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

ALL PROJECTS Pasar Ilmu, Activation Programme by Gudskul Goethe Institut Auditorium, Dhaka, 5 Aug 2019 (It is to invent a learning space in where people participate in deciding what’s needed and learning material.)

ALL PROJECTS Independence Movements Curated by Diana Campbell The shared energy fueling movements and building constellations of solidarities across time and diverse geographies defies shallow geopolitical definitions that carve up the world. Artists played a major role in spreading the deep yearning for independence in what is now Bangladesh, as well as elsewhere in the global majority world. Creative individuals with conviction were willing to stake their position and shift the course of history by galvanising people around their work which became the images, words, and songs to rally resistance and transform mere individuals into a collective force to be reckoned with. The artists in this movement chronicle the spirit of resistance and struggle for freedom, shifting from euphoria to disillusionment and back again. Independence is a spirit that needs to be kept alive and moved and nurtured across generations. Antonio Dias b. 1944, Campina Grande, Paraíba; d. 2018, Rio de Janeiro Trama , 1968/1977 Portfolio with 10 woodcuts on hand-made Nepali paper. Courtesy of Alexandre Roesler Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory, 1968/2020 adhesive strip and lettering on floor Courtesy of Collection Daros-Latinamerica and the Estate of Antonio Dias The Illustration of Art/Tool & Work , 1977 Red clay on hand-made Nepalese paper Courtesy of Geyze Diniz Collection Untitled , 1981 Handmade paper, cellulose with clay, iron oxide and soot. Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation Demarcando Terretorios , 1982 Iron oxide, graphite, metalic pigments on Nepalese paper Working in the Furnace, 1986 Mixed media on nepalese paper The Last Houses of the man , 1987 Iron oxide and metalic pigment on Nepalese paper. Courtesy of Galeria Nara Roesler Research supported by Instituto InclusArtiz Antonio Dias’s many transnational experiences coloured his conceptual art practice. Supported by a Brazilian patron, he travelled to Nepal in 1976 ‘to buy paper for an edition.’ He soon discovered that the kind of paper he imagined could not be purchased in a store. Over an intense period of five months in 1976–77, living near the Tibetan border with Nepali artisans, Dias adapted their paper-making process by mixing in plant fibres and materials such as tea, earth, ash and curry. This presentation includes the installation Do it Yourself: Freedom Territory, whose words and motifs appear in Trama – the edition that brought him to Nepal. The Illustration of Art/Tool & Work, also from 1977, marks a shift in his practice. His process became less about the ‘illustration of art’ (a series from 1971–1978) and more about the physicality and the making of art. This work is a rare example where Dias and his Nepali collaborator’s hands both appear in the work, depicted as equals surrounded by the red Nepali clay they coexisted on. Dias returned to these papers to create works for at least a decade, layering further life experience into these remarkable collaborative surfaces that carry traces of experimentation, invention, and reinvention. Dias was one of the leading figures of 20th-century Brazilian art, working across various media to question the meaning of art and its systems. He left Brazil in 1966 and arrived in Paris in time to participate in the May 1968 protests. Because of his political involvement he was forced to move again; he settled in Milan, where he became the only Latin American member of the Arte Povera movement, and spent his career working across Brazil, Italy, and Germany. Bouchra Khalili b. 1975, Casablanca; lives and works in Berlin and Oslo The Constellations, Fig. 2, Fig. 4, Fig. 6, Fig. 8 , 2011 Four individual silkscreen prints Courtesy of the artist and mor Charpentier. Presented with support from ifa | Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Bouchra Khalili translates the illegal transnational journeys of individuals into utopian midnight-blue maps, where solidarities between people make visible the waiting, setbacks, force, and compromise found in the condition of statelessness. In her words: ‘constellations are by essence reference points located in spaces where landmarks do not exist: the sky and the sea. As maps, they were used for centuries by sailors looking upward to locate themselves below… Constellations are also visual translations of narratives: many of them are based on mythology. Translating these forced illegal journeys into constellations of stars also aims to challenge normative geography in favour of a ‘human geography’” – based on micro-narratives and singular lives. The limits between the sky and the sea blur, eventually suggesting an alternative form of orientation: the landmarks are [no longer] boundaries as established by nation-states, but the path of singular lives, from where the world can be seen. As alternative maps of the world, The Constellations suggests a counter-geography, of singular gestures of resistance against arbitrary boundaries.” Working with film, video, installation, photography, and prints, Khalili’s practice articulates language, subjectivity, orality, and geographical explorations. With her work, Khalili investigates strategies and discourses of resistance as elaborated, developed, and narrated by individuals – often members of political minorities. Kapwani Kiwanga b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada; lives and works in Paris The Secretary’s Suite , 2016 Mixed Media Installation, UN Photo Courtesy Teddy Chen Courtesy of the artist and Tanja Wagner. Presented with support from the Canada Council for the Arts The Secretary’s Suite is an installation that investigates the complexities of gift economies. Presented within a viewing environment inspired by the 1961 office of the United Nations Secretary-General, Kapwani Kiwanga’s single-channel video examines the history and tradition of gifted items within the United Nations’ art collection. Countries that are members of the UN, including Bangladesh, often donate works of art and objects of cultural value which go on display in public spaces, the Secretary General’s office, or are stored away from private view. This work raises questions about how gifts can impact power dynamics in relationships and with differing cultural significance across the course of history. Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historical narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and media including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Maryam Jafri b. 1972, Karachi; lives and works in Copenhagen and New York Independence Day 1934–1975, 2009–ongoing Sixty+ black and white archival inkjet prints Courtesy of the artist Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934–1975 features over 60 archival photos culled from more than 30 archives of the first Independence Day ceremonies of various Asian, Middle Eastern, and African nations. The swearing-in of a new leadership, the signing of relevant documents, the VIP parade, the stadium salute, the first address to the new nation – all are supervised and orchestrated by the departing colonial power. The photographic material is strikingly similar despite disparate geographical and temporal origins, revealing a political model exported from Europe and in the process of being cloned throughout the world. Although a great deal of research has been done on both the colonial and the postcolonial eras, this project aims to introduce a third, surprisingly neglected element into the debate – that 24-hour twilight period in between, when a territory transforms into a nation-state. Jafri works with video, sculpture, photography, and performance, which act as a support for her research-based, conceptual practice. Her works address and question the cultural and visual representations of history, politics, and economics, such as the politics of food production and consumption, the highly coded performance rituals of nascent nation-states, and cultural memory and copyright law. Murtaja Baseer b. 1932, Dacca; Lives and works in Dhaka Untitled (Dinosaur Drawings) , 1971/2020 Archival Newspapers and Mural by young artists Courtesy of the artist How does a living artist share his historically important work with his people when the person keeping it for decades is not willing to sharea it publicly in exhibitions or publications? Murtaja Baseer created a powerful series of drawings between 1971 and 1972 in Dhaka and in Paris, depicting the Pakistani military as prehistoric figures towering with physical might over Bengali people. The work violently alludes to the wartime atrocities of famine and rape as well as the colonial efforts to subjugate the Bengali language. The magazine ‘The Express’ where the particular work was edited by Zahir Raihan. Zahir Raihan was a writer, novelist and filmmaker, most notable for his documentary ‘Genocide’ on the killing of citizens by the Pakistani Army on 14 December 1971. Baseer first began these dinosaur drawings for mass dissemination in East Pakistani newspapers. Now 88 years old, the artist is working with archival material and a younger generation of artists to reimagine this series of work as a mural for all to see at the entrance of DAS, emblazoning it in public memory. Murtaja Baseer is known for his ‘abstract-realist’ paintings reflecting his daily experience of Bengal. In 1967, he started ‘Wall’ series, his first step towards abstraction, which depicted the entropy and layers of textures and colours on the walls of old Dhaka, a reflection on the society under the dictatorship of Ayub Khan (1958–1969). He actively participated in the Language Movement of 1952 and pre-liberation war demonstrations. He was sent to jail throughout the East Pakistani period for his leftist political views and later left for Paris. He demonstrated his solidarity with the Liberation Movement through his work by changing the spelling of his name from Murtaza Bashir to Murtaja Baseer, adjusting