ALL PROJECTS Crafting Togetherness Srihatta Crafting Togetherness fosters collaboration between artisans and architecture students through workshops and knowledge exchanges, guided by Rizvi Hassan. Taking place at Srihatta and supported by the British Council's Climate Futures: South Asia Grant 2025, the project focuses on sustainable building practices and explores Sylhet’s indigenous techniques using bamboo, mud, and leaves. These exchanges will shape the design and construction of a biodegradable, zero-waste cultural space. After completion, the space will continue to host workshops and performances on sustainability, inspiring eco-friendly practices in the arts and strengthening community connections through shared learning. Crafting Togetherness is shaped by a team that connects artistic vision with deep local knowledge. Diana Campbell leads the artistic direction, while Ruxmini Choudhury guides the curatorial direction, with support from our curatorial assistant, Swilin Haque. Architect Rizvi Hassan, whose long-standing work with natural materials anchors the project, leads the architectural research and design. Our administrative and on-site backbone comes from Mohammad Sazzad Hossain, along with the Srihatta team who ensure everything functions smoothly on the ground. The workshop and design process is led by Rizvi Hassan, supported by a dedicated group of young architects and designers: Minhajul Abedin, Zareen Sharif, Ruhan Al Faruk, and Fazlul Haque, whose hands-on engagement with artisans and students is vital to the project’s collaborative approach.

ALL PROJECTS TONDRA A project commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, uniting ten Bangladeshi artists with international curators and mentors to create score-based works that explore the space between dreams and reality, unfolding across global partner institutions in 2026. TONDRA The meaning of the word TONDRA in Bangla can be described as a state of existence where reality and dreams collide; a lucid dream that captivates the soul. TONDRA is also a common female name in Bangladesh, which became popular during the mid-1990s-2000s for a character named Tondra in a novel by the Bangladeshi author Humayun Ahmed. For many the name Tondra carries a wave of nostalgia -tied to love, longing, and cultural imagination shaped by Bengali literature and film. Our story of TONDRA emerged from heartbreak expressed by a young visitor at DAS 2023, who wrote messages for a woman named TONDRA on the walls of our exhibition, such as “Everyone is here, but you are missing from my life.” His writing style ranged from graffiti to poetry, referring to his Tondra as ‘a cloudy day’ and other beautiful metaphors that connected his deepest personal feelings for his beloved to the stories and films of Humayun Ahmed, Zahir Raihan, and lyricist Ukil Munsi. We see this visitor as an emerging artist who found the need to express the feelings inside of him in a public cultural forum, transforming the delirious state of heartbreak into something others can connect to, as we do with some of our favourite love songs. TONDRA is a journey through the landscapes of emotions, where the line between what we feel, what we see, and what we imagine becomes blurry. In July 2024, Bangladesh entered a state of radical transformation, catalyzed by a historic student uprising that ended a 15-year autocracy and opened up space for imagining new futures. Many from the generation of “the student who loved Tondra” were active in this revolution, freeing Bangladesh from one reality and currently living in a place where a new reality has yet to land. One can describe life in Bangladesh as a state of Tondra, a liminal space where Bangladeshis are dreaming about what kind of future they wish to have. TONDRA is a project by the Samdani Art Foundation supporting ten Bangladeshi artists to work with a global curatorial team to develop score-based projects, which, like a dream, are not limited to a particular time and place to exist. As Bangladesh approaches democratic elections in 2026, the Samdani Art Foundation is rethinking how best to support artists in this moment of transition. With international mobility more limited than when the Dhaka Art Summit began in 2012, our focus is shifting from producing exhibitions to empowering artists to develop works that connect their ideas with the world. TONDRA will be the heart of a reimagined Dhaka Art Summit, led by Tondra’s curatorial team , which will reopen to visitors after Bangladesh has elected its future leadership—contributing to a forward-thinking civil society through art and culture. Dreams might also be the last frontier of freedom. These works of art will circulate as part of a global dream about what is possible when ideas can move even when bodies lie still, as they do when we dream. In dreams and in art, the wildest things are possible. Samdani Art Foundation’s Artistic Director Diana Campbell, as Chief Curator, and a team of guest curators will be working with the selected ten artists for a year to develop their projects. The guest curators are Nora Razian (Deputy Director, Arts, Art Jameel, Dubai), Lucas Morin (Senior Curator, Art Jameel, Dubai), Indranjan Banerjee (Curator, Art Jameel, Dubai), (Chief Curator, WEILS, Brussels ), Hiuwai Chu (Head of Exhibitions and Curator, MACBA, Barcelona), Mohamed Almusibli (Director, Kunsthalle Basel), and Christina Li (Independent Curator based in the Netherlands), with the curatorial support from Ruxmini Choudhury (Curator, Samdani Art Foundation) and Swilin Haque (Curatorial Assistant). TONDRA’s first artist dreamers in residence are Ashfika Rahman, Joydeb Roaja, Kamruzzaman Shadhin, Laisul Hoque, Munem Wasif, Promiti Hossain, Reetu Sattar, Samsul Alam Helal, Sumi Anjuman, and Yasmin Jahan Nupur.

