addressing the new nation: neither he nor his prose fell into a particular political or national regime. It would seem that Chaudhuri is a fitful example of Edward Said’s assertion of “gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise… new alignments are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism.”1 1Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , New York: Random House, 1993, xxiv-xxv The 1972 documentary by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization commissioned by BBC, vividly and unapologetically captures Chaudhuri in England, living out his western affectations. The film is a captivating portrayal of a postcolonial intellectual and forms the primary point of orientation for my film programme Passages for the 3rd Edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, which will play across two spaces in the Shilpakala Academy. Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization will show on the hour every hour in an independent ancillary space to the Academy’s auditorium where rest of the programme, organised into thematic group screenings will be projected at scheduled times. The thematic screenings build off concerns that come to bear in Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization. The most direct association can be made to those films in the programme that preoccupy themselves with the lives of individuals who have lived between various geographical contexts, and like Chaudhuri “challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity.” These include Ayisha Abraham’s I Saw A God Dance (2011) about the self exoticizing, transracial gay dancer Ram Gopal who popularised Indian classical dance in the West during early half of the twentieth century, an extract from Leslie Thornton’s The Great Invisible (ongoing) which focuses on Isaballe Eberhardt, a Victorian woman who dressed up as a man to travel freely in North Africa during the late nineteenth century, or Aykan Safoğlu’s Off White Tulips (2013) a semi personalised account of the queer American writer James Baldwin’s time in Istanbul in the 1960’s. The trips made by the filmmakers themselves are also integrated, as in Anita Fernandez’s Un Balcon En Afrique (1980) where Fernandez is seen living in a tree house somewhere in Bissau, observing the city from above, but not physically interacting with it and conversely Narcisa Hirsch’s dreamlike Patagonia (1976) that centers itself on a corporeal engagement with the plains and mountains of Patagonia. Alongside, these films is Mati Diop’s A Thousand Sun’s (2013) set in contemporary Dakar, which follows the cattle herder Magaye Niang who was the star of one of the most iconic films of African cinema Touki- Bouki (1973) made by Djibril Diop Mambety, who happens to be Mati Diop’s uncle. In Touki-Bouki Niang along with his then companion Mory conspired to find ways to migrate to France, but A Thousand Sun’s finds them 40 years later still in Dakar, no closer to Paris. The film is a heartbreaking reflection on the notion of self-exile and failed aspirations. Djibril Diop Mamberty himself makes an appearance in ‘Passages’ in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s short filmic portrait Grandma’s Grammar (1996) in which the legendary filmmaker ruminates on filmmaking and the potential the cinematic holds in telling stories of an emotional and affective nature. The subjective and intimate condition of being in exile, and the complexity in expressing these circumstances is further explored in Bouchra Khalili’s Chapter 1: Mother Tongues (2012) from her Speeches Series in which Khalili collaborated with five exiled people based in Paris and its outskirts, inviting them to translate, memorise, and relay fragments of texts from political thought and contemporary culture written by Malcom X, Abdelkrim El Khattabi, Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Mahmoud Darwish. The film programme seeks to move beyond a literal understanding and consideration of travel - one that might focus exclusively on, say, works made by traveling artists - and consequently devotes a section to those films that relate the journeys made by objects across differing contexts and scenarios. It pairs Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s Statues Also Die (1953) that reflects on African tribal objects that have been gathered by ethnographic museums in the West, with Bahman Kiarostami’s The Treasure Cave (2009) where the story of the The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran and its comprehensive collection of modern western art is told. Yto Barrada’s False Start (2015) is an observation on Moroccan fossils and the counterfeiting industry that has sprung up around them, while Lois Patiño’s hallucinatory Night Without Distance (2015) is a portrait of border smuggling between Portugal and Galicia. Objects like LP covers of jazz, blues and salsa in Kader Attia’s Silence Injuries (2013), the pieces of fabrics that Jodie Mack’s delightful animates in her films, kitschy dinnerwear sets in Ana Vaz’s Occidente (2014), a roll of film itself in Jennifer Reeves Landfill 16 (2011) or the collections of objects gathered by artists in their homes or studios as witnessed in Ben Rivers Things (2014) Narcisa Hirsch’s Taller (Workshop) (1975), and Kohei Ando My Collections (1988) are regarded as having expressive potential, and able to convey particular cultural and personal histories. A broader inquiry into other kinds of voyages, is part of the programmes itinerary, and while some of the aforementioned films recount literal acts of travel across territories by people and objects, it also makes room for work like Lisl Ponger’s Phantom Foreign Vienna (2004) in which Ponger does not leave Vienna, but films over seventy different cultures and nations, simply by visiting different neighborhoods in the city. In Ponger’s film Vienna becomes ‘global’, so to speak. She is constructing her own world map, reinforcing that map making itself is an ideological act, something which is further underscored by Anna Bella Geiger in her Elementary Maps No. 3 (1976), where Geiger dwells on the shifting cartographic lines that depict Latin America, and the numerous stereotypes and myths that are projected onto it. Place as an abstraction, the way it resides in memory, but also the more phenomenological and emotional experience of geography is a distinct strand of the programme, most forcibly felt in Claudio Caldini’s pulsating Vadi Samvadi (1981), Sylvia Schedelbauer’s overwhelming Sea of Vapors (2014), Ashim Ahluwalia’s subtle Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) and Alexandre Larose’s mesmerizing Brouillard – Passage # 15 (2014) in which a single unedited roll of 35mm is exposed 39 times as the filmmaker walks along the same forest path to a water body. Landscapes themselves hold emotions, those particularly that are scarred by violence, and this is suggested in a cluster of films that comprises Mani Kaul’s rarely seen but stunning film on Kashmir Before My Eyes (1989), Soon Mi Yoo’s Dangerous Supplement (2005) assembled from found footage shot by American soldiers during the Korean war, Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series # 1 (2013) in which anonymous people are pointing to landscapes across Vietnam, Lamia Joreige’s Untitled: 1997-2003 (1997 - 2003) filmed in Beirut after the Lebanese war officially ended and Basma Alsharif’s Deep Sleep (2014) that alludes to the situation in Gaza, but by filming ancient ruins in Athens and Malta. The trauma, terror, fear, discomfort and threat that lurks in urban cities like Bangkok and Luanda is compellingly communicated in Taiki Sakpisit’s A Ripe Volcano (2011) and Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady (2014) respectively. There is also the unknown, the landscapes of outer space in Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts (2014), and of future Vietnam submerged underwater in Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Minh Quy Tru’o’ng’s Mars in the Well (2014). As is evident, this film programme is committed to exploring certain colonial and postcolonial conditions – belonging, difference, exile, displacement - that are part of the regions history and present day reality, but with a resolutely transnational perspective. It consciously eschews a regional focus, and presents films from across the world, hoping to manifest as an expansive constellation of shared affinities and empathies, but one where each work still retains it own specificity. Perhaps, ‘Passages’ itself can be regarded as a veritable travelogue, snippets and fragments, of images and sounds, gathered together, to evoke, provoke and trigger emotional responses and memories, and by doing so initiate a set of reflections as to why, when and how do we travel? The experience of any place, here, there, elsewhere, is never static or fixed. It is informed and charged by our interior state of being, by a brew of reminiscences and past resonances that constantly shift, oscillate, and change, as we keep moving. Claude Lévi-Strauss has written in his masterpiece Tristes Tropiques: “the accident of travel often produces ambiguities such as these. Because I spent my first weeks on United States soil in Puerto Rico, I was in future able to find America in Spain. Just, as several years later, through visiting my first English University with a campus surrounded by Neo-Gothic buildings at Dacca in Western Bengal, I now look upon Oxford as a kind of India that has succeeded in controlling the mud, the mildew and the ever encroaching vegetation.”2 2Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Penguin, 1974, 35. Maybe, like Lévi-Strauss, Chaudhuri found Dhaka in Oxford? Will we find Oxford in Dhaka? I - I Saw A God Dance , Ayisha Abraham, India, 2011, 19 minutes - Off White Tulips , Aykan Safoğlu, Turkey, 2013, 24 minutes - The Great Invisible (Excerpt) , Leslie Thornton, United States of America, ongoing, 20 minutes Total Running Time: 63 minutes II - Mapas Elementares No. 3 (Elementary Maps No. 3) , Anna Bella Geiger, Brazil, 1976, 10 minutes - Speeches: Chapter 1 - Mother Tongues , Bouchra Khalili, France, 2012, 23 minutes - Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns), Mati Diop, Senegal/France, 2013, 45 minutes Total Running Time: 78 minutes III - Un Balcon En Afrique , Anita Fernandez, Guinea-Bissau, 1980, 17 minutes - Patagonia , Narcisa Hirsch, Argentina, 1970, 10 minutes - Phantom Foreign Vienna , Lisl Ponger, Austria, 1991-2004, 27 minutes Total Running Time: 54 minutes IV - Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) , Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, France, 1952-53, 30 minutes - The Treasure Cave , Bahman Kiarostami, Iran, 2009, 43 minutes Total Running Time: 73 minutes V - La Grammaire De Ma Granďmère (Grandma’s Grammar) , Jean Pierre Bekolo, Cameroon, 1996, 9 minutes - Silence’s Injuries , Kader Attia, Germany, 2014, 13 minutes - Occidente , Ana Vaz, France/Portugal, 2014, 15 minutes - Faux Départ (False Start) , Yto Barrada, Morocco, 2015, 23 minutes - Noite Sem Distância (Night Without Distance) , Lois Patiños, Portugal, 2015, 23 minutes Total Running Time: 83 minutes VI - Persian Pickles , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2012, 3 minutes - My Collections , Kohei Ando, Japan, 1988, 10 minutes - Blanket Statement # 1 - Home is Where the Heart Is , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2012, 3 minutes - Taller (Workshop) , Narcisa Hirsch, Argentina, 1975, 11 minutes - Razzle Dazzle , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2014, 5 minutes - Things , Ben Rivers, United Kingdom, 2014, 20 minutes - Undertone Overture , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2013, 10 minutes Total Running Time: 61 minutes VII - Before My Eyes , Mani Kaul, India, 1989, 26 minutes - Landscape Series # 1 , Nguyen Trinh Thi, Vietnam, 2013, 5 minutes - Dangerous Supplement , Soon-Mi Yoo, South Korea/United States of America, 2005, 14 minutes - Deep Sleep , Basma Alsharif, Greece/Malta/ Palestinian Territory, 2014, 12 minutes - Untitled 1997 -2003 , Lamia Joreige, Lebanon, 1997-2003, 8 minutes Total Running Time: 65 minutes VIII - A Ripe Volcano , Taiki Sakpisit, Thailand, 2011, 15 minutes - Concrete Affection , Zopo Lady – Kiluanji Kia Hende, Angola, 2014, 12 minutes - Afronauts , Frances Bodomo, United States of America, 2014, 13 minutes - Sao Hoa Noi Day Gieng (Mars in the Well) , Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Truong Minh Quy, Vietnam, 2014, 19 minutes Total Running Time: 59 minutes IX - Vadi Samvadi , Claudio Caldini, Argentina, 1981, 6 minutes - Brouillard - Passage # 15 , Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2014, 10 minutes - Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) , Ashim Ahluwalia and Akbar Padamsee, India, 2016, 15 minutes - Landfill 16 , Jennifer Reeves, United States of America, 2011, 9 minutes - Meer der Dünste (Sea of Vapors) , Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany, 2014, 15 minutes Total Running Time: 55 minutes

ALL PROJECTS A BEAST, A GOD, AND A LINE | TS1 YANGON CURATED BY COSMIN COSTINAS 6-24 JUNE 2018 | TS1, YANGON Dhaka Art Summit 2018 exhibition, A beast, a god, and a line travelled to TS1 in Yangon for its third iteration, featuring many works commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation as part of the exhibition's initial edition during DAS 2018. This exhibition was organised by the Samdani Art Foundation in collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Installation image of A beast, a god, and a line at TS1, Yangon. Courtesy of TS1. Photo credit: Pyinsa Rasa.

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

ALL PROJECTS Charupith Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Many processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change in society yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country. This is not a generations old tradition. It is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Close to 10,000 young students have graduated from Charupith’s independent school of fine arts. This series of masks was created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Charupith lead a mask-making workshops for Dhaka school children on the children’s days of DAS.