the letters to suit the Bengali language. Baseer is also a writer, poet, numismatist, and acted as an academic at the University of Chittagong until 1998. Pratchaya Phinthong b. 1974, Ubon Ratchathani; lives and works in Bangkok Waiting for Hilsa , 2019 Photographs, Book, Election Ink, Gill Net Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY, and gb agency. Produced with additional support from BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY Installation activated by a discussion at 2pm on 8 February Stories of the Hilsa fish and its migration across salty and sweet waters have been inscribed in South Asian culture for centuries as they historically swam from the Bay of Bengal up the Padma river and into the Ganges. In 1975 the Farakka Barrage (dam) was completed on the Indian side of the Bangladesh–India border, disrupting this migration. Pratchaya Phinthong draws a mental map of this cross-border conflictual reality, combining photos taken at the Farakka Barrage, reconstructed images, books, and objects – taking into consideration geopolitics, science, spirituality, and human relationships. Using Bangladesh’s ‘national fish,’ the artist metaphorically examines nation-state powers, but also presents to us an example of water as a source of life and the ability of sensations such as taste to transcend ideas relating to national identity. Phinthong creates situations without predetermined forms that rely on an element of viewer participation with the aim of creating a shared experience. He addresses financial fluctuations, media alarmism, and the global labour market, commonly employing them as metaphors for human behaviour. Interested in creating dialogue, he often juxtaposes different social, economic, or geographical systems. Rashid Talukder b. 1939, Pargana; d. 2011, Dhaka. Arms drill by women members of the Chatro Union (students union), 1st March, 1971, 1971/2020 . Photograph, Inkjet Print Outraged artists hold placards bearing the Bangla letters Sha Dhi Na Ta (independence) protesting the postponement of the opening of the National Assembly by President Yahya Khan, Dhaka, 1st March, 1971, 1971/2020, Photograph, Inkjet Print A sea of people move towards Ramna Racecourse, now Suhrawardy Udyan, to attend the historic speech of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Dhaka, 7th March, 1971, 1971/2020 Photograph, Inkjet Print. Courtesy of Drik Picture Gallery Fed up with being oppressed linguistically, economically, and culturally under the rule of West Pakistan (1947–1971), masses of people in what is now Bangladesh rallied in support of an independent sovereign country. People coming from all walks of life engaged in protests finally leading to the liberation war. This bloody war was catalysed when West Pakistan refused to hand over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1971, despite his having received the majority of the democratic votes in the general election of Pakistan. Rashid Talukder dedicated himself to capturing the mass revolution of the East Pakistani people and their fight to maintain freedom as a newly independent nation. His images of empowered female activists, artists (including Murtaja Baseer whose drawings of resistance and independence are installed near this work) and students who participated in the making of Bangladesh greet visitors at the entrance of DAS, grounding us in the history of public assembly in Bangladesh that makes the Summit possible. Rashid Talukder was a photojournalist whose images represent a significant contribution to the collective memory of Bangladesh. Among many other defining events in the history of the nation, he documented the struggles of East Pakistan in the 1960s that led to the liberation war and the formation of Bangladesh. His photographs immortalise mass uprisings, resistance movements, and the participants, of whom many were killed by the Pakistani army. Talukder also photographed artists, highlighting their role in the liberation. As a photojournalist, he worked at the Daily Sangbad and The Daily Ittefaq successively, reaching wide audiences. Dedicated to expanding the field of photojournalism in Bangladesh, he founded the Bangladesh Photo Journalists’ Association in 1972. S. M. Sultan b. 1923, Narail; d. 1994, Jessore First Plantation sketch , c. 1976 Ink on brown paper Courtesy of the collection of Farooq Sobhan While South Asian art history describes him as a landscape painter, S.M. Sultan is remembered in Bangladesh for his energetic paintings of strong farmers made after 1975. These are primarily large-scale paintings made with natural pigments on unprimed jute canvases, celebrating the strength of Bengali peasants, both male and female, in their struggle against colonial and ecological disasters. Famine had been plaguing the country across generations from the era of the British Raj until just the year before Sultan first painted these icons of physical might. In this context, his depiction of the weak and downtrodden as invincible forces can be seen as subversive. In this sketch for the First Plantation, Sultan created a mythical environment where a larger-than-life figure demonstrates power, yet maintains a humble and protective gesture cherishing a single seed, a metaphor for all of humanity. The nude angels in the background speak to the plurality and liberalism found within the Bangladeshi art community who recognizes this work as one of the country’s most iconic contributions to Bangladeshi art history. After travelling extensively as a celebrated artist both internationally and within South Asia, Sultan retreated from urban life, moving to his home village of Narail, where he founded the Shishu Shwarga art school. His devotion to rural art education has had a lasting legacy, inspiring many initiatives to promote personal growth outside of urban centres through art. Sultan’s activities highlight the importance of rural culture in the collective identity of Bangladesh. Tuan Andrew Nguyen b. 1976, Sai Gon; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Solidarities Between the Reincarnated , 2019 Digital pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper and graphite on paper, two-channel video Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery Solidarities Between the Reincarnated interrogates the place of the archive document in a personal re-appropriation of history at the crossroads between echoes that persist amidst institutional amnesia and gaps in transmission within collective memory. At its core, this project considers the movement of people through (post-)colonial violence and the obscuring of its legacy in the context of France’s use of colonial troops in global and colonial conflicts and of communities born from it. Tuan Andrew Nguyen offers imagination and creation as ways in which to connect the gaps and fulfil a desire for connection through imagined lines of solidarity whose absence in the historical canon are brought to clash against expanded possibilities for the means by which we can remember. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable. He initiated The Propeller Group (f. 2006), a platform for collectivity that situates themselves between an art collective and an advertising company. Dr. Zahia Rahmani b. 1962, Les Attouchs; lives and works in Paris and Heilles Seismography of Struggles – Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Journals , 2017 Video and sound installation, 59 min Courtesy of INHA, Paris Seismography of Struggle is an inventory of non-European critical and cultural journals, including those from the African, Indian, Caribbean, Asian, and South American diaspora, produced in the wake of the revolutionary movements of the end of the 18th century up to the watershed year of 1989. The sound and visual work included here reflects populations who have experienced colonialism, practices of slavery, Apartheid, and genocide. The struggle against slavery is at the root of many critical and cultural journals. Colonialism impacted the social and cultural cohesion of a number of communities and was also fought against in both writing and gesture by constantly renewing the modalities of political action. The oldest material evidence of this eminently modern exercise is L’Abeille Haytienne, a critical journal that was founded on the island of Haiti in 1817. The journal expresses the constant desire for emancipation. Christopher Columbus landed in Haiti in December 1492 and named it Hispaniola. The island later became a French territory and was renamed Dominica and, over time, more than 400,000 slaves live there and were subjected to France’s ferocious rule. C.L.R. James noted that, in 1789, this territory alone accounted for more than two-thirds of French foreign trade. In 1804, the revolt of subjugated populations gave rise to the birth of a small independent state of Haiti. Even though this cause was won, the struggles continued. For over two centuries, print media has been a space that has accommodated varied experiences. Born out of a sense of urgency in response to colonialism, journals have aligned with a critical, political, aesthetic, poetic, and literary ambitions and helped sustain graphical and scriptural creativity. They have appeared with regularity in the struggles that women and men have waged for their emancipation. Consisting of formal singularities and political objectives that support human communities and their aspirations, the journal, this fragile object, often pulled together difficult material that was motivated by noble causes and the determination of committed authors. The journal reveals a rare aesthetic power. In this all-digital era, we must re-establish and qualify its formal, aesthetic, and political function on a global scale. Zahia Rahmani is one of France’s leading art historians and writers of fiction, memoirs, and cultural criticism. Rahmani curated Made in Algeria, genealogy of a territory (2016), dedicated to the role of cartography in the colonial expansion. Rahmani founded the Global Art Prospective (f. 2015), a collective of young researchers and actors within the art scene who are specialists in non-European territorial and cultural spaces.

