ALL PROJECTS My Oma 8 December 2023 — 1 September 2024, Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands Sheelasha Rajdhandhari's remarkable piece, 'My great-great-grandmother’s shawl,' from the SAF collection was featured at Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands, as part of the 'My Oma' exhibition. 'My Oma' was curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Rosa de Graaf, Jessy Koeiman, Julija Mockutė, and Vivian Ziherl. Its key producers were Shana Lewis, Pilar Mata Dupont, and Wendy van Slagmaat-Bos. Advisors to the research and planning process of "My Oma" include our Artistic Director, Diana Campbell, alongside Edward Gillman, Sun A Moon, and Manuela Moscoso. In the performative artwork titled 'My great-great-grandmother’s shawl,' Kathmandu-based artist Sheelasha Rajbhandari intricately weaves together the threads of change embedded in fabric and time. The three sets of photographs depict generations of women in the artist’s maternal family, tracing the evolving clothing preferences that mirror broader political and economic transformations within Nepal. The first image features the artist's great-great-grandmother, Purna Kumari Vaidhya, adorned in a Dambar Kumari Shawl, a 19th-century textile composed of a block-printed fabric sandwiched between fine muslin. The second and third portraits depict her grandmother, Chiniya Devi Bijukchhe, and the artist herself, both framed in the same posture and draped in a shawl. However, these two shawls are replicated by the artist, evident by the clothing tags. This visual narrative explores the growing influence of capitalism and ready-made items, prompting an interrogation on notions of authenticity and mimicry in the production of culturally significant items.

ALL PROJECTS A Time Comes When We Hear Nothing Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) and FICA presented a collaborative online performance, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen" by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman, launching their project, "A time comes when we hear nothing." The artists were awarded a grant for their project through the aegis of Stitching Screens, a platform instituted by FICA and SAF for supporting artistic collaboration across India, Bangladesh and the digital space in 2020 - 2021. Having worked on the project for over a year, Ashfika Rahman and Amol K Patil shared the final iteration of "A time comes when we hear nothing” on November 6, 2022. The project was imagined as a means of solidarity for global working-class people. An expression by two artists across borders reflecting on the collective experience of social divides during lockdown. The projected connected them through common concerns and emotions for people. Common deep pain ran through the veins of Bangladesh to India despite a geographic border. As part of our virtual launch event, we also screened an online performance by Ashfika Rahman and Amol K Patil titled, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen," realized in 2022 as an addition to "A time comes when we hear nothing." The performance is a cross-national conversation between two artists, a conversation symbolic of what might be shared between two laborers from Bangladesh and India. Questions of communication in two different languages. This conversation was inspired by the theatre script of Amol K Patil, referring to a long distance conversation between a migrant labourer and his wife. Here is a mundane conversation people of different nationalities and different genders transcending borders through screens evoking the monotony of a digital life. Getting into the deeper feeling of the working class. A conversation between two digital voices, two screens. The project ‘A time comes when we hear nothing’ is a means of solidarity for global working people. It showcases 1 min videos of artists’ performances across the globe, posted on an Instagram account called @a_time_comes_we_hear_nothing . The project explores the collective experience of social stratification, which was exacerbated by the pandemic. It also reflects on the plight of the migrant labor and the effects of the lockdown on those stranded at home. The videos represent occupying one minute as a means of solidarity. Visit their website to learn more about the project: A time comes when we hear nothing https://www.atimecomes.net/

ALL PROJECTS Stepping Softly on the Earth Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Gidree Bawlee and Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s collaborative project ‘Kaal’ explored how we perceive time, our place within its tapestry, and how these rhythms manifest in our narratives and practices. Informed by rituals, beliefs, and mythologies that persist across generations, the community-engaged project ‘Kaal’ is a study of our surroundings where past and present intertwine, and a dialogue between our shared history and the unfolding present. It’s a journey through time’s knotted and unraveled threads, seeking the enduring connections that bind us all. The first iteration of ‘Kaal’ is ‘Pala,’ showcasing at the Stepping Softly on the Earth exhibition curated by Irene Aristizábal and Kinnari Saraiya. Pala seven intricately woven jute figures echoing the ‘Bishahari Pala’ performance, which blurs the lines between human and non-human realities. Woven by the village community in a collaborative spirit, the work captures the collective essence of participation and shared narratives. This exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia, Jhaveri Contemporary, and Samdani Art Foundation. Stepping Softly on the Earth evolved from Baltic’s Research and Development project Cosmovisions on Land and Entangled Futures . With additional support from the British Council through an International Collaboration Project Grant towards the research and development project titled Cosmovisions on Land and Entangled Futures.

ALL PROJECTS Manifesto of fragility, 16th Biennale de Lyon 14 September - 31 December 2022, Lyon, France Munem Wasif's works were shown extensively across three venues: The Fagor Factory, Guimet Museum, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon at the 16th Biennale de Lyon. Mostly comprising photographs, videos and sound installations, Munem Wasif’s oeuvre reflects a long-term engagement with the places and stories of his home country. The Machine Matter installation evokes the demise of the jute industry in Bangladesh following the transfer of power in East Bengal to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947, the widespread use of artificial materials, and the container and cargo-ship boom. Alternating long shots and close-ups, Wasif moves through an abandoned jute factory, amid immobile people. The echo of birdsong, the drip-drip of water and the rays of sunshine create an illusory sense of life in a space reduced to silence. The weight of memories, machinery and bodies underscores the fragility of the economy in post-colonial Bangladesh. The exhibition is supported by the Samdani Art Foundation & Project 88. Image courtesy Munem Wasif

ALL PROJECTS The Sunwise Turn Curated by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa The Sunwise Turn took Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point and meditated upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industrial, modern and region. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writings in the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the symposium sought to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western modernism. Bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy, the workshop is conceived as a series of propositions linking Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. The Sunwise Turn was a critical circumambulation around the philosopher, curator and historian. It picked up the phrase from an oft-overlooked bookshop, which became the centre of anarchist political thought in New York City just after the first World War, a place that Coomaraswamy not only came to be closely associated with, but evoked as “the storm of the world-flow”. Following are the papers presented at the symposium: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=wkhOKP0EJzM Still Reading Coomaraswamy by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Date: 9 February 2018, 10.20am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The Sunwise Turn took Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point and meditated upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industrial, modern and region. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writings in the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the introductory remarks sought to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western modernism. One methodological approach that this paper sought to engage with was that of an “alternative geography” that Coomaraswamy puts forwards in A History of Indian and Indonesian Art, where he seeks to understand cultural production in Asia not through the tried lenses of 'influence' and 'borrowing' but through the steady proliferation of 'cognates', i.e. the study of connections and lateral links between different sites. This paper also tracked some of the critical secondary literature that has emerged on Coomarswamy in the last three decades from the Indian subcontinent where much of his work remains canonised and contested from beyond the subcontinent, especially the United States of America where newer lines of inquiry are emerging on his thoughts and impact as a curator of Asian art. Overall, the remarks offered thoughts about the rationale in bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy and how The Sunwise Turn linked Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. Shabbir Hussain Mustafa curated SEA STATE featuring artist Charles Lim Yi Yong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. He is Senior Curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where he currently heads the curatorial team overseeing Between Declarations and Dreams, a long-term exhibition that surveys art about the region from the 19th century to present day. From 2013-2015, he was lead curator of Siapa Nama Kamu? (in Malay, What is Your Name?), the Gallery’s other long-term exhibition that focuses on art in Singapore from the late 19th century onwards. He was formerly Curator (South-Southeast Asia) at the National University of Singapore Museum (NUS Museum), from 2007-2013, where his approach centred on deploying archival texts as ploys in engaging different modes of thinking and writing. It was at NUS Museum that he initiated the critically acclaimed accumulative platforms Camping and Tramping through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011) and co-conceived the experimental space prep room | things that may or may not happen (2012-ongoing). Mustafa writes often and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, Singapore Section. In 2017, he was curator in residence at the DAAD in Berlin and is currently developing two multimodal projects on the philosopher-curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and the artist-poet Latiff Mohidin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=IE0vUMWMoT0 The Figure of the Artisan in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art by Iftikhar Dadi Date: 9 February 2018, 11.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ananda Coomaraswamy resided in Ceylon between 1902-1907. Based on this experience, his first major book, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art was self-published with great care in a luxurious limited edition in 1908. It contained a great amount of original research carefully detailing technical and cultural information, which remains valuable today as an indispensable guide to traditional crafts of Kandy. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art engages with the problem of translating the legacy of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement into the colonial context. This paper argued that the book is caught between a historical recreation of 'mediaeval' Kandy, and an anthropological and historical description of craft processes. Coomaraswamy’s paradoxical account is the result of a necessary 'mistranslation' of the 'mediaeval,' as carried over from industrial Britain into a colonial site. The consequences of this maneuver are both textually and photographically incorporated into Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, in which the artisanal figure oscillates between a dying anthropological specimen on the one hand, and an already deceased and thus a spectral figure on the other. Iftikhar Dadi is an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of History of Art. He is the author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) and the edited monograph Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). Dadi has co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). Curatorial projects include Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space at Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2012) & Nasher Museum, Duke University (2013-14); and Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001-2002). Dadi serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals Archives of Asian Art; Bio-Scope: South Asian Screen Studies; and on the board Art Journal during 2007-2011. He is an advisor to the Hong Kong based organization Asia Art Archive, and director of The Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. As an artist, Iftikhar Dadi has collaborated with Elizabeth Dadi for twenty years. Their practice investigates popular media’s construction of memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization, and the productive capacities of urban informalities. Their work has been widely exhibited internationally, including the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia; Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Miami Art Museum; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Dhaka Art Summit; and the Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=lgjcF5ol0v0 Coomaraswamy to Ambedkar: Tracing the Vanished Horizons of the ‘Vernacular in the Contemporary' by Nancy Adajania Date: 9 February 2018, 11.40am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper traversed a genealogy of perspectives that bear strongly on the categories of the 'folk', 'tribal', 'rural', 'national' and 'modern', which have shaped our discourse around what constitutes the contemporary in postcolonial Indian cultural production. Certain tropes, figures, sites and themes recur in this discourse: the village, regarded variously as the site of native and pre-modern authenticity, pre-industrial backwardness or cultural wholeness; the figure of the artisan, variously conceived as an organic bearer of holistic cultural values, a poor relation to the metropolitan and academy-trained artist, or as a scripturally sanctioned producer of culturally significant icons; the 'folk' as the pre-national repository of collective consciousness that assured its members of identity and belonging in a locale; the 'tribal', either stigmatised as a rustic figure without access to cultural capital, championed as a subaltern victim deserving of developmental assistance, or idealised as a cultural subject rooted in the specificities of a local environment. Above all, it is 'authenticity' that persists as an anxiety in this discourse. As such, it becomes the ground of claims exerted by numerous forces, including the Hindu right wing, aggressive modernisers, resurrectionists of the crafts, and progressively oriented thinkers who wish to invest contemporary artists emerging from these backgrounds with agency. This paper revisited a series of debates staged across the 20th century in India, and which involved such participants as the cultural historians E B Havell and A K Coomaraswamy, the anthropologists G S Ghurye and Verrier Elwin, and the political thinkers M K Gandhi and B R Ambedkar. In doing so, it demonstrated that the debate over the 'vernacular in the contemporary' is both about an aesthetic self-assertion and a choice of artistic form, as well as a demand for the redistribution of social equity and the securing of participatory citizenship for India's subaltern communities. Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (Guild Art Gallery, 2016), goes beyond the mandate of a conventional artist monograph to map the larger histories of the Leftist and feminist movements in India. She recently edited the transdisciplinary anthology Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge (Raza Foundation, 2017). She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale in 2012, and has curated many exhibitions including: ‘No Parsi is an Island; A Curatorial Re-reading Across 150 Years’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, 2016); ‘Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video’, Jewish Museum, New York (2015); and the hybrid exhibition-publication project ‘Sacred/Scared’ at Latitude 28/ TAKE on Art magazine, New Delhi (2014). Adajania taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2013/2014). She is the juror for Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015 - 2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=deBb7osd9sQ Locating Art in the Colonial Milieu by Swati Chattopadhyay Date: 9 February 2018, 12.20pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy A.K. Coomaraswamy remarked that nothing of artistic value had been produced in 19th century India, and that modern Indian architecture was “at its very lowest ebb.” Overcoming this degraded condition necessitated learning the forgotten 'art of living.' Where was this lost art of living to be found? In the art schools, in the village community, in colonial cities, or among the educated classes? In this paper, Chattopadhyay looked at the ethical implication of location/space in the work of Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose that engaged with and critiqued Coomaraswamy’s vision of cultural regeneration in everyday life. Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005), Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012), the co-editor (with Jeremy White) of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Taylor and Francis, 2014). She is currently completing two book projects: Geography of Small Spaces, and co-edited volume (with Jeremy White), Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Routledge, 2017). She received a 2015-16 Guggenheim Fellowship for her research project, “Nature’s Infrastructure: British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880.” She is a former Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=bATTYTIa8VE A.K. Coomaraswamy and Japan – A Tentative Overview by Shigemi Inaga Date: 9 February 2018, 1.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper gave an overview appreciation of A. K. Coomaraswamy in Japan. Kakuzo Okakura (also known as Tenshin Okakura), author of The Book of Tea (1906), might have had a chance to see Coomaraswamy in London. Okakura’s attempt at constructing Asian Art History as an idea has been accomplished by Coomaraswamy as curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. British rule of India may find a parallel in Japan’s colonial rule over Korea. In this context, Muneyoshi Yanagi, founder of the Popular Crafts Movement in Japan, is worth comparing with Coomaraswamy. Yanagi’s medievalism, inspired from his Korean experience, may shed new light on Coomaraswamy’s view of arts and crafts. Both Yanagi and Coomaraswamy have shown affinity with William Morris, though their encounter did not bring any fruitful outcome to the posterity. And yet, the friendship between Takumi Asagawa and Gurcharan Singh in their pursuit of ceramics in Korea and India cannot be overlooked. The merging of Oriental religious experience and aesthetics is another common feature between Yanagi and Coomaraswamy. Just like Coomaraswamy’s relation with Rene Guenon and Mircha Eliade, Yanagi was closely related to D.T. Suzuki. As an epilogue, and in token of Coomaraswamy’s legacy, this paper touched upon Fuku Akino, a Japanese woman painter who took special interest in decorations made by women in Kacchi, Gujarat. Shigemi Inaga is Professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto, Japan. He was formerly Dean of the School of Cultural and Social Studies, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai). He grew up in the city of Hiroshima and obtained a Ph.D. at l’Université Paris VII in 1988. Thereafter he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts (1988-1990), later he served as Associate Professor at Mie University (1990-1997), before being appointed to his current position in 1997. His main publications include La Crépuscule de la peinture, Lutte posthume d’Édouard Manet (1997), The Orient of the Painting, from Orientalism to Japonisme (1999), The Painting on the Edge, Studies in Trans-national Asian Modernities (2013). Academic proceedings he has edited include Crossing Cultural Borders (1999), Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts in the 21st Century (2005), Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking (2010). Shigemi Inaga is also co-editor of Vocabulaire de la spatialité japonaise (2013) and recipient of the Suntory Academic Award, Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, Ringa Award for the Promotion of Art Studies (all in 1997) as well as the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Prize (2001). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=-q7DrclRt_M Banished to America - The Anarchist Turn by Alan Antliff Date: 9 February 2018, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In early 1917 Ananda Coomaraswamy arrived in New York from Britain under trying circumstances. Agitation for India’s independence from colonial rule, coupled with his outspoken opposition to Indian involvement in the British war effort, had led the authorities to regard him as a dangerous subversive, better expelled than tolerated. Upon arrival, however, he found a ready audience for his views among New York’s anarchists. Plunging into that milieu, Coomaraswamy would contribute a series of articles to the anarchist Modern School journal and codify his own variation of anarchism for an American audience in The Dance of Siva (1918). Coomarawamy’s involvement in, and impact o,n the movement in America was multifaceted; his concept of 'idealistic individualism' influenced the arts; his calls for 'post-industrial' social transformation resonated with critics of capitalism; his 'cosmopolitan' interpretation of Frederick Nietzsche’s philosophy captured the imagination of theorists; and his anti-colonial condemnation of World War One struck a strong chord among revolutionaries. This paper explored this pivotal moment in Coomarswamy’s career through a rich network of activists, artists, cultural centers and publications. Allan Antliff is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Victoria, Canada. He has authored Joseph Beuys (2014); Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the fall of the Berlin Wall (2007); Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001), and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004). Allan has published on a wide range of topics, including radical pedagogy, post-structuralism, and aesthetics. Currently he serves as art editor for the UK-based journal Anarchist Studies and co-edits the interdisciplinary journal Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. His writings have been translated into numerous languages and he is recognised as one the foremost authorities on the history of anarchism and the arts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=1mL1ZuKQ-KU Stella Bloch, Navigating a Radical Life of Art and Dance, East and West by Kim Croswell Date: 9 February 2018, 3.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Stella Bloch was an artist, dancer, and writer whose emergence on the New York art scene unfolded during tumultuous and exciting times during the later years of World War One. A self-taught artist and performer, Bloch initially drew her inspiration from the revolutionary dancer Isadora Duncan, but also sought out other performers to capture on the page. In 1917, she was attending a recital of the performing duo Roshanara and Ratan Devi where she met Ananda Coomaraswamy. That evening she showed him some of her drawings, which would mark a significant turning point in her life. Coomaraswamy soon became her mentor and her lover. Shortly after meeting Coomaraswamy Bloch made her acquaintanceship with Isadora Duncan’s six proteges, began practicing with them, and drew further studies of the dance from observation and from memory. In 1920, Coomaraswamy invited Bloch to join him on a museum purchasing trip to Japan, China, India, and Indonesia. There, Bloch was inspired by the performance traditions of Java and Bali, where she had an opportunity to closely study the art forms. Upon her return home to New York, she embarked on a new direction as a dancer, now performing in the manner of the Javanese dances she saw while on her journeys. This presentation of Stella Bloch offered an overview of Bloch’s art and dance, as well as an analysis of two texts by Bloch: “Intuitions” published in the Modern School Journal in 1919, and Dancing and the Drama, East and West, a booklet in which Bloch concluded Eastern dances to be superior to those in the West, for their value as cultural traditions rather than as ‘mere’ entertainment. Kim Croswell is an artist and writer currently living in Victoria, Canada. She has a history as a welded steel sculptor and a street puppetista. Her M.A. thesis, The Politics of Dance: Stella Bloch and the Ideal Drama, East and West, analyzed tensions between 'tradition' and 'modernity' in art and dance-drama by comparing the social-political function of the arts in South Asia with Euro-American dance practices. Currently, she is completing a Ph.D. in Leadership, Adult Education, and Community Studies at the University of Victoria, where she is investigating the value of educating for social change utilizing arts-based research practices. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=TcV57kukgYw Ananda Coomaraswamy and Traditionalism by Mark Sedgwick Date: 9 February 2018, 4.20pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy As well as introducing the West to Asian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy also helped introduce the West to Asian religion, not as something remote and distinct from Western religion, but as an instance of that core religious truth that is "the common inheritance of all mankind." Coomaraswamy came to understand common, core religious truth in terms of what the Franco-Egyptian philosopher and metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) called “tradition,” itself a form of the “perennial philosophy” hat had interested Western thinkers and esotericists since the Renaissance. Coomaraswamy in turn changed the understandings of Guénon and of other “Traditionalists,” both by adding a certain academic rigor to their work and by convincing them to accept Buddhism as a valid expression of tradition, along Hindu Vedantism, Islamic Sufism, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. This paper placed Guénon’s Traditionalism within its wider context and examined both Traditionalism’s impact on Coomaraswamy and Coomaraswamy’s impact on Traditionalism. This included an abiding emphasis not only on Buddhism but also on traditional arts, reflected for example in the activities of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, founded in 2004 by Great Britain’s Prince of Wales. Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Before moving to Denmark, he studied at the universities of Oxford and Bergen and taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He works on cultural and religious transfer between the Muslim world, the West, and global transnationalism. His Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century was first published in 2004, and his Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age was published in 2016. He also works on contemporary politics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=2mamyqI-oUk Transformation of Art in Nature by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath Tagore by Samit Das Date: 10 February 2018, 10.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Many years ago, I was surprised at how two bearded Brahmin scholars, namely Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath Tagore, exchanged thoughts on art, nature and time. Since then, my curiosity has evolved towards the philosophies of these two great scholars. I studied at Santiniketan, the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore, where I tried to grasp his ideas about nature and education. Coomaraswamy entered my life much later. My paper explored the idea and philosophy of art and nature in the context of the pre-independence period. I inquired how the ‘modern’ came to be negotiated between these two figures while trying to unpack the historical context as discussed and perceived by Tagore and Coomaraswamy, as I feel their thoughts are relevant today. Coomaraswamy suggested that culture is a living heritage, not something that belongs in a museum. Coomaraswamy’s profound grasp of the twin ideals of harmony and truth in Indian art helped him understand the evolution of Indian culture as a crossing of spiritual tendencies. Yet, he knew very well that the fusion of religious and aesthetic experiences was not exclusively Indian. This resulted in a dialogue between the spiritual traditions of the East and the West. Indeed, Coomaraswamy did not reject Western culture, what he opposed was modern secularism and anti-traditionalism. On the other hand, Rabindranath could see himself as an integral part of nature and could dissolve his innermost self in the elements – earth, water, air. In this state, he no longer perceived the earth merely as earth, or something apart from himself. The flow of water merged with the stream of joy in his soul, and he wrote: “If I be the earth, if I be water If I be a twig, if I be fruits or flowers If I travelled the world and beyond with this One Life There would no cause for care Wherever I go I would find the infinite self in the embrace of the boundless.” Neither of these thinkers believed that art and nature belonged in a museum but attempted to associate the aesthetic closely with everyday life, in which nature too plays an integral part. My presentation also looked at the thoughts of Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita and the way they resonated with art, because without their journey, Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath would not be complete. Samit Das was born in 1970 in Jamshedpur, India and specializes in painting, photography, interactive art works and artist’s books, often creating multi-sensory environments through art and architectural installations. He studied fine arts at Santiniketan Kala Bhavan and thereafter at Camberwell College of Arts. Samit has deep interest in archival and documentation tactics, often in search of newer visual vocabularies. Samit has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at TARQ and Clark House Initiative. One of his key projects has been to document the Tagore House Museum in Kolkata (1999-2001) and develop resonances with Tagore's concept of space in relation to Swami Vivekananda and Nandalal Bose. This resulted in the book Architecture of Santiniketan: Tagore’s Concepts of Space (2013). In 2016, he received the Prohelvetia Grant to research at The Material Archives in Sitterwerk. Most recently, he was awarded the Pernod Ricard Fellowship to work on post-independence Indian artists with Parisian links. Titled ‘Punashcha Parry’, the exhibition was held at Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2017). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=n1uI5dlcOkY 'Who is this Coomaraswamy? Durai Singam's Life Work and the Impossibility of Not Writing' by Simon Soon Date: 10 February 2018, 11.20am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In what ways can the intellectual horizon of the diaspora be triangulated? How do they demonstrate a global connection that is not strictly formed by a movement from East to West? Can this multi-centre story complicate our commonplace understanding of what kind of 'worlding' did historiographical projects produce outside of the academia? This paper considers the life work of Ceylonese Malaysian Durai Raja Singam, who corresponded briefly with the esteemed scholar of Indian art history and curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Ananda K. Cooramaswamy, in the late 1940s. Durai Raja Singam later became one of the most obsessive biographical compiler of Coorasmaswamy’s life and work. Towards this end, he had self-published some of the most idiosyncratic yet valuable books, often filled with memorabilia, photos, excerpts, newspaper clippings, graphs and charts that aimed at preserving for posterity the profile of Cooramaswamy as one of the most renown scholars on Indian art and spirituality, alongside recognition of Coomaraswamy's greatness as a scholar-saint for the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. In this paper I considered Durai Raja Singam’s building of an archive and self-publishing initiatives in relation to the spiritual use of print technology. Though premised on a language of devotion, the life work ultimately attempts to construct an intellectual memory through the use of allegory. In this sense, these publications circulate a form of intellectual, cultural and moral resistance amongst the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora in a time of civil war as ethnic tensions between the Tamil and the Sinhalese communities were heightened following the independence of Sri Lanka. Simon Soon is a researcher and Senior Lecturer in the Visual Art Department of the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya. He completed a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Sydney under an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. His thesis ‘What is Left of Art?’ investigates the spatial-visual cultures at the intersection between left-leaning politicized art movements and the emergent modern publics of Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines from 1950s–1970s. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in the art, urban histories, history of photography and art historiography. He has written on various topics related to 20th century art across Asia and occasionally curates exhibitions, most recently Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond. He is also co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Art Vol. 4. From 2015–16, he is a participant in the Power Institute’s “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” funded by Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. He is also an editorial member of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and a team member at the Malaysia Design Archive, a repository on visual cultures from late 19th century to the present day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=lmWeFGdJ72c Crafting the Nation from Boston and Baroda by Priya Maholay-Jaradi Date: 10 February 2018, 12.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The crafts’ discourse serviced a complex web of imperialist, nationalist and capitalist agendas between the metropole, colony and indirectly-ruled British India from the 1820s to the first half of the twentieth century. The nationalist ideologue within A.K. Coomaraswamy’s writings on Indian art in general and The Indian Craftsman (1909) in particular, furthered two aims: one was to educate the colonial state on the different standards of Indian art; the second was to champion the cause of the disadvantaged artisan by furthering a protectionist discourse to preserve caste-based guild systems and their contexts of production in what was viewed as a coherent, timeless Asian tradition against the aesthetically failed experiments of a rapidly industrialising Britain. For all its emphasis on timelessness, authenticity and anti-industrialism, equally national-minded crusaders such as Maharaja Sayajirao III of Baroda steered the cause of the craftsman with a reformist slant. This paper problematised Coomaraswamy’s writings by juxtaposing Baroda’s pragmatic experiments which yielded an alternative paradigm of traditional crafts, technology and capital. Close archival reading of Baroda State’s polytechnics, workshops and loans to international exhibitions and firms, not only points to a modernising narrative of the crafts but also illuminates Baroda’s participation in a global system of production and taste-making. By underlining a series of ironies and paradoxes, this paper highlighted how protectionism and reform actually co-opted each other in the space of exhibition and publications. Quite contrary to the “Boston-based giant’s” idyllic picture of the craftsman as pre-modern, provincial Baroda demonstrated the craftsman’s readiness to unhinge caste-based categories and participate in new systems of technical education, workshop-style production and metropolitan capital and technologies. Despite their seemingly conflictual strains, in the end, both ideologues, theorised and displayed alternative standards of assessment of Indian (art), craft and design and its adaptive leverage to groom the uneducated European view. Priya Maholay-Jaradi is currently Convenor for Art History Minor, a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore and the National Gallery Singapore. She earned an MA in art history from School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001); a PhD from the National University of Singapore (2012) and a post-doctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2013). Former Curator at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, she has co-curated Portrait of a Community (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2002), Beauty in Asia (Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, 2007), Tautology of Memory (NUS Museum, Singapore, 2012). Jaradi has authored Parsi Portraits from the Studio of Raja Ravi Varma, Mumbai: KR Cama Oriental Institute (2011); Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, Mumbai: Marg Foundation (2015); Fashioning a National Art, Oxford University Press (2016). Panel Discussions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=YWPy8ymbnnY Histories Panel Discussion led by Allan Antliff with panelists Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Nancy Adajania, Swati Chattopadhyay and Shigemi Inaga Date: 9 February 2018, 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=JY46B1x9xuM Panel Discussion led by Swati Chattopadhyay with panelists Samit Das, Simon Soon, and Priya Maholay Jaradi. Date: 10 February 2018, 12.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zCsXI_6cIYxc94L3Xu_9lIo&v=PAY26ZXOD-w Cosmopolitanism, Panel Discussion led by Shigemi Inaga with panelists Allan Antliff, Kim Croswell, and Mark Sedgwick Date: 10 February 2018, 12.