ALL PROJECTS On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention Co-Curated by Diana Campbell with Sean Anderson and Nurur Khan and Assistant Curator Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury Observing the interplay and occasional confrontation inherent amongarchitectural spaces within an emergent nation-state, seventeen artists/collaboratives respond to the built and unbuilt legacy of the groundbreaking Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam (1923–2012). Active in politics because of his own conviction that ‘it was the most architectural thing he could do’, Islam humbly and uncompromisingly forged an architectural movement in what was East Pakistan as part of a broader claim toward decolonial consciousness in the 1950s leading to the country’s independence in 1971. His buildings and ideas influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects working today and subsequently international figures. Working across photography, painting, sculpture, performance, sound, and film, the artists in the exhibition present work that at once negotiates and builds worlds that are borne from the local environmental and cultural climate of Bangladesh. For Islam as well as these artists, architecture and art are conceived as benefiting all who make up the lands of any nation, no matter their origin, without the boundaries of class or caste. On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention Co-Curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt with Sean Anderson and Nurur Khan and Assistant Curator Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury If the inception of the monument connoted manifestations of power, how do histories of collective agency, that which builds and/or questions the monumental, begin to be made visible? Architecture, in its capacity to embody the simultaneous recording of historical narratives in addition to marking action across time and space, extends how bodies modify, represent and experience the environment. Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam, born a generation prior to the partitioning of the Indian sub-continent and at work during the 1952 Language Movement and the 1971 Liberation War, was alarmed to witness attempts to transform the territory of his birth from a communal ecology grounded in culture to an alienated society in which interdependence was reduced. He deployed architecture and the assembly of physical and institutional structures as a fortress against myopic singular views of Nationhood and citizenship. While Islam believed in the strength of a Bengali identity, he also recognised how modernism as an ideology and tool could be deployed to extend the country’s influence beyond the region. Bangladesh, according to Muzharul Islam, should be conceived as modern from the beginning. In a striking departure from his predecessors, Islam’s prolific works throughout the country ensured that the pursuit of a Bangladesh-born architecture was as much concerned with signifying the multiple worlds in which the individual and society functioned while also locating oneself, a calculation of value built from within and not externally construed. Islam harnessed the diachronic histories of the built environment in Bangladesh as a means to reject proscriptive views of Bengal rooted in vernaculars. He instead refocussed how his collaborators, workers, students, and leading architects of his time including Louis I. Kahn and Stanley Tigerman could witness a Bengal of 2,000 years ago that was building large scale cities and monuments in brick as a means imagine the future of a country that did not yet exist. Muzharul Islam’s practice and ideology influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects whose work has been increasingly visible internationally over the last five years. However, until recently, there has been little critical scholarly research in English about this architect who tirelessly and uncompromisingly fought to construct a new social order in cooperation with communities and partners of the land. Muzharul Islam’s conception of modernity in Bangladesh was conceived as an extension of its lands while also ensuring a way of life that was accessible to and responsive of an international community of architects, designers and artists. The production of a modern architecture in Bangladesh and more broadly, in South and Southeast Asia, expressed the potential of space with a materiality that was fluid in meaning and nature. While the introduction of concrete and cement in the region at the beginning of the 20th century promised the rise of new industrial techniques and forms, the use of brick in Bangladesh allowed for a return to the ground, to the unobstructed lands occupied for millennia by many different peoples. How brick might be conceived within modernist paradigms that privileged the multiple industries related to concrete, was crucial for an emergent nation attempting to assert its own visual and spatial identity. With an almost ontological connectivity to building, to histories in and out of time, brick remains an essential component that transcends multiple scales and contexts. Muzharul Islam’s brick architecture invests in tectonics that reconfigured how surfaces might be understood both as symbol and method. One may regard Islam’s drawings and buildings as a structuring of structures. For the architect, and the artists presented in this exhibition, contrasting (im-)materialities allow for the mutability of meaning even among precise configurations of settings. One may be able to observe how Muzharul Islam, as both an architect and an activist, revealed how communities and cultures could serve as agents in the imagining of new institutions. The conceit of the exhibition’s title reveals a paradox found within the reception of modern architecture in Bangladesh. On one hand, surfaces are both agents of and metaphors for what contains us. Buildings can be surfaces. And surfaces may embody how buildings are designed and built. Informing our visual and haptic faculties, surface is also that which collapses the negotiable nature of built space. Surfaces are a productive in-between, neither here nor there. In architecture, we are at once enmeshed among assemblies of surfaces that may have been ‘designed’ or ‘chosen’ while they are also subject to entropy, to the passage of time. By extension, the collaborative efforts for much of how Muzharul Islam’s projects transpired also allows for a questioning of labour; he built with and for the people of Bangladesh, refusing to inscribe himself as the ‘genius creator.’ Intention, likewise, is tied to internal and external processes that may broaden one’s understanding of affect. The invisible may subsequently become an index of strategies for making. Found at the horizon of the known, or perhaps at the threshold of building as object and form, intention remains ever-present, pointing a way forward, a movement toward a fragile yet more complete notion of self-knowledge. By surfacing intention, we are attempting to suggest how Muzharul Islam revealed subjectivities among his built and unbuilt projects. Consequently, the prompt for each of the artists allowed for expansive readings that are rooted in Bangladesh but also relevant to other local contexts such as Manila, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, among others. Each of the artists brought together for this exhibition use process, materiality and form to disassemble the boundaries that have long defined self and other. Conventional dialectics embedded within notions of gender and context are also questioned. In our discussions with each of the artists, how surface in all of its manifestations came to inform their own conception of Islam’s architecture was apparent. Surface was imagined as a modern agent for thinking through and responding to alternative spatial paradigms. Yet, we remained steadfast that such diverse perspectives resonate with how and why the (modern) architecture of Bangladesh might be reconceived through projection, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing and painting. What are the residues of intention? By circulating through this exhibition one participates in a journey that reveals elements of Muzharul Islam’s ideology that cannot be read by looking at an architectural plan or model. Fingerprints carry the material traces of a day’s activities and are unintended marks of our presence in a space. One of the first works visitors encounter