ALL PROJECTS Cinema Banner Painting Workshop A week-long art workshop on Cinema Banner Painting took place from 5 October 2019 at Jothashilpa Studio in the Adabor area of Dhaka, organized by Jothashilpa (A Centre for Traditional and Contemporary Arts) in cooperation with the Samdani Artists Led Initiatives Forum (SALIF). Cinema Banner painting is one of the most popular visual art languages in the South Asia. It was initiated as a publicity medium located at the movie theaters. Henceforth, its inception and evolution is heavily shaped by the growth of cinema industry in this region. To understand the origin of Cinema Banner painting, one could trace back to Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings and popular prints of 19th century, which were based on western academic style. In the field of cinema banner painting, non-academic painters had played the major role to develop its unique style in the Indian subcontinent. A distinct visual aesthetics emerged which was molded by a larger than life manifestation of cinema. A week-long art workshop on Cinema Banner Painting took place from 5 October 2019 at Jothashilpa Studio in the Adabor area of Dhaka, organized by Jothashilpa (A Centre for Traditional and Contemporary Arts) in cooperation with the Samdani Artists Led Initiatives Forum (SALIF). Master artist of traditional cinema banner painting Mohammad Shoaib conducted the workshop as a mentor, while artist and researcher Shawon Akand curated the workshop. Five participating artists from different parts of Bangladesh joined this second edition of the cinema banner painting workshop. They were Rezaur Rahman, Imtiaz Nasir, Rafiqa Majumdar, Muntasib Rahman Anan, and Hemahyet Himu. This workshop took place at Jothashilpa Studio (House 819, Road 5, Baitul Aman Housing, Adabor) from 5 to 11 October 2019. The last day of the art workshop (11 October 2019, 4 PM to 8 PM) featured an Open Studio Day for all viewers to see the artworks and meet the artists at the workshop site in Adabor, Dhaka. The goal of this workshop was to understand and exchange the special skill and visual aesthetics to produce large-scale paintings in line with the cinema banner painting style and technique. The organizers hoped that this would contribute to contemporary art practice in Bangladesh by finding a new way of visual language based on popular culture. Visit Jotha Shilpa’s website or Facebook page for more details

ALL PROJECTS Kamruzzaman Shadhin at Delfina Foundation Spring Residency 2026 Tondra artist and long-term Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) collaborator Kamruzzaman Shadhin participated in the Spring Residency 2026 at the Delfina Foundation, developed around the theme Making and Materiality. Working across sculpture, installation, and collaborative practices, Shadhin's research is rooted in process, labour, and the transformation of locally sourced materials. During the residency, he continued his exploration of material knowledge and making, expanding conversations around the social and cultural histories embedded within everyday materials. Samdani Art Foundation, a long-term institutional partner of the Delfina Foundation, supported Shadhin's participation in the residency as part of its ongoing commitment to enabling international exchange and supporting artists from Bangladesh in developing sustained relationships with global arts institutions.

ALL PROJECTS The Missing One The Office of Contemporary Art Norway, 27th October 2016 – 15th January, 2017 The Missing One was curated by Nada Raza for the 3rd edition of the Dhaka Art Summit in 2016 and the Samdani Art Foundation was proud to support this exhibition's journey to the Office of Contemporary Art Norway to be realised once again. The exhibition was on display from the 27th of October 2016 to the 15th of January 2017.

ALL PROJECTS Education Pavilion Curated by Diana Campbell The Education Pavilion at Dhaka Art Summit, curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, placed learning at the centre of our programme to nurture and challenge the next generation of artists and architects in Bangladesh. These workshops were free and open to Bangladeshi participants who pre-registered. The education pavilion programming can be found here: Education+Pavilion .pdf Download PDF • 4.16MB

ALL PROJECTS A Utopian Stage Curated by Vali Mahlouji The Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis was an arts and performance festival held in Iran every summer between 1967-77, in and around the city of Shiraz and the ancient ruins of Persepolis. Taking place during a time of radical shifts in global narratives and power dynamics – at the height of the Cold War, and in the wake of rapid decolonisation – the festival facilitated a unique and transformative crucible of artistic possibility: simultaneously apart from, and in response to, its time. The festival introduced artists and expressions from the Global South into international cultural discourse on an unprecedented scale, radically dismantling the dominant hierarchies. After Iran, the most highly represented region was South Asia, re-invigorating strong but dormant cultural ties with countries like India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan which has been severed through colonial rule. In the immediate aftermath of decolonisation, Shiraz-Persepolis would shift the cultural centre of gravity towards the re-emerging ‘other’ – consciously attempting to bypass the hierarchies and conventions of the European cultural terrain. Domestically, the festival also opened up a transgressively liberal space within a politically restrictive Iran, after the CIA-organised coup d’état of 1953. In 1977, the Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis was declared decadent by religious decree, and since the Iranian revolution of 1979, materials associated with the festival have been removed from public access: the materials in this exhibited during DAS 2018 remaining officially banned in Iran. A Utopian Stage unearthed archival materials, audio recordings and film footage to articulate and appraise the implications of this decade-long episode in the 20th century’s artistic narrative. In doing so, this exhibition shed light on the aspirations and contradictions of a contentious historical moment, and addressed the notion of a collective, hyper-modernist, arena of experimentation that remains a high watermark of modernist ambition. thrust open the heavens and start anew - Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis Excavated Archives Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) has unearthed archival materials, audio recordings and film footage, which documents the revolutionary spirit of the Festival, and was displayed for the first time in Asia during the Dhaka Art Summit 2018. AOTFD considers the Festival’s landscape to be one of the most revolutionary multi-disciplinary artistic crucibles of any commissioning platform witnessed around the world - its cultural perspectives being one of the major unresolved artistic enigmas of late modernism. A Utopian Stage revealed a kaleidoscopic range of performances in music, drama and dance presented and commissioned by the Festival, with a focus on Asian and African contributions, alongside the significant presence of the international avant-garde. Through these materials, A Utopian Stage aimed to articulate and appraise the implications of this decade-long episode in the 20th century’s artistic narrative, addressing the notion of a universalist arena of modernist aspiration and experimentation. below the levels where differences appear - Performance Programme During the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, below the levels… drew upon the music, theatre, dance and politics that informed the utopian aspirations and contradictions of the original festival, with contributions by Hassan Khan, Goshka Macuga with Vali Mahlouji, Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham Trust), Reetu Sattar, Yasmin Jahan Nupur with Santal performers and Lalon Baul singers. For full details of below the levels... programme and performers, click here. to be free is to lose sight of the shore - Film Programme Throughout the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Archaeology of the Final Decade curated an eclectic selection of films, which echoed and reflected the themes at the heart of A Utopian Stage , both aesthetically and politically, from the revolutionary to the existential. The programme conflated artist and feature films, video documentations of live performances and historical documentaries to realise an ambivalent, universal stage where impulses could flourish. Invited artists and filmmakers included Reza Abdoh, Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, Ashish Avikunthak, Shezad Dawood, Rose English, Rose Finn-Kelcey, William Greaves, Isaac Julien, Mikhail Kalatozov, Lindsay Kemp, William Klein, Lala Rukh, Goshka Macuga, Simon Moretti, Sergei Parajanov, Gillo Pontecorvo, Ousmane Sembène, Shuji Terayama, and Stan VanDerBeek, among others. beyond the bounds on the other side - A Timeline In Zone 1 of A Utopian Stage , a fragmented history of the 20th century was conjured through the ambitions and contradictions of countless utopian universalist episodes and ideals: transcendental internationalisms, radical liberations, emancipating solidarities. By the middle of the last century, the demise of the old European empires revealed a new horizon of opportunities and encounters for people and cultures across the world. This timeline served as an evocation of the constantly evolving dreams and possibilities that emerged and dissolved during the period.

