The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the last five editions of the platform with a global team of collaborators. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, adding a scholarly element to the platform through collaborations with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, Cornell University, Harvard University, RAW Material Company, Gudskul, and many other formal and grassroots educational initiatives around the world. Pacific Islands and Bangladesh are at the forefront of climate change; Campbell’s maternal family is indigenous CHamoru from the island of Guam, and her heritage inspires her curatorial practice and the development of DAS as a platform to amplify indigenous practices both in South Asia and internationally. In addition to her exhibition making and writing practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home and community-based residency program at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Campbell’s practice specializes in building networks. She is part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged initiatives, and leading the international development of EDI Global Forum, a global network of art education departments as an initiative of the Campania Region of Italy developed by the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples that is convening over 150 global institutions to address needed change in art education. She is currently curating the 2023 edition of DesertX in the Coachella Valley opening in March 2023, linking the climatic challenges of droughts and floods across California and Bangladesh. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury CURATOR Ruxmini Choudhury is a curator, art writer, researcher, and bilingual translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been working as the Assistant Curator of the Samdani Art Foundation since 2014. Among the many initiatives she has introduced and developed for Dhaka Art Summit are its art mediation program and the Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum, part of her ongoing interest in exploring ways to make art more approachable and interactive to the public. Her research has supported the growth of curatorial knowledge about Bangladesh through her collaborations assisting many international curators on shows in Dhaka such as Dhaka Art Summit, but also in Hong Kong, India, Austria, Norway, Dubai, among others. . She founded the 'Singularity Art Movement' in 2021, a platform which acknowledges social stigmas that impact gendered, social, political, religious, cultural, and racial oppression. This platform acts as a safe space for artists and non-artists to discuss and share these issues, which may or may not result in an exhibition. She completed her BFA in Art History from University of Dhaka in 2014 and previously interned at the Dhaka Art Center, a Dhaka based non-profit art centre. Her research on the crafts of Kushtia, Jhenaidah and Magura districts of Bangladesh has been published in Setouchi Catalogue: Bangladesh Crafts, 2014. She is also an alumna of Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) programme and was previously involved in many social service and youth empowerment activities. Swilin Haque CURATORIAL ASSISTANT Swilin Haque is the curatorial assistant of the Samdani Art Foundation.She trained as a painter at University of Dhaka. She received the ICCR scholarship in 2021 to pursue further studies in Art History and Aesthetics at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India, with a particular interest in the political discourses found in art history. She has worked with organizations including the India Art Fair 2022, Artscapes India, ACCORe - Mexico, Hexydexy Box, Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Kolkata and curated Being and Becoming at Whoyait Art Space in Baroda in 2021. Eve Lemesle PRODUCER Eve Lemesle is an arts producer based between Europe and South-Asia. She started the arts management agency called ‘What About Art’ in Mumbai in 2010. She has produced many exhibitions and consulted internationally for the Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums, Shanghai Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit, Kochi Biennale, the Asia Now art fair at La Monnaie de Paris, Soho House collection amongst others. She is currently a consultant with Reliance for the upcoming JIO World Centre in Mumbai. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Public Art at the University of Shanghai. Eve has been installing some of the most prestigious private and corporate art collections in South-Asia. Noushin Tarannum Neha VIP COMMUNICATIONS Noushin Tarannum Neha she is a VIP Communications Manager for the Dhaka Art Summit 2023. She is currently majoring in Environmental Science at Independent University, Bangladesh. DAS 2023 Team Akansha Rastogi CURATOR ( Very Small Feelings Akansha Rastogi is Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Programming at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, India. She has been part of the core instituting team of the museum since 2011. As a creative practitioner, she is the founding member of artist collective WALA (formed in 2009), and is intensely involved with many artists-led initiatives and forums in New Delhi. Her research and writing focuses on exhibition histories of modern and contemporary Indian art, institutional memory and histories of visual arts, museum studies and storytelling. She studied Art History at National Museum Institute and English Literature