when entering the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is an immersive installation on the winding central staircase of the venue choreographically built up by Rana Begum. Fingerprints of Bangladeshi collaborators of DAS come together to form a pattern of collectivity, a monument to democracy, speaking to what the hands of the people can achieve together, while maintaining the individuality of each person through the unique markings and spirals making up each fingerprint. If you look closely, similar traces of individual makers can be found on the terracotta screens and bricks of Muzharul Islam’s art school, Charukala, now formally known as the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (designed 1953–55). Similarly, works by Ayesha Sultana, Maria Taniguchi, and Prabhavathi Meppayil measure the markings of making that build up and transform over time through processes of accumulation, oxidation, and entropy. As we pass Begum’s installation and enter Gallery One, we become enveloped in another spiralling environment of iron rebar growing from what appears to be two stairs ripped out of the central staircase of Muzharul Islam’s School of Fine Art. The climb up and down this staircase in addition to the hidden (and often forgotten) emotions from those daily journeys are part of what makes up the art history of Bangladesh, inspiring Monika Sosnowska to reimagine this element of Muzharul Islam’s architecture in a seemingly displaced sculptural form. Hajra Waheed’s video The Spiral (2019) draws us into another reading of the spiral, taking this catalytic geometry as a starting point to reflect on processes of upheaval in human experience. The video is a meditation on undefeated despair and the possibilities for radical hope that Islam fostered in his practice as Bangladesh fought for its independence. The spiral staircase in Muzharul Islam’s Charulaka winds around a column, a pivotal support structure bearing silent witness to the generations of movement around it. Tanya Goel has wrapped the pillars of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy’s South Plaza with Bangla resistance poems that Muzharul Islam and his peers engaged with at the dawn of Bangladesh’s existence. These texts and their florid Bangla forms painted in textured brick dust unfold as visitors circulate around these co-dependent structures which float free from obstructing walls for the first time in DAS’s exhibition history. Muzharul Islam designed his buildings with the hope that they would provide culturally grounded upward mobility for all the people passing through them in their own pursuits of knowledge. Movement is key to the works by Aditya Novali, Shezad Dawood, and Dayanita Singh in this exhibition. Novali created rotatable paintings inspired by the situated modernism of Muzharul Islam and his Indonesian contemporary, Y. B. Mangunwijaya. These paintings change form throughout the course of the show, speaking to how influence moves and shapes architecture across space and time outside of nationalist frameworks. Drawing on the futuristic geometry of Muzharul Islam’s drawings, Dawood’s adaptable ‘stage set’ functions somewhere between architecture and tapestry. For a number of years, Dawood has been developing a notion of ‘paintings without painting’, that are created through the collaging and sewing of different textile elements, some incorporating Bengali kantha techniques. These works, inspired by Islam’s plans for the University of Chittagong (1968–71), function as hangings and room dividers which envelop visitors and connect to a video that documents a dance performance realized in collaboration with choreographer Adrienne Hart, composer Patten, costume designer Priya Ahluwalia and Dawood. Dayanita Singh’s ‘Museum of Shedding’ takes the elitist form of the museum off its metaphorical pedestal and puts it in the hands of the people, where they too can become the curators, adjusting the sequence and display of the individual images within it. Institutions are dynamic mechanisms for the making of society. Like Islam and his emphasis on change from within, Dayanita’s Museums are open structures, frameworks for the making and reception of multiple meanings and audiences. While movement was crucial to Muzharul Islam, so was standing still, a necessary state of being to learn from nature and its transformations across time. The open plan of most of Muzharul Islam’s university and educational buildings speaks to how he wanted students and others alike not only to learn about art and culture within the classroom, but also from the activities teeming beyond the windows and across the roofs, verandahs, and ponds hosting other components of student life. The National Library in Dhaka has one artwork inside, a monumental mural of a jungle, and Lucas Arruda’s exquisite jungle paintings speak to a kind of knowledge that cannot be taught from books. They are embodied and yet distant; seductive yet menacing. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film, shot in Chaukala, looks at the spiritual interplay between humans and nonhumans and the kind of interconnected ecology that Muzharul Islam tried to foster in his work in Dhaka in the 1950s, which has ongoing lessons for other parts of the world today. The Otolith Group’s film O Horizon grounds the spirit of Dhaka’s art school in its predecessor Santiniketan in West Bengal, speaking to the wisdom its founders and architects tried to glean from its surrounding structures and forests. While the works described thus far draw inspiration from Muzharul Islam’s built spaces, many of these spaces no longer carry the architect’s intentions due to bureaucracy, degradation or ideas of modernisation that implemented elements such as air conditioners and false ceilings, obscuring the quiet majesty of his spaces. The invention of blueprints, aspects of which are used today in contemporary architectural practice, carry the scores of intentions, of what was meant to come but might never appear or what may have ceased to be. Muzharul Islam and Stanley Tigerman spent nearly ten years developing five polytechnic institutes across the country, including detailed studies into different microclimates of Bangladesh, which were never realized beyond visionary drawings and blue-prints from 1965–71. Marlon de Azambuja awakens Dhaka’s multiplicity of densities at all scales in an installation inspired by the ‘bones and organs of the city’, shifting how we consider, deploy, and imagine the clamps, bricks and tools that both Muzharul Islam and architects today imagine and construct the urban environments that contain us. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh’s cyanotype prints of Muzharul Islam’s poorly preserved Central Library at Dhaka University employ conventional architectural representational methods, such as the plan and elevation, and function between the precise formalism of a blueprint and the intuitive nature of drawing. Haroon Mirza’s animated scores of light and sound derived from Muzharul Islam’s drawings and blue-prints for Chittagong University bring to life an architectural vision for sites that would train Bangladeshis (the East Pakistanis) to develop their own destiny (even if ironically many of these projects were funded by the World Bank). Sometimes it is not possible to think or operate in a free and radical way with radical transparency, and it is necessary to remain invisible, emerging when the time is right. William Forsythe’s work, A Volume within which it is not Possible for Certain Classes of Action to Arise (2015) locates the need to find new ways of navigating spaces that constrict freedom, akin to the kinds of social spaces that Muzharul Islam tried to create within his lifetime. If previous (Western) modernist paradigms for truth-seeking were in part coalesced in and around solutions, to finality, then this exhibition attempts to reverse course, to allow for an opening, even if brief, to the possibilities afforded by architectures that may not yet be visible. These are architectures of becoming. For this exhibition, inasmuch as for the architecture of Muzharul Islam, surfacing is thus an active method for articulating simultaneities in a society’s arising, an awareness of emergent parallel historicities among movements near and far, a reshaping of value’s precarity, of collaborations borne from collectivity, each of which threatens to disturb the surface. The authors wish to thank and cite the dedicated research of the