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

ALL PROJECTS The Collective Body Curated by Diana Campbell and Kathryn Weir. Assistant curator: Kehkasha Sabah. Supported by Adam Ondak, Lucia Zubalova, Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Teresa Albor Expressions of community and connections that precede the neoliberal individual and the nation-state are at the heart of The Collective Body, an exhibition that brings together more than thirty collaborative art initiatives. Half of these are from Bangladesh, where the thriving contemporary art ecology is largely carried by artist-led interdisciplinary initiatives that have developed festivals, art spaces, schools and collaborative networks to support their practice in the absence of centrally funded institutions or sources of economic support. Alongside these, artists and collectives have been invited from parallel contexts in order to crystallise discussions pertinent to collaborative practice in Bangladesh, drawing parallels and creating unprecedented forms of exchange of tools and strategies across Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Oceania. The curating process opened articulated conversations from which emerged common interests and preoccupations; these include the transmission of long-standing aesthetic forms, relationships between rural to urban contexts, labour movements across agricultural and industrial domains, climate change and environmental toxicity. An emergent network of initiatives comes together at DAS to address – through puppet shows, concerts, debate, installation, documentation and performance – issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersection of gender, caste and ethnicity. Centred on ideas and contemporary social contexts, the artistic practices represented in The Collective Body are fundamentally engaged in the creation of social tissue and in sharing knowledge. They are both rooted in particular contexts and looking elsewhere in formulations of what decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls ‘cosmopolitan localism’. Artistic experiments around processes of community selfdetermination are gaining strength in the context of the ecological crisis and the widening cracks in the system of extractivist neoliberalism, defined by French sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu over 20 years ago as ‘A program to destroy the collective structures capable of opposing pure market logic’ (Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998). The Collective Body structures a reflection rooted in the dynamics and questions of contemporary art initiatives in Bangladesh but reaching out to multidisciplinary groups of creative practitioners across diverse geographies to highlight the collective processes that may be ignited in the space of freedom that art offers. These processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based artists’ collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country; it is part of UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage list since 2016. This is not a generations old tradition, it is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations (especially children) to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Charupith is a longstanding research and education-based initiative located in southwestern Bangladesh; close to ten thousand young students have graduated from their independent school of fine arts. Rising fundamentalism has threatened the use of masks due to criticism of the figurative nature of the art with resulting security threats to the festival. The presentation in The Collective Body includes a series of masks created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Artist and philosopher Denise Fereira Da Silva speaks of ‘the task of unthinking the world, of releasing it from the grips of the abstract forms of modern representation’ that have supported violent forms of appropriation and extraction in modern juridic and economic systems. She suggests that artistic practice should today be considered ‘a generative locus for engaging in radical reflection on modalities of racial (symbolic) and colonial (juridic) subjugation operating in full force in the global present.’* Artist-led initiatives such as Trovoa in Brazil, The Hill Group, Kaali, and Shako in Bangladesh, Mata Aho Collective in New Zealand, Thuma in Myanmar, and eleven and ProppaNOW in Australia, among others, have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa, a group of black and nonwhite women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil, the context that has given birth to both Trovoa and Ferreira da Silva’s approaches to blackness. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia (Shako) and South America (Trovoa) for a five-hour tea party within the exhibition’s dedicated discussion space to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions will be published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media. The imperative to ‘unthink the world’ is also linked to what Ferreira Da Silva calls the deep implication of the human and non-human (and of life and non-life) to the collective, fluid, intuitive body and the elements that combine and recombine within it. In terms of the practices of art, where the image ‘reduces the basis of existence to lethal abstraction’ (as Ferreira Da Silva states in the film of 2019, 4Waters: Deep Implication), elemental matter is always more complex than its representation and can provide pathways for artists’ collective radical reflection. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, have been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes our relationship to the earth more complex and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. For DAS, Jatiwangi has explored parallels between the clay-based culturesof Indonesia and Bangladesh. The Vietnamese collective Art Labor brings together agronomy as well as colonial and cultural history to study the circulation of plant species in international markets and the effects of industrial agriculture, notably focussing on Robusta coffee beans (introduced to Vietnam in the French colonial period). Policies of increasing scale and modernising techniques related to the introduction of coffee farming have led to mass deforestation and rapid changes in the lifestyle of local indigenous Jarai community in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. Art Labor collaborates with these communities, from which one of the collective’s members comes, to diversify sources of economic support outside of coffee cultivation and support Jarai culture and farming practices. Also working on community regeneration and seeking food sovereignty through revisiting indigenous agriculture traditions, Calpulli Tecalco works on the outskirts of Mexico City to revive indigenous language and farming techniques, constructing an ecology of knowledge to rethink and defend the use of the land. Adopta Una Milpa is one example of the organisation’s agricultural regeneration projects that reinforces systems of collectivity embedded within Nahuatl language and culture. As opposed to the monoculture of industrial farming, a milpa is a cultivated field where around a dozen crops are planted together – maize, avocados, squash, bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and others – which are nutritionally and environmentally complementary, helping each species to grow and providing complementary proteins to the farmers. Unthinking the world takes place not only through working with unexpected materials but also with unexpected groups historically excluded from serious art production such as children, climate change refugees or those affected by natural disasters, all examples taken from specific art projects included in DAS. Calpulli Tecalco has facilitated The Book Club Incualli Ohtli for over twenty years, introducing several generations of children to Nahuatl language and storytelling and also engaging them in imaginative activities with pictographic representation of their linguistic roots. Storytelling is one of the many ways that an idea can move across generations and be renewed. In Bangladesh, Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together local communities and artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created Hamra to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, Golpota Shobar performs local history and myths surrounding a small village in northwest Bangladesh and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south to north movements of climate change refugees. In 2015, Bangladesh’s neighbouring Nepal was hit by a massive 7.8 Richter scale earthquake, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving 22,000 injured and 3.5 million homeless. The collective ArTree Nepal initiated 12 Bishakh Post Earthquake Community Art Project at Thulo Baysi, Bhaktapur, Nepal which started as an immediate relief initiative and developed into a sixmonth-long collective healing process involving more than 100 artists, community members, researchers, and musicians who created multi-generational interactive programmes, helping to allow the emotional ground of the community to settle in the wake of the trauma. In recent times, an increased awareness of questions of the interdependence of the human community with non-living elements has emerged in the context of climate change and industrial toxicity. Bangladesh is home to one of the largest poisonings of a population in history via arsenic in the groundwater, exacerbated by ill-conceived plans for shallow wells imported by foreign NGOs who sought inexpensive solutions to provide clean drinking water, but whose lack of specific knowledge of the local context instead unleashed enormous harm. When Europe and North America are directly affected by toxicity and freak weather effects that they previously had only read about in places like Bangladesh, their elites no longer quarantined from the sites of contamination and danger, the limits and violence of neoliberalism begin to be broadcast through the system’s own infrastructure. The ‘end of the world as we know it’ is announced as a contemporary crisis without any recognition that this is the culmination of a more than 500-year accelerating history, the effects of which have been long felt by others who the system discounted, by other lifeforms, and by non-life. Artists, as receivers and transmitters of some of the key questions of our time, and particularly those working collectively in contexts historically subjected to violent extractive and colonial forces, have been approaching environmental interdependence in powerful and lateral ways. Made up of architects, remote-sensing geographers and visual culture researchers, INTRPRT investigates underreported environmental crimes known as ecocide (including the case of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh). Their advocacy work, visual culture research, exhibitions and publications work towards making justice approachable in the fight against climate emergency and all forms of ecological impunity through collaborations with lawyers and policy-making bodies. Whereas INRPRT works through the judicial systems of the world, The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) engages scientists and engineers with young people growing up in Ladakh, especially those from rural or disadvantaged backgrounds. This platform equips young Ladakhis with the knowledge, skills, perspective, and confidence to choose and build a sustainable future in a high desert lacking water more every year. Temperatures in the Indian Himalayas are rising as a result of climate change, causing snow from glaciers to melt faster, negatively affecting local communities that rely on springtime meltwater for agriculture. Resulting from two years of experiments at SECMOL Alternative Institute, Ice Stupa was born as a local solution to a local problem, which is now being implemented elsewhere in the region and the world. Ice Stupa is an artificial glacier created