at Delhi University. Akansha’s exhibitions, ‘Hangar for the Passerby’ (2017), ‘Zones of Contact/Grazing’ (2013), ‘Inhabiting the Museum’ (2011-15) and ‘Archiving the Studio’ (2011) have been ingenious for their curatorial thinking, approaches and conceptual rigour. Each one positioning and imagining contemporary art museum space in South Asia as an incremental site for the undigested materials and histories. She served as associate curator of India Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). At KNMA, she is currently leading a long-term multipart program under the framework of ‘Young Artists of Our Times’ (YAOT). Through its exhibitions, books, institutional partnerships and assemblies, YAOT explores a range of artistries, approaching the ‘young’ as a sensory body. Akansha is drawn to the language and terms of the young, not simply as an age, but as transformative, restless, and critical space of inquiry and experimentation. Moreover, in the context of South Asia where a large chunk of the world's youth population resides. Sean Anderson CURATOR (To Enter the Sky) Sean Anderson is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture. Anderson was formerly Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in addition to being a practicing architect and educator in Afghanistan, Australia, India, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the U.A.E. He is a founding Board Member of the African Futures Institute (AFI). Long seeking to uncover overlooked contexts for reappraising the spatial, he has written books on South Asian ritual sculpture, the modern architecture of colonial Eritrea and co-edited a volume dedicated to contemporary architecture and design in Sri Lanka. At MoMA, he organized Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016-17) and Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-89 (2017-18) and led four iterations of the Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1. At MoMA, he was co-director of the CMAP Asia and Africa research programs, an editor of post, and established two continuing online educational platforms: “What is Contemporary Art?” and “Reimagining Blackness and Architecture.” Co-organized with Mabel O. Wilson, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the first exhibition and book ever at MoMA to highlight the work of African American and African Diasporic architects, artists and designers, concluded in May 2021. Anne Barlow CURATOR (Samdani Art Award) Anne Barlow is Director of Tate St Ives where she most recently curated exhibitions with Thao Nguyen Phan, Petrit Halilaj, and Haegue Yang. Barlow was formerly Director of Art in General, New York, Curator of Education and Media Programs, New Museum, New York, and Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, Glasgow Museums, Scotland. Much of her work has focused on supporting emerging artists through exhibitions, new commissions, residencies, and international collaborations with museums and non-profit art spaces. Her interest in critical dialogue and experimental curatorial and educational practice led to the development of the Museum as Hub initiative (New Museum) and What Now? symposia (Art in General) and more recently at Tate St Ives, projects that address the specificities of the hyperlocal within a global programme. Barlow was Curator of 5th Bucharest Biennale and Co-Curator of the Latvian Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale. She has lectured and published widely, and edited the publications Working with Artists and Audiences (2014) and What Now? The Politics of Listening (2016). She is an Ambassador of the EDI Global Forum and has participated in selection panels and juries including the Artist of Tomorrow, Prishtina, Kosovo; kim? Residency Award, Riga; Exposure 8, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; MAC International 2018, Belfast; and the British Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale. Bishwajit Goswami CURATOR (A Duality) Bishwajit Goswami is a Dhaka based curator and art educator. He is an Assistant Professor in the Drawing & Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and also visiting faculty at the Architecture Department of BUET & BRAC University. Goswami is the co-founder of Brihatta, a research-based, artist-run Platform, with a strong focus on community development, and collaboration. As an art educator he has been part of many conferences and has participated in many national and international exhibitions as a practicing artist. His extensive interest in art and education has led him to extend his practice to exhibition making. In 2020 he curated the exhibition ‘Roots’ at the Dhaka Art Summit which focused on Bangladeshi art educators and the institutions that they built, following this journey across the 20th century until the 1990s, to consider how today’s artistic practices in Bangladesh were shaped. Goswami is passionate about working with students and providing them with opportunities and his practice involves collaborating with young art students and creatives. Muhammad Nafisur Rahman RESEARCHER FOR দ্বৈধ EXHIBITION Muhammad Nafisur Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the School of Design, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati, USA. Trained as an architect in Bangladesh, Muhammad holds a M.Des. in Graphic Design from University of Illinois at Chicago and currently pursuing his PhD in Architecture. In conjunction with his cross-disciplinary research and professional affiliations, he has taught students in