exhibition’s curatorial advisor Nurur Khan. Many of the ideas in this essay and exhibition stem from long conversations with Khan and relate to his upcoming PHD thesis. Muzharul Islam b. 1923, Murshidabad, British India; d. 2012, Dhaka Muzharul Islam was an architect, urban planner, and educator and is considered to be one of the pioneers of South Asian architecture. He sought to develop a language of architectural modernism in South Asia that responded directly to the local social, cultural, and climatic conditions, while also establishing the groundwork for the development of architectural education in the region. Islam’s architectural projects include the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dhaka University (1953–1955), the Central Public Library (1953–1954), the NIPA Building (1963–65) and the Rangamati Township (1964), Jahangirnagar University (1968–71), Chittagong University (1971), the National Library and the National Archives (1980–84). His works remain as outstanding instances of situated modernism, as well as sensitive and visionary architectural masterworks of architecture that address history, society, people, economy, city, and, foremost, the building and aspiration of a nation. Aditya Novali b. 1978, Surakarta; lives and works in Surakarta Y/M/B/U/M/Z/A/H/N/A/G/R/U/U/N/L/W/I/I/S/J/L/A/A/Y/M/A #1 ,#2,#3,#4,#5,#6,#7,#8,#9,#10,#11,#12,#13,#14 (rotatable painting series), 2019–2020 Oil paint and ink on modular rotatable triangular zinc bars covered with canvas, wood and zinc frame Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Roh Projects. Realised with additional support from Roh Projects Aditya Novali finds inspiration in the ways that Muzharul Islam (1923–2012) and the Indonesian architect Y. B. Mangunwijaya (1929–99) created spaces that provided a better quality of life for the people building the new nations of Bangladesh and his native Indonesia. For both, the ambition of architecture was in part to create transcendent opportunities for mobility across class barriers with a humanist approach. Islam and Mangunwijaya demonstrated how architecture could cross the borders of the political, social, economic, and religious realms to invent solutions for living inspired by local wisdom, especially when considering how to live in variable climates. We live in a world where many people relate more to digital information than to the immediate environment around them. In this new body of work, the artist paints rotatable panels inspired by the work of Islam and Mangunwijaya as a means to create hybrid paintings that change across the course of the exhibition, drawing connections across time, space, and cultures through the rooted legacy of these figures to their land and people. 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. Ayesha Sultana b. 1984 in Jessore; lives and works in Sylhet Breath Count Series, 2019–2020 Mark-making on clay-coated paper Courtesy of the artist, Experimenter Kolkata and Samdani Art Foundation Ayesha Sultana’s recent work negotiates space and distance by measuring the space between things- such as the breaks between taking breaths- marking the rhythm of the day. She contemplates the relationship between her hand, her body, and the rest of the landscape surrounding her, making visible the motion of rhythm without being seen. Through a body of scratch drawings on clay-coated paper, Breath Count are personal explorations of movement, mark-making and corporeality. Ayesha reveals staccato patterns that represent a delicate inward probe of her own body using count, distance, motion and removal in breath in these works. Like the marble lines in Louis Kahn’s parliament building, which mark the labour of a day’s work casting concrete, Sultana’s marks measure the labour of internal bodily systems. Sultana works with drawing, painting, object, and sound, through processes that translate notions of space. She employs drawing as a tool of inquiry, through cutting, folding, stitching, layering, recording, and tracing applied to her series characterised by repetition, variation, and rhythm. Sultana often draws inspiration from architecture and the natural environment. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané b. 1977, Barcelona; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro Fog Dog, 2019–2020 Film and ceramic installation Commissioned for DAS 2020 and produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Esther Schipper. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Esther Schipper. Presented with additional support from Mendes Wood DM Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film brings us into a community of human and inhuman inhabitants of Charukala, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka (designed by Muzharul Islam from 1953–55). Mixing fiction and contemplation, this work explores the past and future spectres that haunt present-day Bangladesh from the viewpoint of the stray dogs who live in and among its shared spaces. While life revolves around the art school for the protagonists in this film, the horrors of climactic and political violence elsewhere in the world appear and speak to the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate contexts. Employing sculpture, installation, film, holograms, and drawing, Steegmann invites the viewer to critically reflect on how the divide between culture and nature is perceived while exploring their constructed interstices. Echoing his interest in biological systems, specifically Brazilian rainforests, Steegmann’s works often introduce elements from nature into exhibition spaces. Dayanita Singh What, when and where is a museum? For Dayanita Singh, the museum rests within, occasionally outside of the conventional market and aesthetic discourses that have come to instigate their articulation throughout history. One finds congruence with the institutional building projects of Muzharul Islam who actively sought to democratise spaces. For her Museum of Shedding, Singh has selected a collection of images that, with one box, suggests an origin or window into a visual and spatial language that does not seek answers. Drawn from her extensive photographic body of work, the box forms part of a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Like Muzharul Islam, the spaces that Singh has photographed are imbued with the relations, voices and rituals of their occupation. Viewers share in their unfolding. Each photograph in a Singh museum contributes to the making of unbound mythologies: of a chair, of an individual, of interiors that stand outside of time. Familiar but perhaps also unknown, Singh’s photographs and Islam’s buildings situate us in a continual state of becoming. Dayanita Singh deploys photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to photographic images and their construction. Stemming from Singh’s longstanding interest in the archive, her museums at all scales present photographs as interconnected bodies and spaces that are replete with narrative possibilities. b. 1961, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi Hajra Waheed b. 1980, Calgary; lives and works in Montreal The Spiral, 2019 Video work with narration, 7:10 min Courtesy of the artist. Presented with additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts Conceived and written by Hajra Waheed as a series of working notes for an exhibition, the narration of this film explores a single form – the spiral – as a starting point to reflect on processes of upheaval in human experience. The film acts as a meditation on undefeated despair and the possibilities for radical hope. For Waheed, spirals are reflexive and interdependent, much like Muzharul Islam’s belief in the ability of architecture to bring people together to radically transform society for an equitable future. Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice ranges from interactive installations to collage, video, sound, and sculpture. Among other issues, she explores the nexus between security, surveillance, and the covert networks of power that structure lives, while also addressing the traumas and alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and state violence. Haroon Mirza b. 1977, London; lives and works in London Lectures in Theology, 2019–2020 24-channel electrical signals for Hi-Fi speakers and LEDs, steel, electrical wire, bespoke media device, carpet, wall painting Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Lisson Gallery for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Lisson Gallery. Realised with additional support from Lisson Gallery How does one envision a building while also recognising its inhabitation through time and space? Even with the best of intentions, spaces change over time and often deteriorate if not maintained. This is the case with several buildings designed by Muzharul Islam, such as the Jaipurhat Limestone and Cement Project (which was built as housing for 1,700 workers and is now a girl’s military school) and the five polytechnic universities designed by Islam and Stanley Tigerman throughout Bangladesh. Architectural plans and blueprints are like scores for the future, and Haroon Mirza has composed a new sound and light installation reimagining Islam’s frequencies of thought. For both the artist and the architect, building a society relies on the ways in which education contributes to and informs how equality transcends previously encoded class divides. Mirza’s medium is electricity, which is seen and heard simultaneously. He adopts found objects and audiovisual equipment in his installations and performances. Inviting the viewer to re-evaluate their definitions of noise and music, Mirza’s work is known for its physical impact and its undermining of straightforward narrative by exploring the sociocultural histories of the objects, ideas, and processes he employs. Lucas Arruda b. 1983, Sao Paulo; lives and works in Sao Paulo Series of Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2013–2019 Oil on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM. Presented with additional support from Mendes Wood DM The National Library of Bangladesh (1978–9) reflects the architect Muzharul Islam’s engagement with Louis I. Kahn. Upon entering the lobby, one immediately encounters a monumental mural of a jungle painted. This immersive and magnanimous image, an unusual choice for a library, greets those seeking knowledge while conveying Islam’s belief that learning must be grounded in the demands of climate and place. Jungles rebuild themselves as dynamic and diverse ecosystems, akin to Islam’s ideas about Bangladeshi society, which had to rebuild itself after the Pakistani army brutally massacred the country’s intellectuals in 1971. Lucas Arruda creates images that concern the body’s relationship to light throughout the day and life. Like the mural in Islam’s National Library, Arruda’s jungles coalesce a metaphysical sensation that can’t be described by scouring all the books in the library. They allude to another form of feeling and knowing. Lucas Arruda works with painting, prints, light installation, slide projections, and films. His practice encompasses a wide spectrum of subjects, ranging from the conceptual framework of painting to metaphysical questions. Commonly portraying archetypal landscapes characterised by a subtle and intricate rendition of light, Arruda’s small-scale atmospheric compositions dwell on the viewer’s experiences as opposed to geographical specificity. Maria Taniguchi b. 1981 Dumaguete City; lives and works in Manila Untitled, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Untitled, 2017 5 works, acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Realised with additional support from Perrotin Like Muzharul Islam, Maria Taniguchi finds beauty in the marks of the human hand on objects that we associate with industrial production, such as bricks. These traces inform not only the contexts in which they were made but also the people who made them. Taniguchi’s painted architecture calls to mind the transformative and meditative process of brick-laying as well as the subtle changes that can be found across seemingly monotonous surfaces through the movement of light and shadow. Bricks are an apt metaphor for Muzharul Islam’s philosophy that can be read as nationalism expressed through modernity. ‘When I mention standing on one’s own soil’, writes Muzharul Islam, ‘it is to find oneself, but not to find oneself and become stagnant. What I am seeking is to stand on one’s own feet and then to proceed forward. If for that reason I have to take two steps backward to go one step forward, I have no problem with that. I think that there is no other way of moving forward.’ (Islam, Muzharul. An Architect in Bangladesh: Conversations with Muzharul Islam. Edited by Kazi Khaleed. Ashraf. Dhaka: Loka Press, 2014. p.37) Taniguchi works with painting and video in addition to printmaking, pottery, and sculpture. Her work focuses on concepts of composing, constructing, and framing, whilst referring to the craftsmanship and history of the Philippines. The repetitive process of creation employed in much of her work has been likened to the urban structure of Manila. Marlon de Azambuja b. 1978, Porto Alegre; lives and works in Madrid Untitled (from the Brutalismo Series), 2019–2020 Industrial metal clamps, building material sourced in Dhaka Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation and Instituto de Vision. Realised with additional support from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) Marlon de Azambuja’s sprawling installation captures the density of Dhaka as well as its precarity in the wake of exponential urban growth resulting from climate change-related migration. The work unveils the inner organs of the city – construction materials such as bricks and concrete blocks, industrial clamps and building tools. Like unsung artists, Bangladesh’s construction workers transform these everyday materials into the buildings that make up the cityscapes of emergent massive cities such as Dhaka. Dhaka is the world’s most densely populated city, a fact that Muzharul Islam could never have imagined when he was the senior architect for the government of East Pakistan. ‘Cities should provide the environment for civilised life within the context of our own culture,’ said Islam. ‘The city can develop only as a part of the physical environment of the country – with the ultimate aim of abolishing all differences between the city and the rural areas. The traditional relationship with nature… should be continued in the cities.’ De Azambuja works with drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and video to create new ways of looking at the structures that surround us. He is invested in the cultural and aesthetic impact of architecture and urban planning as spaces of confrontation between instinct and rationality, and the city as a living, breathing entity. Monika Sosnowska b. 1972, Ryki; lives and works in Warsaw Stairs, 2019–2020 Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation Nearly every Bangladeshi artist exhibiting at DAS 2020 has climbed up and down the spiral staircase at Charukala (the Faculty of Fine Arts) at Dhaka University as part of their artistic journey. Muzharul Islam viewed architecture as a vehicle to a better life, elevating local materials to their highest potential (while avoiding decoration). For Islam, the common Bangladeshi woman and man could rise above the circumstances in which they were born via education. Inspired by Islam and his vision, Monika Sosnowska has created a sculpture using similar materials to the staircase at Charukala, but removing its function. This sculpture leads nowhere, and while it pays homage to foundational structures, it also invites the viewer to consider the illusions inherent in built spaces. Sosnowksa uses building elements and materials to create disorientating installations, spaces, and objects that explore the psychological impact of architectural space. She is interested in architecture’s capacity to influence behaviour as well as reflect social structures and ideologies. Flaws, glitches, and deficiencies in her work are used to question aspects commonly attributed to global modernisms. The Otolith Group Founded 2002 by Anjalika Sagar (b. 1968) and Kodwo Eshun (b. 1966), who live and work in London O Horizon, 2018 4K video, colour, 90 min Commissioned by Bauhaus Imaginista and co-produced by the Rubin Museum, with support from Project 88 Screening: 10am, 11.30am, 1pm, 2.30pm, 4pm, 5.30pm O Horizon refers to the surface layer of soil, changed in the area around Santiniketan as the result of Rabindranath Tagore’s introduction of new flora to the planning and development of the campus. The film extends The Otolith Group’s ongoing consideration of the current geological age as one in which human activity spurs the primary changes on climate and the environment. O Horizon reflects upon modernist theories of dance and song developed by Tagore and the experimental practices of mural, sculpture, painting, and drawing developed by India’s great modernist artists affiliated with Santiniketan. O Horizon draws together visual arts, dance, song, music, and recital to assemble a structure of feeling of the Tagorean imagination in the 21st Century. The work also has resonances with Muzharul Islam’s campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, where learning and convening of students unite the indoors and outdoors around circular forms such as the rooftops and ponds. The research-based work of The Otolith Group spans moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. These are utilised to explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the nonhuman, and the complexity of the ‘environmental conditions of life we all face.’ The Otolith Group also runs a curatorial public platform, The Otolith Collective. Prabhavathi Meppayil b. 1965, Bangalore; lives and works in Bangalore dp/twenty/thirteen, 2019 Copper wire and copper wire embedded in gesso panel dp/twenty/forty eight, 2019 Wood gesso and copper dp/twenty/six, 2019 Thinnam on gesso panel Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Pace. Presented with additional support from Pace Time is rarely subtle. Yet among Prabhavathi Meppayil’s works, one’s gaze is enmeshed in a rare confluence of multiple structures, temporalities and forms that reconfigure our notion of space in and of time. At once archaeological in process and expansive in reading, Meppayil’s multimedia paintings confound for their immediacy and immeasurability. These newly commissioned works observe how Muzharul Islam’s reliance on both social and empirical structures informed the making and occupation of space. For Meppayil, her work shares in a similar layering of ideas; of an intuitive composition of sublime architectures that may be affected by forces such as entropy while at the same time, resistant to present-day desires for immediateness and easy reproduction. In this oscillation between additive and subtractive connotations, of surfaces marked and degraded, Meppayil’s works encourage the generative act of looking closely and seeing beyond. Prabhavathi Meppayil’s practice rests in her meticulous approach to conceiving and executing processes specific to the materials that she uses. Coming from a family of goldsmiths, Meppayil adopts artisan techniques as a means to relocate particular materials as a generator of forms, providing a parallel reading to the way in which western art histories were received in the twentieth century. Through the use of non-traditional tools and often copper wire, she carves, erases and highlights carefully conceived lines and patterns into layers of gesso to underscore the blurring of painting, drawing, and other disciplines while establishing meditative installations. Rana Begum b. 1977, Sylhet; lives and works in London No. 972 Wall Painting, 2019–2020 Ink and fingerprints on wall Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary. Realised with additional support from Jhaveri Contemporary Many buildings designed by Muzharul Islam carry the marks of their makers. The architect reminded Russian-born American architect Louis I. Kahn that Bangladesh’s most skilled construction workers possessed a refined knowledge of building yet were illiterate, prompting Kahn to consider other ways of translating his vision for building in Bangladesh. In a similar spirit, writer Kazi Nasrul Islam invokes a benediction of indigenous forms of feeling and knowing in his poem Ink on My Face, Ink on my Hands. Inspired by her memories of growing up in Sylhet, Rana Begum creates an immersive participatory installation in the central staircase of DAS 2020, where the fingerprints of the individuals who come together to build DAS form an abstract portrait of the collective energy of the Summit and city. Begum utilises industrial materials such as stainless steel, aluminium, copper, brass, glass, and wood in her minimalist sculptures and reliefs. Her contemplative works explore shifting interactions between geometry, colour, and light, drawing inspiration from both the chance encounters of city life and the intricate patterns of Islamic art and architecture. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh b. 1975, Karachi; lives and works in New Delhi b. 1976, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi Dhaka Library (set of 9), 2017–18 Cyanotype prints on Arches aquarelle paper Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte. Presented with additional support from Nature Morte First presented at DAS 2018, Dhaka Library is part of a collaborative body of work by Seher Shah and Randhir Singh exploring overlapping ideas in architecture, photography, drawing, and printmaking. Cyanotypes were one of the first photographic printmaking processes developed in the 19th century and a precursor to the blueprint, which was an important reproduction method for architectural and engineering drawings well into the 20th century. Working with this printmaking process, Shah and Singh focused on Muzharul Islam’s Dhaka Library (1953–1954), fragmenting its unique architectural components through photographic images. The artists were drawn to Islam’s work due to its aesthetic qualities, including heavy massing, the sculptural use of concrete, and repetitive structural grids, along with a visionary intent driven by a desire to break from the status quo. Seher Shah’s practice uses experiences from the field of art and architecture to question the rational language of architectural drawing. Randhir Singh is an architectural photographer who draws on his education as an architect to focus on ever-changing meanings found within modern architecture and urbanism in South Asia. Over the past few years, they have collaborated on a number of projects to explore the relationships between drawing, photography, and architecture. Shezad Dawood b. 1974, London; lives and works in London University of NonDualism, 2020 Installation with painted textiles and programmed lighting sequence Musical score by patten Commissioned for DAS 2020, generously supported by the Bagri Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary University of NonDualism, 2019 Super 8 and HD transferred to digital, 3:27 min Commissioned by Frieze LIVE and DAS 2020, generously supported by the Bagri Foundation. Produced by Miranda Sharp and Sara Thorsen Fredborg for Ubik Productions. Costumes by Priya Ahluwalia / Ahluwalia Studio, musical score by patten, choreography by Adrienne Hart / Neon Dance, dancers Pepa Ubera and Devaraj Thimmaiah, production by Laurie Storey, lighting by Pete Carrier, editing by Sergio Vego Borrego, location Queensrollahouse, London Considering how the body and fabric may become architecture, and where architectural space is always a platform for human performativity, Shezad Dawood’s installation draws on the legacy of Muzharul Islam to create an adaptable stage set. His interior functions somewhere between architecture and tapestry. With the layering of sound, Dawood examines the influence of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore on Muzharul Islam, but also how Tagore informed the later spiritual work of Alice Coltrane. Referencing Islam’s approach to nondualism, the project extends such flows into the space of the exhibition and enacts a series of dynamic collaborations much like the architect who regularly collaborated with artists, poets, and singers. Dawood works across disciplines to deconstruct systems of image, language, site, and narrative. His fascination with architectural modernism in South Asia recurs in several projects, interweaving these histories with those of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War. His practice often involves collaboration, imagining a remapping across geographic borders and communities. Tanya Goel b. 1985, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi Tracing Modernity in Dust, 2019–20 Brick-dust paint Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Nature Morte. Realised with additional support from Nature Morte and Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation The brick is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous building material. Tanya Goel was inspired by the detailed texture found in the brick patterns of buildings by Muzharul Islam. In designing the Faculty of Fine Arts, for example, Islam introduced a subtle geometric pattern on the face of each handmade brick, integrating a modern architectural