by piping an un-useful winter mountain stream down below the frost line, and then cascading it out of a vertical spout in the desert plateau. When gushing water encounters freezing ambient temperatures, it transforms into a conical ice formation with minimal surface area exposed to direct sunlight. The artificial glacier lasts late into the spring, allowing communities extended access to water throughout the season, as opposed to ice, which melts much faster. This is a local solution at a human scale. Particularly in resource and infrastructure-poor contexts, artists work to amplify local initiatives, voices, and materials, even experimenting with alternative economic systems, other approaches to technology and different articulations of scale in political and social intervention in order to generate other sustainable models. The multidisciplinary platform Aman Iwan has developed an action-based research process, combining a research laboratory and the concrete experimentation of a workshop. The realities of diaspora and migration have allowed for a group to come together in Paris of which the members retain connections to many different places. Combining cultural translation and local, rooted knowledge, the platform focusses on cultural heritage preservation and renewal through knowledge transmission. In the installation The Weight of Water commissioned for The Collective Body, one landscape disappears while another appears, using elements inspired by longstanding water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan, where Aman Iwan founding member Feda Wardak works with artisans on reviving and transmitting skills. Wardak says that ‘Water management systems are both indicative of exceptional human know-how enabling settlement and catalysts for the evolution of certain landscapes, sometimes leading to their disappearance.’ Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open membership artist-led initiative Shonimongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Cafe. It continues to host bi-weekly debates and exhibitions and has recently begun publishing newsletters. While initiatives such as Shonimongol Adda push the limits of where a space for art could be located, several artists’ collectives in the exhibition examine the political limits of where their passports allow them to go. The Shelter Promotion Council based in Kolkata and Dhaka’s Britto Arts Trust collaborated in 2014 on Project No Man’s Land, a research and process-based project that brought together twenty-four artists on the borderlines of Dhonitila of Monipur Para in Sunamgonj, Bangladesh and Kalibari village in Cherapunji, India, where they developed installation, performance, sound, photography, and video works on either side of the border. Their activities inspired the border authorities on either side, who in a seemingly unthinkable act, allowed the artists to shed their documents and meet and embrace each other in the zone between the borders. In another border area, issues between Bangladesh and Myanmar have been highly publicised in the wake of the Rohingya crisis, dominating conversations related to these two countries’ relationships, and making it nearly impossible for Burmese citizens to obtain Bangladeshi visas, and viceversa. Two collectives of young female photographers from either country came together in Yangon in 2019 to explore notions of identity, respect, hope, conflict, and resolution through storytelling and photography, a collaboration which culminated in the photo book project Bridging the Naf (the river connecting Bangladesh and Myanmar). Based on their interests and experiences, artists from each country were paired up and took a journey to solve problems, make decisions, and explode stereotypes through the process of artistic exchange. The Burmese artists were denied visas to Bangladesh when it was time for the reciprocal exchange to occur, and The Collective Body is facilitating these collectives to meet in Dhaka for the first time. The Lagos-based platform Invisible Borders has placed political and conceptual border crossing at the heart of their activity of collaborative road trips bringing together photographers, filmmakers and writers from across the African continent. Founder Emeka Okereke speaks to the role that the important and long standing Dhaka photographic and activist initiative Drik (and its school Pathshala) played as a model when he was conceiving Invisible Borders even though there had been no direct contact in Bangladesh. The Collective Body invited Invisible Borders to conceive together with the Drik Network a collaborative road trip taking Bangladesh as a starting point and they decided to focus on the area in the northeast of the country around Sylhet. This landmark trip inscribes itself into long histories of exchanges and solidarities between Africa and Asia and brings into the present their radical imaginaries. The very act of assembling this event’s collective of collectives in Dhaka dissolves borders through bringing initiatives together outside of an international art circuit centred in Europe and North America and tending to involve individuals who can speak ‘art world English’ and are also from countries where visas can be more easily procured. Born from relationships distributed across the global majority world between groups of artists who responded to the challenge to unite in Dhaka, The Collective Body opens a space for public conversations around common interests and preoccupations within reimagined geographies. Some important shared themes include the transmission of long-standing aesthetic forms, relationships between rural and urban contexts, labour movements across agricultural and industrial domains, climate change and environmental toxicity. An emergent network of initiatives comes together at DAS to address – through puppet shows, concerts, screenings, debate, installation, documentation and performance – issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersections of gender, raciality, caste and class in their symbolic and economic dimensions. When art is practised in life, not abstracted to formal dimensions or insular conversations, material approaches come to the fore that recompose and reinforce existing elements. Networks of artists and other producers develop generative spaces and work against the uniformisation of economic and cultural systems and experiment with other futures. * Denise Ferreira Da Silva, In the Raw, e-flux journal #93 , September 2018, at www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw DAS 2020 Collectives Platform Participants Akāliko Founded 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh Jatiwangi Art Factory Founded 2005, Jatiwangi, Indonesia Akāliko means ‘timelessness’ in Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, reflecting the group’s belief that musical forms have always been present in everyday life in society. The promotion of electronic and experimental music is at the heart of Akāliko’s activities and they collaborate with artists and professionals who make digital and sound art. Born out of Dhaka’s electronica scene, the group was originally established in 2012 as an independent music production label set up to address the need for a common platform to promote the work of ‘bedroom’ music producers. They collaborate with like-minded performance artists, writers, choreographers/dancers, communication specialists, psychologists, and, most recently, sound artists, while at the same time maintaining their label. Their compositions are streamed online and can be experienced in this listening station. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, has been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes our relationship to the earth more complex and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. A listening station within the exhibition connects visitors with the sounds this collective creates that emerge from the ground of Indonesia. Through a mini-residency catalyzed by DAS, Akaliko and Jatiwangi explored parallels between the clay-based visual cultures and sonic qualities of Indonesia and Bangladesh. Looking out the window into the garden, visitors could see collaborative instruments created in Bangladesh, which were activated during several jam sessions on the closing three days of DAS from 4–8pm. Jatiwangi’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by the Indonesian Embassy of Bangladesh. Aman Iwan Founded 2015, Paris, France Particularly in resource and infrastructure-poor contexts, artists work to amplify local initiatives, voices, and materials, even experimenting with alternative economic systems, other approaches to technology and different articulations of scale in political and social intervention in order to generate other sustainable models. The multidisciplinary platform Aman Iwan has developed an action-based research process, combining a research laboratory and the concrete experimentation of a workshop. The realities of diaspora and migration have allowed for a group to come together in Paris, with the group’s members still retaining connections to many different places. Combining cultural translation and local, rooted knowledge, the platform focusses on cultural heritage preservation and renewal through knowledge transmission. In the installation ‘The Weight of Water’ commissioned for ‘The Collective Body’, one landscape disappears while another appears, using elements inspired by long standing water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan, where Aman Iwan founding member Feda Wardak works with artisans on reviving and transmitting skills. Wardak says: ‘Water management systems are both indicative of exceptional human know-how enabling settlement and catalysts for the evolution of certain landscapes, sometimes leading to their disappearance.’ Aman Iwan’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Institut Francais and Alliance Française de Dhaka. Art Labor Founded 2012, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Art Labor brings together agronomy as well as colonial and cultural history to study the circulation of plant species in international markets and the effects of industrial agriculture. Each project is considered an experiment to test boundaries of art, in terms of exhibition forms, exhibition venues, the artist’s role, curation limits, and the value and appreciation of art in society. Policies of increasing scale and modernising techniques related to the introduction of coffee farming by French missionaries in the 19th century have led to mass deforestation and rapid changes in the lifestyle of the indigenous Jarai community in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. Art Labor collaborates with this community, from which one of the collective’s members comes, to diversify sources of economic support outside of coffee cultivation and support Jarai culture and farming practices. Visitors can engage with Art Labor inside the ‘Jrai Dew Hammock Café’ at DAS offering Vietnamese-style filter coffee to the public in a style reminiscent of roadside cafes in Vietnam. The title of this pop-up coffee shop draws its inspiration from the Jarai belief that humans are part of a metamorphosis of nature and will eventually become dew that evaporates into the environment, entering a state of non-being, and transforming into particles that fuel new existence. Artpro Founded 2016, Dhaka, Bangladesh Artpro’s projects mobilise artists to work with less visible segments of society, often working to bridge expressions of urban and rural culture. Nakshi Katha: Interwoven Dialogues (2019–2020) exemplifies their collaborative process. This research-based project involved 4 Dhaka based artists and 24 Jamalpur based Nakshi Kantha embroiderers through storytelling workshops. In the Nakshi Kantha tradition, communities (primarily of women) share stories and pass time together embroidering closely linked linear stitches on found fabrics. Bangladesh once had 6 seasons which are depicted in its songs and folk culture, but climate change has