architecture and communication design programs in the USA, Portugal and Bangladesh for over 15 years. Owing to his background as a practitioner, architect, educator and photographer, Rahman takes a strong interdisciplinary and practice-informed approach to teaching and research that bridges between built environment, placemaking and typography. He is a MAHASSA Scholar supported by Cornell University and the Getty Foundations and Research Fellow in Academic Advisory Council for Signage Research and Education (AACSRE) for research projects on storefront signage and neighbourhood identity. His works consist of various identity designs, interiors, branding, branded environments, book design etc. Rahman is an Assistant Editor of "Visible Language," the oldest peer–reviewed academic journal for design. Guest Curators Esther Syiem RESEARCHER Esther Syiem teaches English Literature at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong and has been involved in the study of Khasi oral narratives for many years. Esther Syiem is a bilingual writer. Some of her publications include three volumes of poetry, Oral Scriptings; of wit and wisdom of follies and frailties; Many Sides of Many Stories a play in Khasi entitled Ka Nam and work of fiction Memoir in Water Speaks the Wah Umkhrah. The Oral Discourse in Khasi Folk Narrative attempts to do a re-reading of the oral, in terms of the contemporary. She is a member of the National Editorial Collective of The People’s Linguistic Survey of India and was the state editor of the Meghalaya Volume which was later translated into Khasi and Garo. She has translated some Khasi folk tales for children and also published books for children. Kanak Chanpa Chakma RESEARCHER Kanak Chanpa Chakma is one of Bangladesh's most significant living visual artists. She was born in Rangamati's hill tracts and was brought up in the indigenous Chakma community, whose way of life and struggle feature prominently in her work. Her paintings are well-known internationally and can be found in many museums including the Bangladesh National Museum, Bhutan Museum, Liberation War Museum alongside many private collections and corporate offices. She is currently the founder of Shako Women Artists' Association and the president of Ethnic Artists' Foundation of Bangladesh. She is a community leader working to empower young indigenous artists by enhancing their visibility both in Bangladesh and internationally. L. Somi Royis RESEARCHER L. Somi Royis a writer, curator, cultural conservationist, and the publisher and translator of the literature of his mother M.K. Binodini Devi. He founded and manages Imasi: The Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi Foundation in Manipur for the protection, preservation, and promotion of the legacy of M. K. Binodini Devi. Michael Lujan Bevacqua RESEARCHER Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Ph.D. (Familian Bittot and Kabesa) taught Guam History and Chamoru language at the University of Guam for 10 years, runs a weekly podcast called Fanachu! and currently works as the curator for the Guam Museum. With his brother Jack, they run a creative company called The Guam Bus (www.theguambus.com) that publishes Chamoru language books, comics and learning materials. He is a co-chair for the political status educational outreach group Independent Guåhan and a member of Guam’s Commission on Decolonization. Mohammed Rezuwan RESEARCHER Mohammed Rezuwan is a 25-year-old Rohingya refugee, currently surviving in the world's largest refugee camp, Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh. He is a Rohingya Folklorist who authored the book Rohingyafolktales to preserve the Rohingya culture and pass them on to the next generation. He is a novice poet and a teacher by profession. He is a Rohingya activist and an asset to International journalists to navigate camps, develop story ideas, and find resources. He is a great lover of art. Many of his poems and short stories were published on international online platforms and anthologies. Transnational folklore researchers for Very Small Feelings exhibition CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan GOETHE INSTITUT BANGLADESH Kirsten Hackenbroch ALLIANCE FRANCAISE DE DHAKA, BANGLADESH Francois Grosjean MUSICIAN Claire Hamid ART COLLECTOR/PATRON Zareef Hamid ARTIST Teresa Albor ALSERKAL AVENUE, UAE Vilma Jurkute UNNATI CULTURAL VILLAGE, NEPAL Surabhi Khaitan Chaudhary CII ART AND CULTURE TASK FORCE, INDIA Tarana Sawhney UPSIDE SPACE, UAE Lisa Ray RANGOONWALA FOUNDATION, PAKISTAN Asif Rangoonwala & Nour Aslam CULTURAL AFFAIRS ATTACHÉ, US EMBASSY, BANGLADESH Sharlina Hussain DELFINA FOUNDATION, UK Aaron Cezar DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

ALL PROJECTS Live Feed Station - Asia Art Archive In its ongoing effort to map and present the many histories of 20th century art writing in different languages of South Asia, Asia Art Archive presented its first Live Feed Station at Dhaka Art Summit 2016. The Live Feed Station was an on-site junction where visitors could view an array of some of the most interesting publications, art magazines, books and catalogues that have been published in the past century, and was also an opportunity for visitors to explore the database and bring their own references to contribute to this expanding platform of shared knowledge. The Live Feed Station was a part of Asia Art Archive’s ongoing Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing project and was hosted by the Samdani Art Foundation at the Dhaka Art Summit.

Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh. PARTNERS TEAM Our Story Founded in 2011 by collector couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh. The foundation has developed and continues to produce the Dhaka Art Summit, the world’s highest daily visited contemporary art event that is now entering its seventh edition, expanding the audience engaging with contemporary art across Bangladesh and increasing international exposure for artistic practices that do not lie within the “art capitals of the world” or which have not yet been written into the limited canon of art history. SAF has collaborated with institutions on every continent in unique and meaningful ways; from producing a symposium on collective practices with RAW Material Company from Senegal; being a research partner for the Asia Pacific Triennial in Australia and contributing to the first time Bangladeshi artists were exhibited and collected by QAGOMA; curating and producing the first work of Bangladeshi contemporary art to be collected and exhibited at Tate Modern by Yasmin Jahan Nupur, commissioning and producing the touring exhibition A Beast a God and a Line curated by Cosmin Costinas which was born in Dhaka and traveled to Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand, Norway, and Poland, to donating a Rashid Choudhury tapestry to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the first time that this important master of Modern South Asian art history has had a major institutional presence in the United States, to lending to the 35th Sao Paulo Biennale in Brazil, to being a partner of Documenta 14 and Documenta 15 in their meaningful presentations of Bangladeshi art, among many other examples, SAF takes pride in its role of furthering the reach of what it does in Bangladesh to the rest of the world. You can learn more about SAF’s many collaborations here . Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh. SAF believes that the planet has much to learn from Bangladesh and South Asia, and its international collaborations (which know no geographic borders) seek to expand creative horizons and collapse outdated frameworks for considering art and culture within the limited frameworks of North American and Eurocentrism. As a non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia, DAS rejects the traditional biennale format to create a more generative space for art and exchange that re-examines how we think about these art forms in a regional and wider context. It supports curators from all over the world at key moments in their careers to ground their thinking with working experience in Bangladesh, to learn new ways of exhibition making that can engage with both specialists and visitors who are new to contemporary art. It also supports scholars to consider art histories that do not take Europe and North America as the central point of comparison, as evidenced by MAHASSA, a major collaboration with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, and Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities. All of SAF’s education and exhibition programs are free and ticketless, and the foundation supports the production of new thinking through residencies, exhibition opportunities, and other programs that it produces with its partners. While it is an independent organization, 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 which allows it to extend the reach of its programs widely in the country. Dhaka Art Summit EXPLORE The bi-annual Samdani Art Award, organized in partnership with the Delfina Foundation, has created an internationally recognized platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi artists to an international audience at the Dhaka Art Summit. Over 70 emerging Bangladeshi artists have had the opportunity to work with an international curator, often for the first time, and have feedback from an international jury to support their creative development, and most of these artists have had international exhibition opportunities resulting from this mentorship and exposure. While it is not a funding body, many emerging Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi diaspora artists such as Ayesha Sultana, Munem Wasif, Naeem Mohaiemen, Rana Begum, and many others have had their early major institutional presentations supported through SAF’s partnership. Awards & Initiatives Faysal Zaman, (অ )পূর্ণ, (un)filled, 2021-2023. Installation. Photographer: Farhad Rahman AWARDS PROJECTS A permanent home for the collection is currently in development: Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park will open in 2025, designed by Dhaka-based, Aga Khan Award for Architecture-winning architect, Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury of URBANA. Located in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Srihatta will house the Samdani Art Foundation Collection, accommodate space for up to ten artists in residence, and commission new works by world-class South Asian and international artists. Opening up new possibilities for art and community engagement in rural Bangladesh and raising standards for the public accessibility of institutions in South Asia, the first project realised on this site is Rokeya – an interactive sculpture created in collaboration with the local community by leading Polish artist Paweł Althamer in early 2017. Ephemeral projects such as these remain in public memory, and serve the basis for a new kind of sculpture park that is less about object making, and more about ritual, community, and climate. SAF Collection