language with the vernaculars of regional building. The artist traced details of Islam’s ageing buildings in brick dust, protecting them for the next generation through the process of drawing. She juxtaposes these zoomed in details within their wider (material) context by framing them within her photographs of Islam’s Faculty of Fine Arts, National Library, and male dormitory at Jahangirnagar University (as they stand today), paired with paintings she made on fragments of debris collected from these sites. Goel is invested in the afterlife of construction, creating pigments from charcoal, aluminium, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite, and foils, all of which are sourced from building sites. Exploring abstraction within her painting practice, Goel works with the concepts of density and complexity inherent to the synthetic repetition of mathematical formulas, balancing unforeseen orders and potential chaos. William Forsythe b. 1949, New York A Volume Within Which it is Not Possible for Certain Classes of Action to Arise, 2015 Scaffolding structure, drywall Courtesy of the artist. The development and international exhibition of Choreographic Objects by William Forsythe is made possible with the generous support of Susanne Klatten ‘Choreography is about organising bodies in space, or you’re organising bodies with other bodies or a body with other bodies in an environment that is organised.’ William Forsythe Politics ‘was the most architectural thing to do.’ Muzharul Islam Both Muzharul Islam and William Forsythe extrapolate the tenets of their respective fields, choreography and architecture, into the realm of the political where these ideas have implications in ‘real life.’ This work is a metaphor for time, for political structures, for any physical or metaphorical barrier that might not allow for certain actions to arise. When Muzharul Islam was building the Faculty of Fine Arts and the National Library, such barriers could have been seen as colonial domination by West Pakistan. What are these barriers today? And how do they persist? This work offers the visitor the possibility of consciously and physically experiencing the loss of a broad degree of freedom, which is incorporated into our daily existence. In a world that is continuously creating impediments to movement, we must invent new strategies of transiting through them. Forsythe is known for his radical innovations in choreography and dance. His deep interest in the fundamental principles of organisation has led him to produce a wide range of projects. Parallel to his career as a choreographer, he creates installations, film works, and interactive sculptures, known as ‘Choreographic Objects.’

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

ALL PROJECTS Jothashilpa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Jothashilpa is a centre for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself ‘a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language.’ The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society that emerges from everyday life. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. Through their research and making processes, they collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary and Master Artist of Cinema Banner Painting Mohammad Shoaib and his disciples to realize a timeline that contains exhibitions about collectivity within, grounding us in solidarities of the past and imagining solidarities of the future. Artists involved in this project: Mohammad Shoaib, Shawon Akand, Didarul Dipu, S. M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Hamayet Himu, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim.

ALL PROJECTS Risquons-Tout Wiels, 19 Sept 2020 – 1 Jan 2021 Shezad Dawood's research about Bangladeshi modern architecture through the archives and history of Muzharul Islam took a new form at Wiels, expanding upon his Samdani Art Foundation supported co-commissions with the Bagri Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary at Frieze LIVE London 2019 (with Timothy Taylor Gallery) and Dhaka Art Summit 2020.

ALL PROJECTS Shako and National Trovoa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Several artist-led initiatives have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa , a group of black and non-white women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Shako – Women Artists Association of Bangladesh – for women and by women – believes art can play a role in healing society. It raises funds for individuals, male and female, who are unwell or in need of medical treatment; uses art to encourage physically or mentally challenged people; and promotes female artists and helps them develop skills. A ‘shako’ is a temporary bamboo bridge, built to make it possible to cross rivers and streams, an apt metaphor for Shako’s work connecting talented female artists to vulnerable communities. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together these two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia and South America for a 5-hour tea party to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions was published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media, follow #darkeningthoughts Shako also ran a workshop about black empowerment on 13 February from 4–6pm in the 4th floor workshop area.

ALL PROJECTS রিক্সা শিল্পীদের পাশে In partnership with Britto Arts Trust Part of the Samdani Art Foundation’s ongoing work was supporting research into pre-colonial knowledge of South Asia and blurring boundaries between art and life by empowering Bangladeshi artist-led initiatives. Artists from around the world often took motifs from vernacular artistic practices, and through our initiatives, we partnered with artists and artist-led initiatives to support the practices of artists who often did not have the privileges of resources and mobility found in “the art world,” such as Cinema Banner painters, Rickshaw painters, weavers, and other talented artisans who created the vibrant visual culture of Bangladesh. Dhaka Art Summit was a platform that realized Bangladesh’s largest cinema banner painting in collaboration with Jothashilpa, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and the Goethe Institut, and kantha stitched renditions of Bangladesh’s six seasons were realized in collaboration with Art Pro and were recently acquired by the Whitworth Museum in Manchester after their display at Dhaka Art Summit 2020. Protecting the heritage of Bangladeshi traditional arts also meant supporting the people behind these arts in their daily lives, so they could continue their practice once the world healed from the Covid-19 pandemic. Samdani Art Foundation is proud to have partnered with Britto Arts Trust to support 23 Rickshaw painters and Cinema Banner painters to produce each producing an artwork that highlighted the unique talent of each maker, while also financially supporting this at-risk community in a time when there were few opportunities for them to continue their work animating public spaces of Dhaka. The artist community forming Britto Art Trust had been working with Rickshaw painters and Cinema Banner painters for a long time. They had exhibited the works of the painters in Paris at Palais de Tokyo, and at other leading institutional platforms in Bangladesh and abroad. Britto Arts Trust had generously lent their talent and infrastructure to help bring 23 artists into the fold of Britto and gave them a platform to share their work with the world during this difficult time. The artists had painted on cut-outs representing parts of the human body, speaking to the fact that together, we were one collective body as residents and contributors to life in Dhaka. “The mission of samdani art foundation is to empower artists and to make art available for everyone to enjoy. It was a pleasure to support these wonderful artists during this difficult time, and we invite you to join us in this mission to show these artists how much the city of Dhaka values their talent and imagination. I am a proud collector of works from this project myself.” nadia samdani “Bangladeshi art owes a lot to the inspiration of its cinema banner painters and rickshaw painters, who we have worked with closely in our own artistic journeys in bangladesh and abroad. We are proud to share their work with you and look forward to these works finding permanent homes in offices and residences across Bangladesh, including our own.” Tayeba Begum Lipi and Mahbubur Rahman