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 4 - There Once Was A Village Here Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 4 - There Once Was A Village Here There Once was a Village Here was a Bearing Point that considered what anthropologist Jason Cons describes as “sensitive spaces” – spaces that challenge ideas of nation, state, and territory where cultures exist that do not fit the image that the state has for itself. These spaces, which like many villages, are often razed with its people forced to succumb to the state, subue to its needs, or submit to the domination of majority forces. However, the social fabric of a village often remains intact through oral tradition. South Asian artists have been advocating for these “sensitive spaces” for decades, however this Bearing Point differs in the sense that rather than advancing the visibility of internationally acclaimed and highly networked artists, it provides a space for artists from these communities to join these networks and speak for themselves.When the British carved out Pakistan from an independent India in 1947, creating East and West wings, they created a country only united by its common majority religion, Islam, ignoring the plurality found in Islam’s cultures of worship, as well as the vast cultural contributions that Buddhism and Hinduism lent to Bengal, especially from the perspective of village rituals that inspire much of Bangladeshi modern art. The name Bangla Desh means the land where people speak Bangla (Bengali) and Bangladesh was born in 1971 on the back of the Language Movement in the 1950s where people fought for the right to speak, live, and work in their own language. Linguistic lines offer far more room for cultural diversity than religious ones, however there are 42 other languages spoken within this territory. Bangladesh has recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of its peace accord with the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the cultural ministry remains committed to supporting the visibility of the rich cultures present there. While we enter vastly different landscapes while navigating this exhibition from Thailand in the east to Afghanistan in the west, the plight of the minority cultures tied to these lands shares uncanny similarity as development needs of the state, capitalist greed, and religious fundamentalism seek to mine resources from below the ground these people stand on and erase the religious beliefs which they stand for, often tied to cultures of fear and oppression. These artists bear witness to religious and ecological violence unfolding in their locales, and their work often acts as a register for this trauma. Despite carrying the weight of enormous pain, the deeply poetic practices of these artists are able to create spaces of empathy through which new modes of solidarity might be imagined. Artists Amin Taasha (b. 1995, in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, lives and works in Jogjakarta) secret, 2017 Be quiet, 2017 the battle, 2017 no one talks about, 2017 freedom, 2017 Forgiving, 2017 The beginning, 2017 Watercolour, acrylic, silver and gold leaf on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface Indonesia based artist of Hazara origin Amin Taasha was forced to flee Afghanistan at the age of 18 after being accused of blasphemy resulting from his art practice. He addresses contemporary violence in a region where free passage was once possible via the silk road which stretched from China into his native Bamiyan. Bamiyan was once a bustling centre for Buddhist philosophy, religion and art, as evidenced by the monumental 4th and 5th Century AD Bamiyan Buddha sculptures that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as part of their attempt to remove this history from communal memory. Taasha uses ink techniques that span many Asian influences, from Iran to China, and tries to create landscapes to chronicle memories that risk being forgotten due to growing beliefs in iconoclasm. Taasha uses the scroll format, drawn from Chinese literati painting, in an attempt to imagine a space of co-existence for the many strands of history that create the conflicted identities of his former home. Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979 in Islamabad, lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan) Residue, 2016/2018 Installation of garments with performance courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid Presented here with additional support from Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid. Photographer: Pablo Batholomew and Noor Photoface A large mound of white garments of all shapes and sizes and for all ages and genders lies conspicuously in the exhibition space. Looking closely, the pile begins to slowly disappear as the artist Ayesha Jatoi takes each piece of clothing and folds and stacks it across the room. White is the color of mourning worn to funerals in many cultures of South Asia, and Jatoi’s performance Residue, 2016/2018 is a metaphorically burdened act in uncertain times of putting away the remnants of love, of longing; trying to make sense of the senseless: of what, or who, has been lost. Gauri Gill (b. 1970 in Chandigarh, lives and works in New Delhi) Rajesh Vangad (b. 1975 in Ganjad, Maharasthra; lives and works in Ganjad) Birth to Death, 2016 Sacred Gods, Revered Things, 2016 Archival ink on pigment print Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Fields of Sight (2013-ongoing) is a moving collaborative project between Rajesh Vangad, a traditionally-trained artist from the Warli community of Maharashtra, and Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill. The project investigates the idea of the site as formed by variant cultural practices, and how marginalized groups might occupy stolen landscapes. In both Maharashtra and Gujarat, the Warli community has been the target of dispossession to make way for industrial and energy projects. Gill and Vangad bring to question the politics of landscape as the site through which trauma is registered, drawing attention to the mass displacement of indigenous communities in an effort by governments, working with private corporations, to seize natural resources in the lands of these communities. Multiple points of focus are produced within Gill’s portraits of Vangad, and through Vangad's interventions on Gill's portraits, rejecting any unidirectional act of viewing. Layers of violent imperial history in both colonial and post-colonial periods share a continuum in their treatment of indigenous communities in the process of resource control. Hitman Gurung (b.1986 in Lamjung, lives and works in Kathmandu) This is My Home, My Land and My Country...(I), 2015 Drawing on Digital Print on Archival Fine Art Paper Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface The act of portraiture becomes one of resistance when state and other actors work to deliberately deny or suppress certain communities or identities. Hitman Gurung’s work This is My Home, My Land, and My Country (2015) addresses the conflicted history between the Tharu indigenous community of the Terai region of southern Nepal and the national government. Like many indigenous people around the world, the Tharu consider that they have been denied equal rights and representation, resulting in widespread protests and demands for independence. Gurung presents a series of portraits of members of the community, holding identity cards, where their faces have been bandaged, visualizing the paradox of being identified by the state, while not being recognized by it. Htein Lin (b. 1966 in Ingapu, lives and works in Yangon) Mangrave, 2017 Iron, Charcoal, Monitor, Video Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the Artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Mangrove forests on the coasts of Myanmar and Bangladesh serve as natural bio-guards to the surrounding villages, buffering them against the rising dangers of cyclones and tsunamis in the age of climate change. Mangroves suffer among the highest rate of deforestation in South and Southeast Asia, in part tied to the monoculture of plantations and infrastructure projects such as power plants, but also due to local fuel demands of villages given rising population density. Mangroves are one of the easiest sources of charcoal. In his menacing sculpture crafted from iron and charcoal, Mangrave (2017), Burmese artist Htein Lin warns of impending destruction resulting from making short-term decisions based on convenience and comfort at the grave expense of the environment. Jakkai Siributr (b. 1969 in Bangkok, lives and works in Bangkok) The Outlaw's Flag, 2017 Installation with embroidered found objects and video Courtesy of the artist and H Gallery Bangladesh welcomed over half-a-million Rohingya refugees into its borders in late 2017 who were fleeing years of oppression in Myanmar as Muslim minorities in a place where Buddhist fundamentalism is increasingly accepted. Buddhist fundamentalism is also on the rise in the sangha in Thailand, where the Rohingya refugees migrating eastwards found themselves during the previous crisis of 2015. Jakkai Siributr provides a critical perspective on rising communal tensions and Buddhist-Muslim relations in the region, which have become intensified by the mass movements of populations. Siributr’s The Outlaw’s Flag (2017) consists of subverted flags of imaginary nations, created by a process of embroidering detritus from the beaches of Sittwe in Myanmar and Ranong in Thailand – respectively departure and arrival points of fleeing Rohingya refugees – these flags are hoisted around a video of these seemingly idyllic landscapes. Joydeb Roaja (b. 1973 in Khagrachori, lives and works in Chittagong) Generation-wish-yielding Trees and Atomic Tree, 2017 Pen and ink on paper Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface The militarization of the Chittagong Hill Tracts inspires the work of Chittagong based artist Joydeb Roaja who comes from the indigenous Tripura community. His performance practice inspires the seven intricate black and white drawings from the Generation-wish-yielding Trees and Atomic Tree series (2017), which are in turn activated by a performance on the opening day of DAS 2018. The thought, education, art, literature, and sports of the new generation reflect the fact that weapons were introduced to their visual landscape at a very young age. Roaja’s surreal drawings that fuse his indigenous community and its traditions with imported army equipment register the traces of this violence in his mental landscape of the hill tracts, and seek to invent ways of imagining another form of existence. Kanak Chanpa Chakma (b. 1963 in the Rangamati Hill Tracts; lives and works in Dhaka) Soul Piercing, 2014 acrylic and collaged photography on canvas courtesy of the artist Orange painting: The Fall, 2017 Red: And The Prayer, 2017 Blue: The History That Will Remain, 2017 Green painting: Snatched, 2017 Orange: The Burn, 2017 Red: But Life Will Continue, 2017 Acrylic and collaged photography on canvas Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist Photographer: Noor Photoface Bangladesh has layers of Buddhist history and in 2015 airport signage in the Dhaka international airport welcomed visitors to the catch phrase “home of Buddhist culture,” surprising for a country with a 90% Muslim population. While violence against Muslims and Hindus in Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar is well documented in the international press, there is far less awareness of persecution of Buddhists (and other minorities) in the country. In 2012 in Southern Bangladesh, someone set up a fake Facebook account under a Buddhist name, and posted an image of a burning koran, inciting mob violence where over 25,000 people mobilised against Buddhist communities, destroying 12 Buddhist temples and over 50 houses in the process, now known as the Ramu Incident. Kanak Chanpa Chakma created a series in 2014 that collaged photographic documentation of the incident and newspaper clippings against imagery of the peaceful Buddhist architecture that growing hate and division in society tried to destroy. We invited Kanak to continue this series for DAS 2018, not anticipating that a similar incident would occur later on June 2, 2017 in the village of Longadu, Rangamati, which left the community devastated with over 300 houses torched. Kanak comes from the Buddhist community that was targeted in both of these incidents, and she shares that “my paintings bring to focus the ongoing cycle of intolerance and aggression against Bangladeshis of different faiths or ethnicity. This is, in my rawest form, an urge for peace.” Khadim Ali (b. 1978 in Quetta, lives and works between Sydney and Kabul) The Arrivals 2, 2017 Inkjet, gouache, and gold leaf on hahnemuhle paper courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery The Arrivals 4, 2017 Inkjet, goache, and gold leaf on hahnemuhle paper courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery Photographer: Noor Photoface Born of Afghan Hazara parentage now living in Australia, Khadim Ali grew up on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and works in the miniature tradition, chronicling the plight of his culture and community who have been oppressed for centuries, even more so recently under the Taliban as a minority and Shia Muslim community. Biographically tied to his family’s experiences as refugees, as well as those of other communities around them, The Arrivals series places Rustom, the hero of the 10th Century epic poem Shahnamah (The Book of Kings) that charts the mythical history of Persia, in the plight of the refugee, placing him in a landscape of limbo adorned with motifs from Australian passport pages. Reflecting on this series, the artist states: War produces innumerable wounds, leaving scars of destruction that are carried through generations. It destroys and deconstructs societies and disrupts the sphere of time. In its displacement by war, the human body becomes the site of trauma and loss. It is exposed to harsh environments and a torrid political atmosphere. This displaced body has a name: refugee. The effects of the refugee’s fragmented journey of displacement differ from person to person. But in almost every case, the inner spirit is numbed, forcing memories to be forgotten. The smell of home, the scent of love, the delicacy of identity and the fluency of language are all erased by the trauma of loss. In our time, political circumstances and misrepresentation has painted these displaced souls as being beyond humanity. Even though they are merely attempting to escape the catastrophe of war, they are portrayed as demons (that is beings other than human) who threaten the social order. In doing this, our society represents the forlorn hope of human beings who have endured the very limits of survival, ignoring that they seek little more than peace. Yet what is at stake in how we treat them is not just their humanity, it is ours. Munem Wasif (b.1983 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka) Seeds Shall Set Us Free, 2016-2018 (ongoing) Cyanotype prints on acid free paper Courtesy of the artist and Project88. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Munem Wasif seeks to reimagine an indigenous “ecosophical” mode of agriculture, where grain is a companion species to humanity, having names, deities and spirits, around which the village organizes itself. He investigates the cultural history of grain, connected to memories of the 1944 Bengal famine. Seeds Shall Set Us Free (2017) is a series of cyanotype prints of rice seeds, referencing at once both scientific representation and the traditional practice of alpona, the Bengali tradition of creating ritual floor paintings using rice paste. The artist excavates layers of ecological colonialism from the destruction of agricultural ecologies with the introduction of plantation farming and cash crops. Indigo was one such cash crop, alluded to in Wasif’s use of bright blue hues in his cyanotypes. Agriculture moved away from the subsistence needs of the local communities as it was harnessed towards sustaining flows of capital with the introduction not only of crop monocultures, but also of genetically modified seeds, producing cycles of debt that lead to dispossession and displacement. Nilima Sheikh (b. 1954 in New Delhi, lives and works in Baroda) Construction Site, 2009-2010 Casein tempera on canvas Courtesy of Chemould Prescott Road Presented here with additional support from Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay. Photographer: Pablo Batholomew Nilima Sheikh creates an almost magical universe where rivers are woven and leaves clothe the towering figure of Lal Ded, the 14th Century Kashmiri saint and mystical poet whose vakh (spoken poems) occupy a significant space in the construction of a Kashmiri identity across religious lines. Construction Site (2009-2010) examines the layers of cultural history that produce an idea of the landscape of Kashmir. On the front face of the painting, we see a broken city, alluding to the Indian army’s occupation of Srinagar, being reconstructed by its citizens – using imagery drawn from Indian and Persian miniatures that she renders in the muted colours of Kashmiri textiles. She weaves these references together with texts from historical sources such as Kashmir chronicler Kalhana’s 12th Century Rajatarangini and excerpts from Lal Ded’s poetry, found on the back of the painting. Sheikh’s expansive use of washes pays tribute to the adoption of the technique by Abanindranath Tagore (whose work can be seen within Raqib Shaw’s adjacent presentation), whose pan-Asian vision imagined a modernity oriented eastwards. Using the form of the scroll, an oblique reference to Chinese scroll paintings and the patachitra painting of Bengal, Sheikh argues for the performativity of the narration of history. Pablo Bartholomew (b. 1955 in New Delhi, lives and works in New Delhi) Untitled, 2017-2018 (ongoing) Photographs, woven textiles, video Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Through several bodies of work created with indigenous communities in Northeast India, Pablo Bartholomew has observed that these communities wear their cultural DNA through their clothing, ornamentation and markings on their bodies; codes that they keep as a form of self identity. With a father hailing from Burma and mother who is of partial Bengali origin, Bartholomew traces in his newly commissioned project (a work in progress as part of a longer ongoing cross-border inquiry) the links between geographically fractured indigenous communities/ethnic minorities in Myanmar, India, and Bangladesh. Working within the Chakma community into which he is related from his mother’s side, he extends the scope of his practice by working with weavers. The artist asked these artisans to use their traditional idioms on back-strap looms (carried on the body through periods of migration) to weave graphic DNA patterns the imagery rendered through scientific testing. Through this project Bartholomew hopes to weave together science, myth, legend and tradition, exploring a cross border ethnic identity. Prabhkakar Pachpute (b. 1986 in Chandrapur, lives and works in Mumbai) The Resistance Movement, 2017 Charcoal and acrylic on canvas Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation Presented here with additional support from Experimenter, Kolkata. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew Hailing from the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, a major site of coal mining in India, and belonging to a family who have worked as miners for generations, Prabhakar Pachpute imagines a landscape where the people of the land can hold onto their own resources and dignity in his surreal charcoal drawings on mill-produced cloth. The use of mill cloth ties Pachpute materially to the history of labour movements in Mumbai led by unions of textile mill workers. In The Resistance Movement, 2017, the artist creates fantastical labouring bodies, alluding to the effects that working in the toxic atmospheres of mines has on these workers, who must invent new modes of living with and inhabiting landscapes. Raqib Shaw (b. 1974 in Calcutta, lives and works in London) Generously supported by White Cube and the Arts Council England. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw, White Cube, Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth, the University of Manchester and the Bangladesh National Museum. Co-curated by Diana Campbell, Chief Curator of Dhaka Art Summit and Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation, Dr Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, and the artist. This exhibition is part of the New North and South, a network of eleven arts organisations from across South Asia and the North of England in a three-year programme of co-commissions, exhibitions and intellectual exchanges. The network consists of Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Colombo Art Biennale, (Sri Lanka), Karachi Biennale and Lahore Biennales (Pakistan), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India), Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth, Manchester Museum, Liverpool Biennial, The Tetley, Leeds (UK) and the British Council. Photographer: Noor Photoface Raqib Shaw’s paintings present a landscape of the imagination, bringing together a remembered Kashmir, his extraordinary studio in Peckham, London, and a passionate engagement with the history of Eastern and Western art. Born in Calcutta to Muslim parents, raised in Kashmir (a historically Buddhist territory), and educated by Hindu teachers at a Christian school, celebration of plurality and difference is core to the artist’s work and to the Kashmiri culture that fundamentalism strives to quash. Shaw’s meticulous attention to detail creates a surface of theatrical extravagance that draws on Renaissance architecture, Japanese prints and Hindu iconography. This complex imaginary space is populated by extreme re-workings of myths, gods, animals and humans as fantasies of excess through which the artist reflects back his own status as post-colonial subject and plays back ‘the oriental’ to both West and East for very different political, sexual and emotional purposes. This is the artist’s first major presentation in South Asia, and the newly commissioned wallpaper speaks to Shaw’s love of fairy tales and his use of motifs of tumbling coins and mythic creatures create an intense domestic disruption in the public spaces of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, where close inspection reveals the lush beauty of the decorative as turbulent and disturbing. Together with his paintings the wallpaper forms the backdrop to the display of historic collections, drawn together by the artist from his own collection, the Whitworth, Bangladesh National Museum, The Collection of Aysha and Shahab Sattar and the Samdani Art Foundation collection. Totemic objects such as the 19th century Kashmir shawl, Japanese woodblock prints, a rose water sprinkler and cloisonné charger map his cultural references and shape a new context in which we can read his work. Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (b. 1988 in Colombo, lives and works in Sydney) Idols, 2016-2018 Earthenware, Glaze, Bronze, Cotton, Resin, Shells, Rubber Snakes, Human Hair and Concrete Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace, Sydney for DAS 2018 with support from the Australia Council for the Arts Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Artspace Sydney, and Sullivan + Strumpf Co-curated by Diana Campbell, Alexie Glass-Kantor, and Michelle Newton Photographer: Noor Photoface Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran fled Sri Lanka at the age of one with his Tamil Hindu father and Christian Burgher mother, escaping religious and ethnic persecution during the civil war. While he himself is not religious, the artist felt naturally drawn to the temple where he learned about a polytheistic view of the world, with multi-gendered gods who could change forms. Nithiyendran noticed that there were not very many public monuments in existence that celebrated non-White or non-Colonial figures, and by considering temple iconography and Brutalist architecture, which captivated his imagination in terms of scale and authority, the artist tried to envision a different kind of way of memorializing people who slip through the cracks of what is considered acceptable. While homosexuality remains illegal in most of South Asia due to draconian British laws, the recognition of multiple genders has gained legal standing due to complex indigenous understandings of gender. Nithiyendran’s work references totems and indigenous clay toys, found in villages around South Asia, attempting to create a mythology of a post-gender world, over which his towering figures preside. In this newly commissioned body of work, Nithiyendran creates 21st Century deities in drag, whose dripping multi-coloured glazes pay homage to the famously colourful festivals of South Asia such as Holi and Pohela Boishakh. Soe Yu Nwe (b. 1989 in Yangon, lives and works in Yangon) On Ghost, 2016 Sagger fired ceramics with sand, salt, underglaze and oxides, cone 10 Courtesy of the artist and Myanm/ Art Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Burmese sculptor Soe Yu Nwe chronicles her own need for protective space in the increasingly repressive environment of Myanmar that embraces Buddhist fundamentalism in her haunting ceramic installation On Ghost, 2016. Referencing the animist traces of Burmese culture found in spirit houses built around sacred trees, the artwork, weighed down by tangles of chains, evokes the violent tension that greed creates between nature, body, and spirit in a sinuous and violent form evoking an ashen sense of loss. Shahid Sajjad (b. 1936 in Muzaffarnagar, British India, d. 2014, Karachi) Hostage II, 1992-1993 Smoked Persian Lilac Courtesy of the Estate of Shahid Sajjad Hostage IV, 1992-1993 Smoked Mulberry Courtesy of Shezi Nackvi Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew The immaculate wood carving technique found in Shahid Sajjad’s Hostage II and Hostage IV (1992-1993) express the fear and state of limbo that indigenous communities have historically endured in the Rangamati Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The artist lived with indigenous communities in Indonesia to learn carving techniques and later had a profound encounter with Paul Gaugin’s Tahitian body of work while traveling in Paris, experiences which sparked his interest in indigenous modes of representation in South Asia in the 1960s. The artist lived in Rangamati from 1965-67, spending two years working with its native wood species and learning wood smoking techniques from the communities there. Inspired by animist and sufi traditions in the region, Sajjad tried to release the spirit of the wood and draw out its hidden mystic qualities. The Hostage series, made nearly three decades after his life in Rangamati, transforms foreign Persian Lilac and Mulberry wood to further draw out the pain inflicted on indigenous ways of life and nodes of knowledge. This series was exhibited soon after it was made in Bangladesh at the the Third Asian Art Biennale in 1993. Sonia Jabbar (born 1964, in Calcutta; lives and works in Darjeeling) Granted Under Fear, 2009 2 channel video with sound Courtesy of the artist One of the cruelest ways of keeping society “under control” is through the practice of enforced disappearances, where a family lives in suspense not knowing whether their loved one is alive or dead, and forced into submission in hopes of bringing them back. According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, around 8,000 to 10,000 cases of enforced disappearances have been reported in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989. Artist and activist Sonia Jabbar’s haunting two-channel video Granted Under Fear (2009) places side by side the haunting sound of military bagpipes, an echo from colonial era marching bands, with the frightening image of stomping army boots in a military parade alongside documentation of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers holding pictures of their missing relatives. Veer Munshi (b. 1955 in Srinagar, lives and works in New Delhi) Leaves like Hands of Flame, 2010 Two channel video with sound Courtesy of the artist and Latitude 28 Veer Munshi’s two-channel video, Leaves Like Hands of Flame (2010) juxtaposes images of the burnt-out houses of Kashmiri pundits in Srinagar, with a video of the artist walking laboriously through the snow. Munshi’s departure from the Kashmir Valley to work in New Delhi coincided with the forced mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus due to rising communal tensions in the 1990s. The Kashmir valley is one of the most militarized zones in the world today and the Indian government has often been accused of using the trauma of exiled Kashmiri pundits to justify cruel measures of repression against those agitating for an independent Kashmir. Finally able to return home in 2008, Munshi attempts to reclaim this trauma, creating a slow, contemplative space to imagine modes of living with difficult histories as he walks through the desolate snowy landscape to the home he once inhabited, now in ruins.