reduced this number to 4 or 5 (depending on who you ask). Artpro engaged with the community in Jamalpur to share memories about these seasons, collaborating with the artisans to then stitch these on a saree that was divided into 6 individual panels. The depictions of Boishahk (Summer), the Rainy Season, Autumn, Winter, and Spring are joined by the ‘missing season’ of ‘Late Autumn’ created by the artisans during the first 2 days of DAS. Visitors share memories tied to this lost period of the year and these are memorialized in textile form through the expressions of the artisans. ArTree Nepal Founded 2013, Kathmandu, Nepal In 2015, Bangladesh’s neighbouring Nepal was hit by a massive 7.8 Richter scale earthquake, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving 22,000 injured and 3.5 million homeless. The collective ArTree Nepal initiated ‘12 Bishakh Post Earthquake Community Art Project’ at Thulo Baysi, Bhaktapur, Nepal which started as an immediate relief initiative and developed into a 6-month-long collective healing process involving more than 100 artists, community members, researchers, and musicians who created multi-generational interactive programmes, helping to allow the emotional ground of the community to be remade in the wake of the trauma. Two examples of this healing are represented here through interventions by ArTree members Subas Tamang and Mekh Limbu. ‘Basibiyal’ is the result of storytelling in the aftermath of the disaster. In an abandoned, damaged house, stories of survivors were recorded through an intimate and cathartic mourning process. Conductive ink was used to make ‘screen portraits’ with a video appearing on a screen when a human hand completes the electric circuit. ‘Still Shots from Chal-Ne-Chitrais’ is an animation based on the art of Subina and Suprem, two children who were part of a group encouraged to express their emotions and experiences following the earthquake through drawings. Meticulously traced, re-drawn, and re-traced, their drawings, made over a period of 3 months, are transformed into an animation in which Subina and Suprem themselves narrate their stories and reveal their own coming to terms with what they experienced. ArTree Nepal’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by Contemporary Art of Nepal. Back ART Foundation Founded 2013, Dhaka, Bangladesh Game Time –‘Khela-Ramer Khel’ Project Coordinators: Adil Hasnat, Afsana Hasan Shejuti, Mahmuda Siddika, Sanjid Mahmud. BACK Art refers to the founders’ ‘backpack’ approach to the portability of art and ideas in public spaces. They are particularly interested in rural life and issues related to urbanisation, water systems and climate change. Various projects, including ‘Dhaka Live Art Biennale’ (‘D’LAB’), use performance to explore folklore and long-standing aesthetic forms, seeking ways to locate these within contemporary art practice. Game Time – ‘Khelaram Khel’ is a performative game labyrinth addressing the question ‘Are ghosts real?’and considering shared time and play. It was developed from BACK Art’s Native Myth rural residency project in which they collaborated with local children to create ghost characters used in games later on. Games are widely played in rural areas of Bangladesh by people of different ages. Danguli, Ekka-Dokka/Kut-kut, Saat Chara, Saap Ludo, Ha-Du-Du, Bou Chi and Dariya Banda are very old games in this region that are no-longer common in urban areas. The collective is interested in rewiring and reviving older ways of being together, using contemporary art practice as a vehicle for this. The audience enters a playing area with a design pattern created from children’s drawings to experience and engage with a series of customized games. Britto Arts Trust Founded 2002, Dhaka, Bangladesh Shelter Promotion Council Founded 1986, Kolkata, India Britto Arts Trust (Bangladesh) is one of the oldest artist-led initiatives that is still active in Dhaka, and it aims to encourage critical discourse, research, interaction, diversity, and innovation in art. They provide support and visibility opportunities for artists in a variety of ways, including participation in exchange programmes facilitated by the Triangle Network and other international partners in home and abroad as well as organising exhibitions, residencies, and festivals in Bangladesh. Shelter Promotion Council (India) was established with the objective of promoting the cause of housing and inclusive development of rural and semi-urban areas with special emphasis on the economically weaker section of society. Its members are social activists, architects, engineers, scientists, environmentalists, artists and planners who work together to produce public art festivals addressing socio-political and environmental issues pertinent to north east India. In 2014 as part of ‘Project No Man’s Land’, these two artist led initiatives pushed the political limits of where their passports allowed them to go. This research and process-based project brought together 24 artists on the borderlines of Dhonitila of Monipur Para in Sunamgonj, Bangladesh and Kalibari village in Cherapunji, India, where they developed installation, performance, sound, photography, and video works on either side of the border. Their activities inspired the border authorities on either side, who in a seemingly unthinkable act, allowed the artists to shed their documents and meet and embrace each other in the zone between the borders. Calpulli Tecalco Founded 1990s, San Pedro Atocpan, Mexico Working on community regeneration and food sovereignty, Calpulli Tecalco works on the outskirts of Mexico City to revive indigenous language and farming techniques, constructing an ecology of knowledge to rethink and defend the use of the land. They have facilitated The Book Club Incualli Ohtli for over 20 years, introducing several generations of children to Nahuatl language and storytelling and also engaging them in imaginative activities with pictographic representation of their linguistic roots. Storytelling is one of the many ways that an idea can move across generations and be renewed; several of these stories can be found within these 5 pictographic flags created by the initiative’s founder Fernando Palma. In Mexican native cosmogony, the coordinates axis North-South and East-West is called Nahui Xochitl or Flower of four petals, and when the center or cross road is named, that is the fifth numeral, it is called Macuil Xochitl or Flower five. Interestingly, the numeral Maquil Xochitl is the name of ‘creation’ and it was attributed also to be the artist. This was common practice among the Aztecs, who spoke Nahuatl, and among the Mayan peoples. Incidentally, the Nahuatl language is the second most important after Spanish in Mexico. These flags orient us in another way of seeing and experiencing the world. Charupith Founded 1985, Jessore, Bangladesh Many processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change in society yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country. This is not a generations old tradition. It is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Close to 10,000 young students have graduated from Charupith’s independent school of fine arts. This series of masks was created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Charupith led mask-making workshops for Dhaka school children on the children’s days of DAS. Drik, Pathshala, and Chobi Mela Drik: Founded 1989, Dhaka, Bangladesh Pathshala: Founded 1998, Dhaka, Bangladesh Chobi Mela: Founded 2000, Dhaka, Bangladesh Invisible Borders Founded 2009, Lagos, Nigeria Invisible Borders investigates the spectrum of knowledge and artistic practices that may be generated by the process of a road trip. Through collective journeys of photographers, videographers, and writers, Invisible Borders conducts research into possible artistic responses to the unexpected. Founder Emeka Okereke comments: “In a world obsessed with artefacts — the physical, final object — as the preferred artistic outcomes, Invisible Borders shifts the gaze to the never-ending, evolutive nature of process. The work produced by the participating artists are precipitates of aesthetic experiences that are ephemeral but contain the seeds of further conversations. The artist’s presence on the road is as important as the work that commences from that presence’’. The resulting works combine photographs, texts, and video to present the critical inquiries of the travellers, their daily journals, and the voices of those met along the way. In a discussion with the curators of the Collective Body, Okereke spoke to the inspiration that the important and long-standing Dhaka photographic and activist initiative Drik (and its school Pathshala) played as a model when he was conceiving Invisible Borders even though there had been no direct contact in Bangladesh. Drik is an independent media organisation committed to challenging social inequality. It specialises in providing state of the art media and communication products for a local and global audience. Establishing its own identity through images and words, it defies the stereotypes created by western media and is a vibrant source of creative energy that refuses to be stifled. Part of the Drik network, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute is a path-breaking school of photography in South Asia. The vision of the institute is to enable an independent, responsible, and creative media industry that contributes to a just and equitable society. Its photography biennial, Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography has become a global platform that brings the world to Bangladesh (as opposed to taking Bangladeshi students to global festivals). This landmark trip inscribes itself into long histories of exchanges and solidarities between Africa and Asia and brings into the present their radical imaginaries. Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation. Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts Founded 2001, Balia, Bangladesh Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together diverse members of their neighbourhood as well as artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created ‘Hamra’ to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, ‘Golpota Shobar’ performs local history and myths surrounding a small village and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south to north movements of climate change refugees. ‘Golpota Shobar’ was realized in collaboration with Jolputul Puppet Studio and was performed inside Taloi Havini’s ‘Reclamation’ installation at 4pm on 7, 8, 9, 14, and 15 February. There were periodic interventions within the puppet theatre in this amoeba. The children also ran theatre workshops with Dhaka-based children during the DAS school days, performing the results of their workshop from 12:45–1:15pm on 11 and 13 February. Hill Artists’ Group Founded 1992, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh The Hill Artists’ Group is based in 3 districts along Bangladesh’s south eastern border with India and Myanmar known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Home to 11 distinct indigenous groups with different languages and cultures, the region is under the control of the Bangladeshi army. In this highly militarised environment, many indigenous people are reluctant to be visible in public space. The Hill Artists’ Group organises exhibitions and also art camps for artists and young people, underlining the need for solidarity across the 11 ethnic communities to preserve their diversity of cultures and languages within a Bengali majority country. Their project for DAS was developed through a workshop with Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez on the methodologies of SÖI (a public mural project in Lima, Peru with the Amazonian community Shipibo-Conibo). The Hill Artists’ Group identified a key shared practice of ‘jhum’ cultivation, also known as ‘slash and burn agriculture’, where crops are planted on land first cleared of trees and vegetation that are burnt on the spot. The soil contains potassium from the burnt plant materials which increases the nutrient content of the soil. The place of cultivation shifts annually, and every year indigenous farmers raise temporary houses in the mountain forests for months known as ‘Jhum Houses.’ This mural of a Jhum House weaves together textile patterns from the 11 communities, identified by different members of the Hill Artists’ Group as a statement of togetherness. INTRPRT Founded 2016, London, UK Made up of architects, remote-sensing geographers and visual culture researchers, INTRPRT investigates underreported environmental crimes known as ecocide (including the case of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh’s groundwater). Their advocacy work, visual culture research, exhibitions and publications work towards making justice approachable in the fight against climate emergency and all forms of ecological impunity through collaborations with lawyers and policy-making bodies. INTRPRT presents a temporary, mobile, research office organized into 3 informal sections. 1) A graphic system focused on original, archival, media and legal research into the genealogies of ecocide and more widely speaking, the presentation of the environment as a subject of international criminal law. 2) Methods and casework with a focus on its extraction and climate justice work, its innovative use of software, interactive mapping and remote sensing techniques such as data-intensive satellite imagery analysis. 3) Advocacy work, both in its legal and environmental justice contexts. This presentation is part of an ongoing collaboration between DAS and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. INTRPRT’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Jog Art Space Founded 2012, Chittagong, Bangladesh ruangrupa Founded 2000, Jakarta, Indonesia Jog Art Space is based in Chattogram, in south eastern Bangladesh. Unlike Dhaka, Chattogram has no commercial galleries and no network of contemporary art collectors, leaving artists to find alternative ways to sustain themselves. Jog Art Space provides the local visual arts community with mentoring support, exhibition opportunities, platforms for exchange and discussion, and access to international artistic exchange programmes. Some members of the group are teachers at the Institute of Fine Arts and see themselves as a bridge to experimental ways of working outside the confines of the academy, thus the name Jog, which translates as ‘connect.’ They advocate taking art out of the gallery, and into public spaces, which they refer to as ‘the emancipation of art.’ Since its establishment in Jakarta in 2000, ruangrupa has founded a video art festival, an online newspaper, music festivals, a library, a radio station, and an art school, among numerous other projects. ruangrupa also create installation works and other devices to investigate how the population of a city of more than 10 million people and lacking in infrastructure can appropriate the public space. ’Ruang‘ means ’space‘ in Sanskrit and Bahasa Indonesia, and ‘rupa’ means ’visual form‘. The collective includes artists, curators, architects, and writers, varying in number from 6 to 50 according to the project. Through programmes and interventions in urban space, ruangrupa exposes how knowledge is produced and shared through informal social situations — in line with their motto ‘Don’t make art, make friends’. Gerobak Cinema was a mobile rickshaw screening station created through a collaboration between Jog and ruangrupa. It produced screening sessions at various spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy on 14 February, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment was collaboratively designed by artists, designers, and IT technicians, and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos or selected Bangladeshi films. Jothashilpa Founded 2016, Bangladesh Jothashilpa is a centre for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself ‘a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language.’ The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society which emerges from everyday life. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. Through their research and making processes, they collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary and Master Artist of Cinema Banner Painting Mohammad Shoaib and his disciples to realise a timeline that contains exhibitions about collectivity within, grounding us in solidarities of the past and imagining solidarities of the future. Artists involved in this project: Mohammad Shoaib, Shawon Akand, Didarul Dipu, S. M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Hamayet Himu, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim. Kaali Founded 2018, Dhaka, Bangladesh Thuma Founded 2017, Yangon, Myanmar Issues between Bangladesh and Myanmar have been highly publicised in the wake of the Rohingya crisis, dominating conversations related to these two countries’ relationships, and making it nearly impossible for Myanmar citizens to obtain Bangladeshi visas, and vice- versa. Two collectives of young female photographers from either country came together in Yangon in 2019 to explore notions of identity, respect, hope, conflict, and resolution through storytelling and photography, a collaboration which culminated in the photo book project ‘Bridging the Naf ‘(the river connecting Bangladesh and Myanmar). Based on their interests and experiences, artists from each country were paired up and took a journey to solve problems, make decisions, and explode stereotypes through the process of artistic exchange. The Myanmar artists were denied visas to Bangladesh when it was time for the reciprocal exchange to occur, and DAS is facilitating these collectives to meet, for the first time, in Bangladesh. Both collectives realise the difficulties facing female photographers in both Bangladesh and Myanmar; coming together provides them the agency to claim space in their respective art scenes. They share postcards with images and text inspired by their cross-border experience for visitors to bring home. Mata Aho Collective Founded 2012, Aotearoa Ko te moteatea te mataaho ki te pa o te hinengaro Māori. The moteatea is the window to the foresight of Māori. Moteatea are songs rich with metaphor that play important roles within Māori communities. Often sung to support or contest a speech, an action or gesture, moteatea are a documentation of history; a way to uplift or lament ancestors, events and places, transferred through many generations. Mata Aho Collective’s time at DAS 2020 will focus on learning a specific form of moteatea called pātere. Composed by women, these fast, vigorous chants recount kinship connections and plot a journey of significant landmarks. Mata Aho will spend time in wānanga each day learning a pātere composed for them that recounts the whakapapa (layers of genealogy) of their artworks they have created together since 2012. Mata Aho’s presentation at DAS was made possible through the generous support of Creative New Zealand. Pangrok Sulap Collective Founded 2010, Ranau Sabah, Malaysia Pangrok Sulap are a collective based in Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, consisting of indigenous Dusun and Murut artists, musicians and social activists who are dedicated to empowering rural communities through art. Membership is fluid and participation open, and their name expresses their make-up, locality and orientation: Pangrok means punk rock, and Sulap is a hut used as a resting place by Sabahan farmers. Pangrok Sulap has no permanent members as it is ‘willing to welcome anyone who wants to contribute’. Their ethos is conveyed by the slogan ‘Jangan Beli, Bikin Sendiri’: ‘Don’t buy, do it yourself’. The group came together to conduct charity work in rural schools, orphanages and homes for the disabled. Working primarily with wood-cut printmaking, they create works that are impressive in scale and seductive in detail, depicting narratives relating to pertinent issues in Sabah. The group has consistently fought against censorship, worked to spread awareness of Sabah’s endangered rainforests, and promoted the power of the arts to empower. Shako Founded 2003, Dhaka, Bangladesh National Trovoa Founded 2019, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Several artist-led initiatives have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa, a group of black and non-white women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Shako – Women Artists Association of Bangladesh – for women and by women – believes art can play a role in healing society. It raises funds for individuals, male and female, who are unwell or in need of medical treatment; uses art to encourage physically or mentally challenged people; and promotes female artists and helps them develop skills. A ‘shako’ is a temporary bamboo bridge, built to make it possible to cross rivers and streams, an apt metaphor for Shako’s work connecting talented female artists to vulnerable communities. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together these two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia and South America for a 5-hour tea party to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions were published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media, following #darkeningthoughts . Shako also ran a workshop on black empowerment on 13 February from 4–6pm in the 4th floor workshop area. Shoni Mongol Adda Founded 2016, Bangladesh Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open-membership artist-led initiative Shoni Mongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Café, and which is walking distance from the DAS venue. Here, the collective presents a new question every day at DAS in a sign-based format for the audience to consider and debate in addas organised in the discussion area of this amoeba form. It also invited visitors to join them for addas at Kamor Cafe on 8 February and 11 February and hosted artistic delegations from Nepal and Australia. Uronto Founded in 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh Uronto is an artists’ community that reconnects with lost memories of forgotten places through interdisciplinary contemporary artistic interventions. They create opportunities to connect to cultural histories through coexisting and co-creating, gaining access to memories that inspire creative workers and empower current generations with knowledge. The Uronto Residential Art Exchange Programme is one of the major yearly initiatives of Uronto, which involves interactive pop-up residencies and workshops at sites that are mostly abandoned and soon-to-be demolished heritage buildings in rural areas. Uronto believes that if we lose a heritage building we lose a part of our sense of belonging. Each iteration takes place in a new location, explores a new community, and brings together a new group of local and international artists from different backgrounds, including visual artists, writers, musicians, storytellers, architects, poets, engineers, and so on. Operating as a ‘site-responsive’ art exchange programme, ten to fifteen creative practitioners are convened through an international open-call. The participants live in the surroundings of these structures, fully immersed in day-to-day life, for a week to ten days, exploring oral history through the community. The process culminates in an ‘Open Studio Day.’ Since 2012, through nine iterations, Uronto has brought together over a hundred artists of various creative orientations from more than nine countries making work at nearly a dozen soon-to-be-lost architectural structures/palaces in Bangladesh. Uronto mediates between local and international artists, rural and urban inhabitants, as well as conventional and experimental creative disciplines. Through shared experiences and storytelling, they have created an archive (available on their website) of lost narratives. Their work is a collaboration that both cherishes old narratives and creates new ones, resulting in a greater appreciation of the chosen sites.