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

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

ALL PROJECTS Breathe In Breathe Out: Susan Philipsz Pathshala South Asian Media Institute & Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 10 - 11 April 2017 As part of the Samdani Seminars 2017, Susan Philipsz conducted an open seminar for everyone to learn about her practice using sound and architecture at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. She then ran a half-day closed-door workshop along with her partner Eoghan James Mctigue at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The project was a collaboration between the Samdani Art Foundation and Goethe Institut, Dhaka. Through the seminar and workshop, Susan Philipsz explored acoustic properties of sounds and the relationship between sound and architecture. The workshop concentrated on sounds we make with our own bodies with a particular focus on breath as a metaphor for life and mortality. Breathing is a fundamental part of living, and it is something that unites us all. In classical music, wind instruments require the human breath to activate them. Philipsz wanted to develop a workshop where we use everyday objects to produce sound with our own breath. The workshop was conducted in two parts: PART I: BREATHE IN: INTERNAL SPACE, INTIMATE, CLOSENESS, DARK, QUIET, SOFT, LUNGS, THE BODY. During the workshop, the participants began by focusing on their own breath: how their diaphragm shifts as they expel air from the lungs, making each aware of his/her inner body space. The physicality of producing sound is particularly emphasised when people sing, and Philipsz chose to focus on sound as a sculptural experience. When sound is projected out into the room, the participants defined the space with sound, drawing attention to the architecture while heightening their sense of self within the space. PART II: BREATHE OUT: EXTERNAL SPACE, PUBLIC, OPEN, LIGHT, ARCHITECTURE, DISTANCE, IMMENSITY. The participants explored potential locations in their near-by surroundings with temporary play-back devices. They chose sites that have interesting architecture and acoustics such as corridors and stairwells. Everyone discussed each other's work in-situ and developed the workshop as a group. PARTNERS: Samdani Art FoundationGoethe Institut, Dhaka VENUE PARTNERS: Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Pathshala South Asian Media Institute SUSAN PHILIPSZ Susan Philipsz has explored the psychological and sculptural potential of sound. She uses recordings, predominantly with her own voice. Creating immersive environments of architecture and song that intensify the audience’s interaction with their surroundings while allowing for insightful introspection. Philipsz often selects music ranging from sixteenth century ballads or Irish folk tunes to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust . The music is selected and responds to the space where the work is installed. While the works remain unique, all explores familiar themes of loss, longing, hope, and return. This creates a narrative that encourages personal reactions and also bridges gaps between the individual and the collective as well as interior and exterior spaces. Philipsz was born in 1965 in Glasgow and currently lives and works in Berlin. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, Scotland in 1993, and an MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1994. In 2000, she completed a fellowship at MoMA P.S.1. in New York. She was the recipient of the 2010 Turner Prize and was shortlisted for the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award the same year. Philipsz's work has been exhibited globally at a number of institutions and venues. In 2012, she debuted a major work at dOCUMENTA (13) entitled Study for Strings , which was later featured at the Museum for Modern Art as a part of the group exhibition, Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013). Philipsz has presented a number of solo exhibitions at institutions to include Museum Ludwig (2009), Cologne, Germany; Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State (2009-10) Columbus, OH; Aspen Art Museum (2010-11) in Aspen, Colorado; Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), Chicago; K21 Standehaus Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2013), Dusseldorf, Germany; the Carnegie Museum of Art (2013), Pittsburgh; and Hamburger Bahnhof (2014), Berlin. She has separately created installations for the 2007 Skulptur Projekte in Muenster, Germany and for the Carnegie Museum of Art’s 55th Carnegie International in 2008. Major commissions include Turner Prize-winning work for Glasgow International (2010); SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London a public project organised by Artangel (2010-11) London; Day is Done , a permanent installation organised by the Trust for Governors Island that opened on Governors Island in New York (2014), and a project for the Grace Farms Foundation (2015) in New Canaan. Philipsz’s work can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Castello di Rivoli, Italy; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