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 La Biennale di Venezia - 56th International Art Exhibition 9th May - 22nd November 2015 Dhaka Art Summit 2014 Solo Project Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen and Indian artist group Raqs Media Collective were selected to show their works in the centre pavilion, supported by the Samdani Art Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS Workshop and Presentation with Tori Wranes 7 - 8 April 2015 Leading Norwegian artist Tori Wranes, who has performed at the Sydney Biennial and Performa in New York, along with her assistant Gustav Gunvaldsen, conducted one day workshop with the 15 participant artists using 8 rikshaws. Tori and her group created a wonderful ballet riding rikshaws in the South Plaza of Shilpakala Academy. She also gave her artist presentation during the closing ceremony on 8th.

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

ALL PROJECTS Solo Art Projects Curated by Diana Campbell Amanullah Mojadidi (b. 1971, Jacksonville, USA, lives and works in Paris, France) Untitled Garden #1 , 2015-2016 Neon, wood, stone and grass Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Jenni Carter Untitled Garden #1 by Amanullah Mojadidi opens up a space to think about the role misunderstandings play in shaping history and the way we view our place in the world. Neon Katakana Japanese characters in this garden spell the word Mu, referring to a state of “nothingness” or “nonbeing” in Zen Buddhism. Mu, however, is also the name of what several pseudoscientists believed was the lost continent and civilisation of Mu, a white race civilisation that fell into the ocean but whose descendants became the great early cultures around the world, including in India. The neon crown in the garden refers to a sacred symbol of this lost Kingdom of Mu, representing "The Lands of the West." In this work, the Japanese definition of Mu is a place with an absence of desire; the second symbol of Mu illustrates what happens with the human desire to explain what they cannot understand. Mojadidi’s Zen Garden explores the hidden dangers of how Eurocentric institutions present themselves as “discoverers” of art from conflicted/developing countries, and creates parallels between the colonial anthropologist discovering the noble savage in exotic lands and the Western curator discovering the noble artist in equally exotic locales. Mojadidi takes a sarcastic approach toward the Afghan and American culture that he comes from, and stereotypes surrounding identity and the capitalism around conflict. “We are all at conflict,” shares Mojadidi, “Whether with others or ourselves, with our own ideas, thoughts, desires, history, present, future. We are all at conflict as we try and navigate ourselves through a life we understand only through our experiences, through our confrontation both internal and external with social, political, cultural, and personal strife.” Ayesha Sultana (b. 1985, Jessore, Bangladesh lives and works in, Dhaka, Bangladesh) A Space Between Things, 2015-2016 Iron, plaster, wire mesh, glass, glue, paint, concrete, aluminium, copper, wood, brass and fabric Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation and Experimenter Photographer: Jenni Carter Ayesha Sultana’s newly commissioned solo project, A Space Between Things, is an ongoing exploration referencing the theme of landscape that threads much of her practice. Sultana works in intimate proximity to the material around her, sensitively reconfiguring it and adding to the potential energy that lies in the space between function and dysfunction. The artist playfully sculpts material culled from found and reclaimed objects, revealing the transitory and fragile nature of our natural and built surroundings, signifying and revealing distance, movement and space. She draws the viewer into the curiosity she has for the process of making and reconfiguring, and creates an enhanced sense of suspense relating to the possible changes the work could undergo over time through the hand of the artist or through the hands of time. Key ideas of transience, contact, balance, weight, and collapse manifest in gestural arrangements that Sultana creates with materials such as wood, metal, mylar, fabric, plaster, stone and glass. Sultana is interested in the duality and coexistence of the material and the immaterial. She strives to free her work from its very rooted and specific Bangladeshi context into a fluid and wide-ranging space, where the work can be set loose within its own parameters. For example, a vertical metal form could vaguely refer to early inspiration of viewing classical architectural structures such as columns and ancient obelisks. The individual works can maintain an interest in a nondescript condition even as particular references are apparent. This is a project that needs to be navigated spatially, and experienced in relation to the scale of the body, a space where transformation and understanding happen not from the description, but rather from experience, which the artist creates through the convergence of will and chance as she intervenes with found and made objects using time as a malleable medium. It is a celebration of what is possible when you allow experience to draw your mind to conclusions, rather than relying on the human tendency to come to a situation with preconceived definitions. Through sound, drawing, sculpture and photography, Jessore-born and Dhaka-based artist Ayesha Sultana considers the poetics of space and the relationship between material and process in notions of making. Within the context of drawing, her practice in the recent past has been an investigation into the rudiments of form through architectural constructions, often derivative of the landscape and attempting to peer into what is out of view. Counter tendencies of movement and stability are also evident as an attempt to generate emptiness by filling up the surface. Through other elemental gestures and implications of plotting, measuring and erasure, merging and filling-in, Sultana makes an otherwise fractured image. Sultana was the winner of the 2014 Samdani Art Award and was featured as one of ArtReview’s “Future Greats” in 2015. She is a member of the Britto Arts Trust and a graduate of Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b. 1979, London, UK, lives and works in London, UK) (featuring drawings by Kavinda Silva & Prageeth Manohansa) When Platitude Become Form, 2016 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and the Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Jenni Carter Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist who manipulates the processes through which art is distributed. He takes as his materials some of the cultural consequences of the economic liberalisation that followed the end of Sri Lanka’s 25-year civil war in 2009. Through what is now called terrorism and genocide, this civil war was waged between Hindu Tamil separatists (popularly known as Tamil Tigers) who wanted to establish a homeland called Tamil Eelam in the Northeast of the Island and the Buddhist Sinhalese Majority Sri Lankan government. ‘Peacetime’allows for tourism and aspirations of a comfortable future to flourish, and art galleries and design shops have been opening over the past six years and the cultural industries are growing with fashion weeks, biennales, and other festivals. Thomas purchases artworks from the island’s contemporary art scene and reconfigures or reframes them for international circulation. Incorporating these original artworks into his own compositions, Thomas exploits the gap between what's considered contemporary in two different art markets and the gap between his family's own origins and his current context as a London based artist with access to the global networks of the contemporary art world. Taking this idea a step further, the artist is launching a brand called New Eelam that imagines the future of citizenship in an age of technologically accelerated globalisation. It is a speculative proposal based on a reinterpretation of the political philosophies of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. How would history have unfolded if the Tigers had manipulated the mechanics of global capital better than their enemy? This proximal sci-fi proposition speculates on how a nation might be reimagined without a territory and on how a corporation might be constituted as a state. Dayanita Singh (b.1961, New Delhi) Museum of Chance, 2014 Book object, edition of 352 Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface 'While I was in London I dreamed that I was on a boat on the Thames, which took me to the Anandmayee Ma ashram in Varanasi. I climbed the stairs and found I had entered the hotel in Devigarh. At a certain time I tried to leave the fort but could not find a door. Finally I climbed out through a window and I was in the moss garden in Kyoto." Dayanita Singh's Musuem of Chance is a book about how life unfolds, and asks to be recorded and edited, along and off the axis of time. The inscrutably woven photographic sequence of Singh's Go Away Closer has now grown into a labyrinth of connections and correspondences. The thread through this novel like web of happenings is that elusive entity called Chance. It is Chance that seems to disperse as well as gather fragments or clusters of experience, creating a form of simultaneity that is realised in the idea and matter of the book, with its interlaced or parallel timeless and patterns of recurrence and return. Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, London) The National Apavilion of Then and Now, 2011 LED, foam and sound Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London. Photographer: Noor Photoface Haroon Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music, and draws into question the categorisation of cultural forms. The National Apavilion of Then and Now , 2011 lined with dark grey sound-insulating pyramidal foam, is an anechoic chamber in which neither light nor sounds is reflected. At the centre, hanging from the ceiling, there is a ring of white LED lights, reminiscent of nimbus effects. After a period of total darkness, the LEDs grow progressively brighter, accompanied by an also ever more enhancing buzzing sound, which abruptly stop, plunging the room in darkness once more, until the cycle starts again. The work evokes intense physical experiences of the perception of sound, light, space and time that seem to echo across the past and future of the universe. The light in this work is reminiscent of a halo, a form used to connote being outside or above the physical human realm. Like many of the other works in the exhibition, Mirza's work rejects recording or representation that limits its complexity; it must be physically felt to be experienced. The work draws parallels between the electrical wiring of circuits and the body; Mirza proposes a third space between seeing and hearing. where imperceptible waves of sound and light draw attention to the role of perception in shaping our view of reality and how we access knowledge. Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, USA, lives and works in Santa Fe, USA, New York, USA, Kastelorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India) Wire, Kozo paper, phosphorescent pigments and acrylic Courtesy of the artist and VAGA, New Work. Photographer: Jenni Carter Over the past fifty years, Lynda Benglis has divided her time between studios in New York and Santa Fe in the United States of America, Ahmedabad in India and Kastelorizo in Greece, with each diverse location having subtle, yet discernible, influences on her work. Reflecting on her over thirty year experience in India, Benglis shares that she was always exploring “how form is discovered through texture, through movement; form is movement… I felt very much at home [in India]… because there is a sense of the “spirit” of natural form and inspired texture, and it occurs in art, architecture, music and dance.” Benglis is known for her radical re-visioning of painting and sculpture in her innovative and prolific practice, seeking a more sensuous kind of surface. Benglis explores how what we see influences our body, a concept known as “proprioception”. “We experience something in our bodies that is proprioceptic; we experience it in our whole body – you feel what you see and you are ‘charged.’ It’s an exchange of energy.”2 Benglis presents seven new cast paper sculptures created especially for the Dhaka Art Summit, reference her wax and glitter works from the 1960s and 1970s. These handmade paper forms are sculpted over chicken wire, a common element in the visual landscape of South Asia, with glimpses of colour and sparkle that are informed by the artist’s formative years in Louisiana and her life in India: each with their rich festival cultures, such as Mardi Gras and Holi. Chicken wire has allowed Benglis to co-opt the grid harnessed by modernism and minimalism and transform it into a fluid and amorphous form that is fully her own. Walking further into the project, seven similar forms emerge from the dark in a second room, glowing from Benglis’s painterly work with phosphorescent materials. Through these fourteen works, Benglis creates a physical moment in a space, and writer Marina Cashdan draws connections between the phosphorescent work and the colours that people often experience in deep meditation, connecting physical movements of breath that become visual forms inside the body. Lynda Benglis is recognised as one of the most important living North-American artists. A pioneer of a form of abstraction in which each work is the result of materials in action — poured latex and foam, cinched metal, dripped wax — Benglis has created sculptures that eschew minimalist reserve in favour of bold colours, sensual lines, and lyrical references to the human body. But her invention of new forms with unorthodox techniques also displays a reverence for cultural references tracing back to antiquity. Benglis has received numerous awards and her works are held in leading institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London and the Guggenheim, New York and she has recently exhibited in major career survey exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the New Museum, New York; Storm King, New York and the Hepworth Wakefield, UK. Munem Wasif (b. 1983, Comilla lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Land of the Undefined Territory, 2015 26 Digital Photographs and three channel HD black and white video with stereo sound, 20min 16 sec Project debut at the Dhaka Art Summit 2016 with partial production support from Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Munem Wasif’s haunting series of photographs and three-channel video of an undefined land elucidates the dialectic relationship between a land and its identity, an identity at risk given the relatively new concept of the nation state and of the environmental effects of man’s “progress” post the industrial revolution. Situated on the edge of a blurred boundary of Bangladesh and India, the mundane, almost extra-terrestrial land hides human interaction with its surface and exposes ever-changing curves with Wasif’s repetitive frames. It seems that frames rarely move from each other, slowing down time and motion and blurring the character of a land, disassociating it from its political and geographical identity. This Solo Project, entitled Land of the Undefined Territory questions the identity of a land that is tied to a specific political and geographic context, but which could also be anywhere, as Wasif displaces the viewer from space and time. Wasif’s dispassionate and systematic approach in this series mimics that of an investigation, topographic study, geological survey or a mere aesthetic query, however his technique of using look-alike frames and ambient sounds overcomes the optical unconscious of the camera and evokes elusive feelings and absurd sensitivity in the viewer. The chosen area of land in this series is a mere observer of nearly a hundred years of land disputes, which saw colonization, 1947’s divide of the Indian subcontinent and mass-migration with Partition, and 1971’s liberation war of Bangladesh which created the current border tension with the neighbouring country, India. Absence of any profound identity for its existence never diminishes its presence, and its body carries the wound of aggressive industrial acts, such as stone collection and crushing. This land belongs to no one, and is thus exploitable by anyone motivated to avail of the land’s unlikely riches. As hills and mountains are cut away to mine the material needed to build Bangladesh’s roads, the communities who have lived on the land for thousands of years become alien to it, as they can no longer identify their community by natural markers. In his video, Wasif captures suspended motions by not moving the camera and by recording predominantly still objects, enhancing the sense of timeless limbo that has now come to define this land, and potentially elsewhere in the future. Mustafa Zaman (b. 1968, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Lost Memory Eternalised, 2015-2016 Digital Print on paper Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Exhibit320, New Delhi. Photographer: Jenni Carter Mustafa Zaman’s Solo Project Lost Memory Eternalised is an unauthorised retelling of the past, revealed after readjusting the lens to the events in the lives of human beings on Earth – where the human condition(s) shaped by history leaves us in awe of the events that make up our experiential domains, giving rise to moments of epiphany and other forms of awakening, which cannot be explained away. Images can be read in the context of their time and place and also in their relationship to eternity. The artist emphasises the latter relationship by overlaying found images with honey, enhancing the sense of transcendence/timelessness inherent in each image, but leaving a symbolic residue of dead ants that speaks to a collective disillusionment, citing a sense of loss which often colours our perception of time. With the intrusion of an additional substance (i.e. honey with dead ants), the historicity of the source images is destabilized. They now invite touching and enforce a renewal of vision. Each image serves as a cue to a larger universe or existential realm, consistently changing under the forces of creation and destruction. Each image primes us to look at how individual desire, and resulting disillusionment, shape both individual and collective history. Po Po (b. 1957, Pathien, Myanmar, lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar) VIP Project (Dhaka) 2014-2015 Photographs and video Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Jenni Carter The self-taught pioneer in Burmese contemporary art, Po Po describes his photography not as a visual record, but as a means to reflect his thoughts regarding political, social and cultural concerns. In 2010, Po Po created his first “VIP Project” in Yangon, placing VIP signs in public bus stops across the city. South Asia has a deeply entrenched “VIP Culture” where certain individuals are given preferential treatment as “Very Important People” – even in the public sector with special entrances in airports, parking spaces, and other basic facets of daily civic life. Standing across the street from bus stops, Po Po took a series of photographs and videos documenting the reactions of people to the signs —in nearly all cases, the commuters saw the sign as more important than them, yielding their seats to the signs, demonstrating their thoughts of their place in society as not as important as anonymous and invisible others who may or may not arrive. Politics play a key role in shaping one’s view of their place in the world. Five years after his first VIP project, Po Po created the second chapter in Dhaka, a city with a similar social VIP culture and historically under the same British rule as Yangon, but with a different political history of over forty years of democracy as opposed to Myanmar’s over five decades of military rule. While the reactions of the public seem similar in the video and photographic documentation across Yangon and Dhaka, the Bangladesh political scenario opened up the possibility for a few members of the public to think of Po Po’s intervention as a joke. This reaction never occurred in the Myanmar intervention, as choice of interpretation of public signage was not an option. Prabhavathi Meppayil (b. 1965, lives and works in Bangalore, India) Dp/Sixteen/Part One,2015-2016 Wood, copper and gesso Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation and PACE, London Photographer: Jenni Carter Entering the central hall of the Dhaka Art Summit, Prabhavathi Meppayil unsettles the viewer by turning the room upside down, creating an immersive installation which displaces the negative space of the coffered ceiling outside the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and placing it inside the floor of the building. Meppayil’s art practice draws on traditional cra and values the truth of materials and tools as well as simple forms, colours and shapes. Coffered ceilings are an ancient and universal element of architecture. In her installation dp sixteen (2015-2016) Meppayil creates movement between the floor and ceiling, outside and inside. She creates a subtle phenomenological experience of an architecture connected to an infinite grid of cubes. In his analysis of Meppayil’s work, Benjamin Buchloh points out that grids are possibly the most basic principle of modernist abstraction, and also panels for tantric meditation. He continues that “Meppayil’s paintings seem to be driven by a latent desire to leave behind the parameters of pictorial space and its supporting surfaces, reaching for an ultimate sublimation of the painterly rectangle in a numinous architectural space.” Meppayil transforms her “painterly rectangles” through meditatively applying white gesso, a material used in most of her work since 2009 that is traditionally used to prime wooden surfaces for later layers of paint. Through her choice of materials, the artist extends painting into the space of architecture, where wood, grids, layers, wiring, and primed surfaces create environments for us to inhabit. Her intervention simultaneously creates order and disorder in the exhibition space, and reminds the viewer to consider the seen and unseen elements creating our sense of being in the world. Sandeep Mukherjee (b. 1964, Pune, India, lives and works in Los Angeles, USA) The Sky Remains, 2015-2016 14 panels of acrylic ink and embossed drawing on duralene (wall) 1000 panels of acrylic ink and carved drawing on plywood (floor) Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Project 88, Mumbai. Photographer: Jenni Carter Possession and dispossession, displacement and debt—it seems that the stories that condition our present are inextricably born out of the stories that conditioned our past. The first of four special issues of South as a State of Mind, temporarily reconfigured as the documenta 14 journal, examines forms and figures of displacement and dispossession, and the modes of resistance—aesthetic, political, literary, biological—found within them. In essays, both literary and visual, as well as poems, speeches, diaries, conversations, and specially commissioned artist projects, the first issue of the d14 South considers dispossession as a historical and contemporary condition along with its connections to archaeology and the city, coloniality and performativity, debt and imperialism, provenance and repatriation, feminism and protest. To launch the inaugural issue of the d14 South, documenta 14 has organized a series of public events—in Athens, Kassel, Berlin, Dhaka, and Kolkata—that bring the disparate voices of the journal, as well as those outside of it, into conversation in cities across the world. This February, South goes to Bangladesh and India for two launch events. The first will be held in Dhaka on February 6, the second in Kolkata on February 10. For the Dhaka launch at the Dhaka Art Summit, in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, documenta 14 Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk and Editor-in-Chief of Publications Quinn Latimer will present the first issue of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind, reading from and expanding on its diverse explorations of both contemporary and historical forms of displacement and dispossession. In addition, they will elaborate on forthcoming issues of the d14 South, which are variously devoted to ideas of language and ecology, post-colonialism and neoclassicism, and the rich relationship among pedagogical, performative, and political processes. South as a State of Mind is a magazine founded by Marina Fokidis in Athens in 2012. Beginning in 2015, the magazine temporarily became the documenta 14 journal and will publish four semiannual special issues until the opening of the exhibition in Athens and Kassel in 2017. These special issues are edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk. The documenta 14 South is conceived as a medium for research, criticism, art, and literature that parallels the years of work on the d14 exhibition overall, one that helps define and frame its concerns and aims. As such, the journal is a manifestation of documenta 14 rather than a discursive lens through which to merely presage the topics to be addressed in the eventual exhibition. Writing and publishing, in all their forms, are an integral part of documenta 14, and the journal heralds that process. Through this collaboration with documenta 14, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts continues its multi-faceted role in actively supporting and disseminating arts and culture publishing, as well as critical theory. This launch event is hosted at Harrington Street Arts Centre, where Seagull has previously organized several events and exhibitions, including a forthcoming solo show by K. G. Subramanyan, titled Sketches, Scribbles, Drawings. Shakuntala Kulkarni (b.1950, Dharwad) Of Body, Armour and Cages, 2012-2015 Cane and four channel video with sound (Julus) Courtesy of the artist and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. Photo credit: Jenni Carter and Noor Photoface Walking into Shakuntala Kulkarni’s solo project, the viewer is confronted with an army of five figures sculpted from traditional cane weaving practices from the eastern part of South Asia. On closer inspection, references of Xi An Terracotta Warriors, Bollywood superheroes, hairstyles from Roman and Hellenic times, and Viking warrior plaits harness the imagination away from any one particular time and place to address the timeless issue of how to exist as an individual in a world that encroaches on individual rights, especially the individual rights of a women. These sculptures come to life through kulkarni’s newest work Julus, an immersive four channel video work where a procession of the multiple selves of the artist storm the space and demand attention, freedom, and respect. Shakuntala Kulkarni is a Bombay based multidisciplinary artist and activist whose work is primarily concerned with the plights of urban women who are often held back due to patriarchal expectations. By placing her sculptures over her body, the artist dictates where the viewer’s gaze will lie, reclaiming power away from the viewer and allowing herself to be looked at on her own terms. “The bodied self can be insulted, subjugated, incarcerated, curbed by religious decree, dictatorial whim or popular sentiment. It can be deprived of