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 1 - Politics: The Most Architectural Thing To Do Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 1 - Politics: The Most Architectural Thing To Do “Architecture must inspire the people, for whom it is built, by creating spaces that incite the finer, more gracious aspects of the mind,” said Bangladeshi architect and urbanist Muzharul Islam (1923-2012). When asked why he entered politics, he responded, “because it was the most architectural thing to do.” This Bearing Point considered the entanglement of the history of architecture in South Asia with the quest to undo the effects of imperialist colonisation. Decolonial practice meant re-making the world; re-framing a new attitude to internationalism against the modes created by imperialism. Moving towards the de-hegemonisation and decolonisation of form, Rasheed Araeen’s monumental commission Rite/Right of Passage (2016-2018) used the familiar form of bamboo scaffolding, as well as that of temporary bamboo pavilions, used across South Asia for ritual and ceremonial purposes to destabilise an imperialist idiom of minimalism, with its focus on the machine-made, replicable form, and erasure of the traces of the presence of the human hand. A rite of passage can be described as a ceremony marking when an individual, or individuals, leave one group/society to enter another. Inspired by figures like Araeen, DAS sought to create a space for artists on the periphery of a Western-dominated art historical discourse, but also an India-dominated South Asian cultural discourse. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh’s Studies in Form (2017-2018) was a tribute to a history of internationalist thinking in architecture, while simultaneously imagining a blueprint for cultural hybridity in architecture through a landscape of cyanotypes. The post-independence moment saw the invitation of many pioneering architectural thinkers to the region. Franco-Hungarian architect and theorist Yona Friedman was first invited to South Asia by UNESCO in the 1980s to research into techniques of vernacular architecture, which could be used to respond emergencies where resources were limited. Friedman worked with existing craft practices, such as basket-making and the use of bamboo, to develop what would eventually become the Museum of Simple Technology (1982) in Madras (Chennai). Rebuilt in 2017 in Bangladesh, this project symbolised the spirit of self-reliance, flexibility, and freedom that allowed Friedman’s manifestos for mobile architecture to exist into perpetuity, infinitely translatable. Questioning the hierarchical position of the museum, and the role architecture plays in the creation of its hegemonic position, Dayanita Singh’s Pocket Museum and Shoebox Museum workshops created a different form of a museum without walls – as mobile entity, one in a permanent state of flux. Continuing the Tagorean tradition of syncretism between vernacular and western forms and de-colonial pedagogy, the Education Pavilion, designed by Samdani Architecture Award laureate Maksudul Karim, imagined a space for a nomadic art school at the centre of DAS which hosted free workshops on artistic and curatorial methodology. The Dhaka Art Summit hoped to foster modes of architectural thinking that are able to conceive of located, contextual forms of life, oriented against imperialism, that produce their own syncretism framework that reimagines both built and non-human environments. Artists Rasheed Araeen (b.1935 in Karachi, lives and works in London) Rite/Right of Passage, 2016-2018 Bamboo Construction Scaffolding Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the Artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Grosvenor Gallery A rite of passage can be described as a form of ceremony which occurs when an individual, or individuals, leave one group/society to enter another, a harbinger of impending change. Moving towards the decolonization of form, Rasheed Araeen’s monumental commission Rite/Right of Passage (2016-2018) rises from the entrance of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, adopting the familiar form of bamboo scaffolding as well temporary bamboo pavilions used across South Asia for ritual and ceremonial purposes to destabilise the American imperialist idiom of minimalism, with its focus on the machine-made, replicable form. Araeen’s sculptural passage into Dhaka Art Summit 2018 is through an improvised space of geometry, fundamental to an Islamic worldview which was developed from the 8th Century. The reference to these forms becomes a conceptual gesture for Araeen, acting in defiance of Western hegemony over regimes of vision, which he believes are enforced through the proliferation and circulation of living images. We invite visitors to embark on a rite of passage into a new mode of thinking with Bangladesh at the centre of its own existence, rather than that periphery of someone else’s, while also looking back at the philosophies that informed the long history of internationalism in the region. Yona Friedman (b. 1923 in Budapest, lives and works in Paris) Museum of Simple Technology, 1982/2018 Bamboo, Woven Baskets, Aluminium Foil Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from Institut Français . The post-independence moment saw the invitation of many pioneering architectural thinkers to the region, such as that of Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh in 1950 and Muzharul Islam bringing his mentor Louis Kahn to Bangladesh to plan the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban in 1962. Franco-Hungarian architect and theorist Yona Friedman was first invited to South Asia by UNESCO in the 1980s to research into techniques of vernacular architecture, which could be used to respond to situations of emergency where resources were limited. Friedman worked with existing craft practices within communities, such as basket-making and the use of bamboo scaffolding, to develop what would eventually become the Museum of Simple Technology (1982) in Madras (Chennai) which was awarded the Scroll of Honour for Habitat from the United Nations. Friedman was equally interested in the modes of transmission of architectural knowledge: he devised instead a sequential visual language to produce scores for the creation of his improvisatory architecture. The Museum of Simple Technology, rebuilt in 2017 in Bangladesh, speaks to the spirit of self-reliance, flexibility, and freedom that allow Friedman’s manifestos for mobile architecture to exist into perpetuity, infinitely translatable. Seher Shah (b. 1975 in Karachi, lives and works in New Delhi) & Randhir Singh (b. 1976 in New Delhi, lives and works in New Delhi) Studies in Form, 2017 Cyanotype monoprints on Arches Aquarelle paper Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artists, Samdani Art Foundation, and Nature Morte, New Delhi Presented here with additional support from Nature Morte, New Delhi Studies in Form is a new collaborative body of work between artist Seher Shah and photographer Randhir Singh exploring overlapping ideas in architecture, photography, drawing and printmaking. A series of cyanotype prints builds on these overlaps to further an ongoing interest into concepts of architectural scale and sculptural intent. Cyanotypes were one of the first photographic printmaking processes developed in the 19th century and a precursor to the blueprint which was an important reproduction method for architectural and engineering drawings well into the 20th century. Working with this printmaking process, Shah and Singh focus on five unique buildings by fragmenting their architectural components through photographic images. These buildings share a number of aesthetic qualities including heavy massing, the sculptural use of concrete and repetitive structural grids along with a visionary intent driven by a desire to break from the status quo. Grouped into chapters, the buildings in this ongoing series are: Akbar Bhawan (Shivnath Prasad, New Delhi. 1969) The Barbican Estate (Chamberlin Powell and Bon, London. 1976) Dentsu Head Office (Kenzo Tange, Tokyo. 1967) Brownfield Estate: Balfron Tower, Glenkerry House and Carradale House (Ernő Goldfinger, London. 1970) Dhaka University Library (Muzharul Islam, Dhaka. 1954) Alongside these five chapters, two smaller series of works, both reproduced as cyanotypes, offer varying perspectives. A series of drawings, titled Flatlands Blueprints, explores notions of incompleteness and uncertainty as a counterpoint to determined architectural expression. The sculptural forms and massing found in the photographs is further explored in a series of woodcut based prints, titled Hewn Blueprints. Working with architectural representational methods, such as the plan and elevation, these prints function between the precise formalism of a blueprint and the intuitive nature of drawing. Dayanita Singh (b. 1961 in New Delhi, lives and works in New Delhi ) Dayanita Singh’s art uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to photographic images. Her recent work, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, is a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities. Selected exhibitions include Suitcase Museum, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2017); Museum of Chance Book Object, a solo project at the Dhaka Art Summit (2016); the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016); Go Away Closer, Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014). Singh has also authored several books including Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent A Letter (2008).

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