ALL PROJECTS Prisoners of Shothik Itihash Kunsthalle Basel The Samdani Art Foundation supported Naeem Mohaiemen's First European Solo Show at the Kunsthalle Basel curated by Adam Szymczyk. For many historians, the subject of their research is often made of, and defined by, events that have a specific cause, and set in motion a specific series of effects. This way of telling history adds up to a chain of historical facts that seem to explain themselves. Nations, figures, wars, treasons, and alliances build up the seeming only order, in which history can be read and taught. The difficulty of such history writing becomes apparent when it comes to the interpretation of the sheer mass of source material any historian has access to. Contradictions begin to amass and the history that previously might have been taken for granted changes its course. In his first solo show in Europe, Bangladeshi writer and visual artist Naeem Mohaiemen deploys the Kunsthalle Basel as a staging ground for what he calls the “exploded history book.” Trained as a researcher (he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University), Mohaiemen’s films, photography, mixed media objects, and essays are based on the commingling of major and minor histories in relation to the subcontinental triangle of nations (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan), and the particular histories of multiple partitions of borders. Mohaiemen’s arc takes in a pre-history of the modern nation state, by looking at Bangladesh’s “first” coming to postcolonial independence in 1947 as one of the two “wings” of Pakistan. In fact, this “first” moment was already foretold in the earlier 1905 British partition of Bengal into East and West Bengal (an event that was reversed in 1911 after sustained protests). In his narrative of this early era, Berlin and Rabindranath Tagore enter the stage; later we also find W. G. Sebald making an appearance within the war years. The country’s journey as “East Pakistan” proved precarious and new country borders were again drawn up after a brutal war in 1971—leading to full sovereignty for Bangladesh, and separation from Pakistan. From that point on, Mohaiemen develops a fragmentary history of the radical left in the 1970s, starting in Bangladesh, but radiating out to parallel underground left movements in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Throughout, there is the idea that this is not a narrative specific only to one set of nations. The title of the exhibition at the Kunsthalle and the accompanying publication—Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (which translates to “prisoners of correct history”) refers to the problematic of many histories, reflected in the constant alterations made to history books as governments, academics, and institutions change. The position of the citizen in relation to these official yet fluid versions of history remains in flux. Mohaiemen considers minor “unimportant” histories particularly relevant in regard to contested national identities, constantly changing based on the state’s fluctuating approach. His academic research and the archival material he has been collecting over the years, including his father’s photographs and great uncle’s novels, enable him to put into crisis the idea of singular history. At the Kunsthalle Basel, the sprawling history of South Asia through two partitions (1947 partition of India and Pakistan, and the 1971 separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh) is played out through a distribution of works, with a focus on particular protagonists in crucial years. Blending family and national histories, the projects construct an ongoing archive out of a series of unlikely objects: vintage stamps acquired from a puzzled philatelist, sandstone molds that reverse the first ever photographs taken by Mohaiemen’s father, expired polaroids that document the ghostly residue of victims and assailants, secret military recordings of hijack negotiations, fragments from interviews with US Embassy officials, incomplete blueprint drawings, timelines, and, always, copious amounts of text– elliptical, but also carrying “clues” of an actual event to be unraveled. GALLERY 1 [1948] Kazi in Nomansland tells the story of iconic Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, a figure some believe could have also won a Nobel Prize like the poet Rabindranath Tagore, if not for the silent biases that left the work of this Muslim poet from a subalternized rural background internationally unrecognized. A staunch opponent of the plan to partition British India into Muslim and Hindu nations, Nazrul was rendered a mute, helpless witness to the madness of 1947 when a mysterious neurological disease destroyed his capacity for speech. Gradually Nazrul lost all his power of speech and memory, surviving another thirty years as an empty husk. Throughout this period, his “presence” was deployed numerous times for ceremonial purposes—first by post-1947 India, and then by