the rights of mobility and expression… An armoured body can extend its capabilities through the mailed fist, the spiked helmet, the radiation-proof bodysuit, or heightened fight/flight reflexes. But the body pays for this protection with its freedom. The armour becomes a cage. The self becomes prosthetic: protected by, yet trapped within, an exoskeleton,” writes Ranjit Hoskote. This tension between the power and the vulnerability of the body creates a powerful artistic statement, as does the social commentary when the artist takes her armour out into public space in india. If she can choose to wear a dress of velvet, why can she not choose to wear a dress. Shumon Ahmed (b. 1977, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Land of the Free, 2009-2016 Video (looped), photographic print on archival paer, 30 sec VR goggles with extreme isolation headphones with sound and video, 1 min 30 sec Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Project 88, Mumbai. Photographer: Jenni Carter Shumon Ahmed’s Solo Project builds upon a prior body of work, Land of the Free, which immerses the viewer into the delicate continuum between sanity and madness that shapes an individual from within. “Reason, or the ratio of all that we have already known,” wrote William Blake in 1788, “is not the same that it shall be when we know more.” This ratio is delicate, and our minds naturally fight to keep equilibrium that anchors us to a sense of reality. Mubarak Hussain Bin Abul Hashem, or ‘enemy combatant number 151’, was flown back home to Dhaka in 2006 after having endured five years of torture and imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay. Through processes of humiliation, sensory overload and deprivation, Mubarak’s sense of self was broken down in an attempt to harvest information against his will, to sever his mind from reason. Ahmed’s project thrusts visitors into the grey spaces of the mind through harnessing torture techniques within the artworks, employing stereoscopic goggles, headphones, and powerful imagery and sound to transform his photographs into a physical experience for the viewer. This project investigates trauma that leads to insanity, and reveals processes designed to crack the human soul. It draws inspiration from W.J.T. Mitchell’s work on “Seeing Madness,” as Ahmed’s images draw us into Mubarak’s compromised senses. The idea of the ‘Land of the Free’ takes on a new meaning as viewers confront an aged Mubarak whose physical body finally finds freedom, but not without permanent mental fog and a lingering sense of displacement resulting from five long years of trauma. Simryn Gill (b. 1959, Singapore, lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia) Ground, 2016 Thread and Paper Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Photographer: Jenni Carter Simryn Gill makes poetic links between art, paper, books, and nature in her work; all begin with seeds that grow roots. The idea of roots can be abstracted into square roots in mathematics, roots of language, roots of belonging, and seeds to seeding ideas and to the ability to traverse manmade ideas of border. Gill shares, “for me, plants and the plant work offer a powerful way to think about where we find ourselves now and how we grow into and adapt to our sense of place. There is a line from one of [William] Blake's poems in his Songs of Innocence, ‘and we are put on earth a little space'. That little space is not a bit of geography anymore, but it seems to be literally the physical room we occupy with our bodies as we carry ourselves around trying to make sense of how to stake claims on constantly shiing grounds.” Reflecting on the slippery concept of place years later, Gill elaborated that “I came to understand place as a verb rather than a noun, which exists in our doings: walking, taking, living.” In an unpublished text in 2012, she continues this train of thought, “If you are empty, nothing, you only exist through the things around you, and if these things shift in their qualities and values, in relation to you, each other and other things, then the sense of self is always moving too. And the other way around: when I am the vector that is moving, then the things around me change, and my relationship to them too, how I do or don't connect, comprehend, sympathise. These are the un-static beacons we use to navigate through daily being.” Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu (b. 1975, Ywalut, Myanmar, b. 1977, Yangon, Myanmar, live and work in Yangon, Myanmar) Ipso Facto, 2011-2013 6 paintings (emulsion on linen, net, 275 x 580cm each) and video (colour, with sound, 20 min. 54 sec.), approximately 7 x 16 x 3m overall. Work realised within the framework of the exhibition at the Atelier Hermès thanks to the support of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Courtesy of the artists. Photographer: Noor Photoface In traditional theatre in Myanmar, a simple twig on stage signified a forest scene; this idea was so recognisable that it could not possibly suggest anything else. Myanmar is rich with natural resources, and as the country was closed off to the rest of the world for over fifty years, there is little documentation of the vast changes in the natural landscape that occurred during this time as different parties in favour with the government devastated the land and amassed great riches. In their solo project Ipso Facto, Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu collaborated with traditional theatre backdrop makers (with Tun Win Aung as the painter) to set the stage to discuss the dramatic environmental changes that have dislocated national identity from the land. For example, the natural mud volcanoes that once existed both physically and as part of local myth are now almost entirely dry, and the next generation will no longer be able to relate their imaginations to the landscape. The UN has recognised Myanmar as one of the countries with the highest rate of forest loss on Earth (the total forest coverage area dropped from 51% in 2005 to 24% in 2008), and soon the next generation might not recognise the dramaturgical stick as the site of a lush forest. In theatre and in domestic life, curtains suggest a portal to another space. The world of theatre uses artifice to show the real, and excess to accentuates parts of reality that might otherwise be overlooked. Here, the viewer walks through a jungle of six backdrop paintings while confronting a seven channel video work that accentuating the sense of loss of the thought of losing one’s landscape. In addition to working individually as visual artists, this Yangon-based husband and wife duo Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu work collaboratively in a range of media including painting, video, performance, and installation. In 2009, the artists began the multicomponent work 1000 Pieces (of White), gathering and producing objects and images to assemble a portrait of their shared life. Their work often reflects politically inflected experiences and through their Museum Project, they collaborate with artists all over Myanmar and exhibit their work in rural contexts, imagining possibilities of what a museum in Myanmar might be. While Tun Win Aung’s practice frequently focuses on local histories and environments, Wah Nu is inspired by her interest in psychological states. They have showcased their work in international venues such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, the Singapore Art Museum and Guggenheim, as well as at art festivals including the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Asian Art Biennale, and the Guangzhou Triennial.

ALL PROJECTS STITCHING SCREENS Supporting Artistic Collaboration Across India, Bangladesh, And Digital Space Introduction The way that we engage with and interact with each other has changed drastically in 2020. While it is not currently possible to physically travel long distances and meet existing and future friends, we have suddenly transitioned into an era of unprecedented digital connectivity - where screens and telecommunications cables and satellites seem the only links to the furthest corners of the planet. Rather than simply uploading existing material online, artists are finding new ways to work and harness digital platforms. Stitching Screens is a cross-border collaboration between the Dhaka, Bangladesh based Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) and the Delhi, India based Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA), connecting patrons, curators, and artists across India and Bangladesh to commission new work born from the challenges and possibilities of an age when we connect through screens. These words by the eighteenth-century mystic poet Lalon, whose words and songs inspired countless generations of writers and singers from Rabindranath Tagore to Allen Ginsberg, prime the spirit of this project: A mirror-city is next to my house A neighbour lives there I never saw him The village is surrounded by water fathomless And no boat is available I long to see him But how can I reach that village If the neighbour would touch me Anguishes of death would disappear He and Lalon live side by side Still a million miles wide gap remains. These times have forced us to think about our common humanity. And in a time of increasing divides, SAF and FICA come together to offer a platform for artists to work across borders. We invite Indian and Bangladeshi artists to explore artistic exchanges that enliven and activate the digital universe in the current time of distance and disconnect, to initiate dialogue across borders. We are looking at art as a coming together, a productive capacity of seeking connections, intricacies, availabilities, discords, (in)coherences, continuities, disparities, seeking new initiations. The first phase included interactive sessions among 22 invited emerging practitioners from Bangladesh and India who shared their work and instigated thinking around the art of proposals and collaborative modes of making. These artists will choose a collaborator with whom to submit a proposal that actively engages with the idea of collaboration with an artist from across the border. To participate in co-creation is to become entangled, to shake up one’s habitual way of engaging with the world, catalyzing potential conversations that can be initiated between the contexts, time zones and spaces. The second phase will mobilise support and mentorship for one collaborative project by an artist duo from Bangladesh and India, selected from submitted proposals by a jury comprised of Shilpa Gupta (artist, India), Munem Wasif (artist, Bangladesh), Shanay Jhaveri (Assistant Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art), Daniel Baumann (Director, Kunsthalle Zurich), Vidya Shivadas (FICA), and Diana Campbell Betancourt (Samdani Art Foundation). About FICA The Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art (FICA) is a non-profit organisation that aims to broaden the audience for contemporary Indian art, enhance opportunities for artists, and establish a continuous dialogue between the arts and the public through education and active participation in public art projects and funding. Encouraging, promoting and supporting innovative work in the field of the visual arts, FICA works in collaboration with, and for the benefit of the art community of students, art historians/critics/curators, collectors and art enthusiasts. It has focused on building a long term relationship with other organizations, local and international, including museums, art schools, galleries and government institutions, collaborating on regular art events, educational programs and special exhibitions, while also developing active year-long public programing with the intention of bringing contemporary art closer to its audience. About Samdani Art Foundation The Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) is a private arts trust based in Dhaka, Bangladesh founded in 2011 by collector couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani to support the work of the country’s contemporary artists and architects. Led by Artistic Director and Curator Diana Campbell Betancourt, SAF seeks to expand the audience engaging with contemporary art across Bangladesh and increase international exposure for the country’s artists and architects. Its programmes support Bangladeshi artists and architects in broadening their creative horizons through production grants, residencies, education programs, and exhibitions. To achieve this, SAF collaborates with the Bangladeshi government through official partnerships with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, and the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. SAF’s motivations are articulated through a variety of initiatives, the largest being the bi-annual the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS), an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, from its inception in 2012, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. SAF also supports the exhibition of Bangladeshi artists in the cases where institutions have meaningfully engaged with Bangladesh in their research about South Asia. SAF’s programme, the Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum, recognises the importance of Bangladesh’s independently established and self-funded art initiatives. Supporting these initiatives’ ongoing efforts, the Forum will help each to continue their work locally while building their profile internationally through SAF’s network. Committed to increasing art-engagement in Bangladesh, SAF runs the annual Samdani Seminars, a free lecture and workshop programme that facilitates engagement between internationally renowned arts professionals and local communities across Bangladesh through participatory artworks, lectures, and workshops.