post-1971 Bangladesh. In a series of images sliced out of official press photos of Nazrul, Mohaiemen constructs a monologue that Nazrul may have spoken if his power of speech had ever returned. The final image is of Nazrul at his funeral; here the perspective is flipped, so that the sunglass-clad eyes of President Ziaur Rahman come to the forefront. Nazrul’s family wanted to take him back to India to bury him, but the request was refused by the Bangladeshi state. History’s ironies—President Zia did not know, at that time, that five years later the next grand funeral would be his own, after a brutal assassination. Unable to speak (and therefore defend himself), Nazrul became a blank canvas for competing fantasies of the place of the Muslim “citizen” after 1947—did he belong to the “pure” homeland of Pakistan or was he an equal claimant to India? All of these ideas waged war over Nazrul’s mute body. Small wonder then that Nazrul is the only figure honored by the national stamps of all three countries (India, Pakistan, and then Bangladesh)—represented here through three delicate towers made entirely out of vintage stamps collected from post offices and obsessive philatelists. [1947] Schizophrene draws on the poetry of Bhanu Kapil, who ties together the partition of India, contemporary migrant lives in Europe, and mental illness as a metaphor for the displacements of modernity. Mohaiemen draws inspiration from the origin story of Kapil’s book of poetry, derived from recovered fragments of her abandoned novel on 1947. GALLERY 2 & 3 [1953] Rankin Street, 1953 constructs a melancholic portrait of a sprawling home, and an extended, multigenerational ekannoborti (“those who eat each meal together”) family that has been pulled apart by the ruthless rush of capital that has rendered contemporary Dhaka into a relentless real estate speculative bubble. The core of this project is a set of hundreds of negatives that Mohaiemen’s father shot around the family home in 1953 with his first camera. The negatives for this year are meticulously preserved, each in a separate sleeve. But all subsequent years are missing, possibly thrown away during the family’s move away from this fabled Rankin Street house where the extended family lived in the 1950s. Does it matter to history that Mohaiemen’s grandfather, Emdad Ali, received this land as part of the post-1947 Pakistan government’s attempt to create a new Muslim middle class? Or that Ali, as the first Bengali Muslim to receive a “gold medal” in Sanskrit language, represented a vanishing way of being Muslim and syncretic? Or, telescoping forward, what is the significance of the year 1953, a mere twelve months after the 1952 Language Riots that first shook apart the Bengali peoples’ faith in their place in united Pakistan? These event histories lurk unspoken in the background, while in the foreground Mohaiemen is seemingly focused on reconstructing a family and a home that is theoretically his, but in actuality scattered all over the world long before he became an adult. In fact, the noble patriarch figure of Emdad Ali, ruling with a stern hand over an extended family, gently dictating choices of school (he was an obsessive fan of Jadav’er Patigonith mathematics), career, and marriage are a way of life that vanished in contemporary Bangladesh with the arrival of neoliberalism. Here, a film gives kinesis to the discovery of a forgotten box, line drawings build a blueprint of the house on top of faded photographs, and sandstone molds “speak back” to his father’s work—and all along, there is a tangential imagining of the larger histories. GALLERY 4 [1971] Der Weisse Engel is a short film that continues Mohaiemen’s experiments with using text on screen to narrate story, almost in the mode of inter-titles such as were used for the silent era (these explorations reach a fuller intensity in the 70 minute film United Red Army). The brutal 1971 war that ruptured Pakistan and created Bangladesh is an ongoing haunting figure for the region, and much of Bangladeshi cinema and literature oscillates around the war in increasingly ritualized, performative ways. In a conscious move away from that exhausted national discourse, Mohaiemen deliberately makes very little visual work about the war (although he has addressed it extensively in his academic writing). Here too, he has approached the war in a tangential way, using artifacts that are in no way familiar to historians of 1971. The film repurposes one scene and the orchestral soundtrack of John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), in order to draw an oblique contrast between the rich popular vein of stories of delayed justice for individual German perpetrators of the Holocaust and the absence of any similar narratives directed toward the Pakistan army after 1971. The accompanying photographs pair dialogue from the Kafkaesque “dentist torture” scene in the same film with a contemporary staging of a moment of violence in Bangladesh. Hanif Kureishi’s film about London burning, a famous cameo in Casablanca (1942), and Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa (1991) are all referenced, but with a speed that refuses to let the viewer settle on the details. GALLERY 5 [1974] Afsan’s Long Day is the latest film in a cycle of projects (The Young Man Was) about the 1970s ultra-left. Each chapter explores a different facet of the radical left of the 1970s in Bangladesh, but also with linkages to Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. In this film, Mohaiemen builds a series of interconnected vignettes that travel with Jean Paul Sartre, Joschka Fischer, Rote Armee Fraktion, and finally settles on the diaries of a Bangladeshi journalist who recounts an almost-execution. GALLERY 6 This room builds the show to a peak, as it brings together multiple projects that mark the turbulent 1970s. [1973] The Year Brought Many Problems for Imperialists, derives from a Bangladeshi magazine story from that period that hints at the convulsions that were shaking the world from Chile to India. However, as Allende’s tragic end in the Presidential palace showed, the forces of global Imperialism struck back quickly against the “problems,” and by the end of the decade hopes for global revolution had been crushed, replaced by authoritarian regimes. Though this Bengali magazine’s optimism seems tragically misplaced, the questions of what that dream was and how it came together that year remains relevant. [1975] I have killed Pharaoh, I am not afraid to die reconstructs another violent assassination of a state leader, this time one that seemed to be the chronicle of a death foretold but not prevented. The exploded Polaroids in resin that accompany the text and photograph pairs stage the deaths of two sets of people. In one, we can make out the outline of newspaper photographs (captured on Polaroid) of the assassination victims. In the other, the assassins themselves, executed after a trial twenty years later. [1976] Red Ant Mother, Meet Starfish Nation extracts a series of “key phrases” from a journalists’ report on the alleged CIA connection to the coup and pairs them with a lonely vigil at the graveyard of the slain leader. The other two pieces in this room lead up to Gallery 7’s film. [1977] You Will Roam Like a Madwoman is a single issue of a popular Bangladeshi magazine of the 1970s. This is the special issue that came out during the 1977 hijack of Japan Airlines to Dhaka. Mohaiemen has built an annotated archive of the entire magazine, translating one phrase from each page for his extended “footnotes” on the wall. The arc traced here ranges from a stern list of the number of dead during an attempted airport coup to a spurned lover’s letter where he tells a woman she will one day be mad in grief for him. [1977] United Red Army::Timeline charts two timelines, of Bangladesh’s journey to 1977, and the arc of international hijacking over the same ten years—the two streams merge to land the crisis of the Japanese Red Army on a Dhaka Airport runway in 1977. GALLERY 7 [1977] United Red Army is Mohaiemen’s most ambitious and widely seen film. Building entirely off the recorded negotiation tapes between the Air Force chief in Dhaka control tower and the lead Japanese hijacker on the plane, the film slaloms between tense one-upmanship and moments of surreal humor. The work looks at a time when hijackers made proclamations such as “we hurt bourgeois people,” but the unintended finale on the runway shows that global south nations often paid a heavy price in “collateral damage.”For the last ten years, Mohaiemen has practiced forms of history writing that escape the journal, the book, and the classroom. He does this by staging interventions that bring together photography, film, and mixed media objects, in order to play out the lacuna, bylanes, and diversions from the “main events” of large historical events. Inspired by the recent research on the Haitian slave rebellion as a possible source of Hegel’s idea of the dialectic, Mohaiemen works on bringing the history of decolonization, and post-liberation antimonies, into the main narrative frame. While Mohaiemen’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel can be understood as an expanded history book, the accompanying publication becomes a simultaneously concentrated and expanded version of his work as an artist. We, the readers and viewers, become witnesses of a past that imprisoned people within history, while also liberating them from other, even more limited horizons. This publication brings together essays and images by Naeem Mohaiemen. The experience delivers a counter-history of minor events that shaped the artist, his family, and the nation. Click the link below for more information: http://www.kunsthallebasel.ch/en/exhibition/naeem-mohaiemen-prisoners-of-shothik-itihash/

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

ALL PROJECTS Dog Eye Kunsthalle Münster, 3 Sept - 22 Nov 2020 Produced in Bangladesh with the Samdani Art Foundation, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film Fog Dog and photographs produced from the artist's Bangladesh experience inform the ghostly narratives found in his solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Muenster, Dog Eye. Watch the work and an interview with the artist here: www.artbasel.com Watch Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s ‘Fog Dog’ A horror film from the point of view of Dhaka's street dogs

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