ALL PROJECTS Colonial Movements Curated by Diana Campbell Colonial Movements Ongoing legacies of colonialism establish and maintain conditions of exploitation throughout the global majority world (the world outside of Europe and North America which hosts most of the human population on the planet). Naked capitalism and internationalism, sometimes masked under the guise of religion and development aid, continues to drive networks of power controlling the globe. Revealed through its extractive actions of planting and uprooting indigenous goods and people, colonialism still extends deep into the furthest reaches of the Earth through the seeds of commodities. Artists across generations have made works that reflect how histories of land are intimately entangled/embedded with narratives of hunger, dispossession and ultimately erasure. Colonisation is inscribed in the physical and cultural DNA of the worlds we inhabit, and the artists working across these spheres help us navigate through complex webs of greed and addiction to imagine solidarities for alternative and autonomous futures Ongoing legacies of colonialism establish and maintain conditions of exploitation throughout the global majority world (the world outside of Europe and North America which hosts most of the human population on the planet). Naked capitalism and internationalism, sometimes masked under the guise of religion and development aid, continues to drive networks of power controlling the globe. Revealed through its extractive actions of planting and uprooting indigenous goods and people, colonialism still extends deep into the furthest reaches of the Earth through the seeds of commodities. Artists across generations have made works that reflect how histories of land are intimately entangled/embedded with narratives of hunger, dispossession and ultimately erasure. Colonisation is inscribed in the physical and cultural DNA of the worlds we inhabit, and the artists working across these spheres help us navigate through complex webs of greed and addiction to imagine solidarities for alternative and autonomous futures. Adebunmi Gbadebo b. 1992, Livingston; lives and works in Newark True Blue: Peter, Peter 2 and Phillis, 2019 Human Black Hair, Cotton, Rice Paper, Denim, Hair Dye, Silk Screen Print Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery Adebunmi Gbadebo addresses the concepts of land, memory and erasure in her work. Sheets of paper constructed with beaten cotton linters and human hair collected from black barber shops serve as abstracted documentations of genetic histories, embedded in the strands of hair. The dominant blue dye traces Gbadebo’s maternal family history to three plantations where her ancestors were forced into slavery. Gbadebo’s use of indigo inevitably links her historical inquiry to Bengal, where the plant was grown as a cash crop from around the year of 1777 by the British East India Company. The more recent histories of Bangladesh and the USA (where Gbadebo traces her family’s history) are interlinked through the garment industry. The bold, blue colour produced from the indigo plant can serve as a reminder of the vast amount of denim clothing produced in Bangladesh for international export. The conditions under which the clothing worn by western consumers is produced by Bangladeshi workers, should not be erased from history. Using black hair, cotton, rice paper, indigo and sometimes silkscreened photo imagery, Gbadebo creates abstract ‘portraits’ of her enslaved ancestors. The DNA of those people still exists in these works of art. She perceives hair as a means to position her people and their histories as central to the narratives in her work. Annalee Davis b. 1963, Barbados; lives and works in Barbados F is for Frances, 2015–16 Coloured pencil on plantation ledger pages Courtesy of the artist The last will and testament of Thomas Applewhaite written in August 1816 directed that six years after his death his ‘little favourite Girl Slave named Frances shall be manumitted and set free from all and all manner of Servitude and slavery whatsoever.’ At the time, Applewhaite was the owner of Walkers – the site where the artist Annalee Davis lives, works, and explores. F is for Frances maps Frances’ name in a series of seven drawings on ledger pages. The letters forming her name are comprised of 17th-and 18th-century sherds found in the soil of former sugarcane fields, suggesting fragments of history understood only in part – usually through the words of the white colonial-settler and most often a male voice. With Frances, another voice becomes audible and visible. Davis has a hybrid practice as a visual artist, cultural instigator, educator, and writer. With the media of printmaking, painting, installation, and video art, she works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies through engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados. Davis has been involved in the founding and co-founding of numerous initiatives, including Fresh Milk (f. 2011), an arts platform and micro-residency programme, Caribbean Linked (f. 2012), an annual residency in Aruba, and Tilting Axis (f. 2015) an independent visual arts platform bridging the Caribbean through annual encounters. Apnavi Makanji b. 1976, Bombay; lives and works in Geneva Appropriation Disinformation – Nature and the Body Politic, 2019 Collage on found paper Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Tarq Sourced from the Atlas International Larousse Politique et Economique (1950), the pages making up Apnavi Makanji’s collages are records of the treasures of the globe as represented through the eyes of imperial powers in their quest for progress and the modern condition. In fact, these pages of statistics are effectively lists of extractivism. They remain silent on the violence inflicted on the environment, on modern-day slavery, and on the displacement of indigenous communities. The artist has chosen to look at them instead as tools of capitalism and proof of systematic violence. These collages are not only a representation of what has been forgotten, buried, or annihilated, they also stand in for a subconscious that is mutant and diseased. In its soft sensuality and secretions, the work attempts to trigger a visceral memory of a situated environment that existed before it was reduced to highly mobile commodities. Installed across the gallery as punctuation points between walls, these collages help the viewer navigate a complex history of connectivity across diverse contexts spanning Africa, South, Southeast, and East Asia, South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, as well as North America and Europe. Makanji works with the media of installation, drawing, and film, producing complex constructs informed by botany, memory, displacement, and environmental urgency. They are interested in exploring the intersection of these concepts within the context of human-engendered climate emergency. Candice Lin b. 1979, Concord; lives and works in Los Angeles The Tea Table, 2016 Etching on Japanese Kozo paper The Roots of Industry, 2016 Etching on Japanese Kozo paper Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly,and Gasworks Candice Lin’s works establish a network of connections between historical and contemporary Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, as well as their generational traumas. In The Roots of Industry, Lin reinterprets an engraving of Bolivian silver mines by Theodor de Bry. The Andean potato was cultivated to feed indigenous miners mining silver and mercury in South America. This silver and the excess potatoes travelled across the sea and fuelled the Industrial Revolution, changing the course of world history. In The Tea Table, Lin appropriates an engraving by John Bowles (circa 1710) which was a satire on affluent fashionable ladies and featured a devil lurking under the table as Envy drives Justice and Truth out of a door. In this rendition, Lin draws connections between tea, opium, and sugar by replacing the symbolic figures with images of tea production and opium abuse. Lin works predominantly with sculpture and video, addressing notions of cultural, gendered, and racial difference, rampant sexualities, and deviant behaviour. Interested in the fluid boundaries between the self and the other, she examines how Western ideologies of the self-influence the politics of power within notions of individualism, selfhood, freedom, and difference. Dhali Al Mamoon b. 1958, Chandpur; lives and works in Chittagong শতাব্দীর উপাখ্যান (The story of the Century), 2019 Spices, tea, and indigo on paper and canvas Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist The history of colonialism is objectively the history of despair. Dhali Al Mamoon’s ongoing work searches for the self through the narrative of historically contextualised images, with a nod to the existentialism found in the analysis of every work of art. Our appearance, sartorial/material representation, and constructed sense of self carry the legacies of colonisation; history, memory, and flashes of coincidence prime our perception of the world. In free-play kinetic works on paper and canvas, the artist draws in commodities that changed the course of South Asian history under the control of the British East India Company: tea and indigo and spices. Tea and indigo, in both solid and liquid form, correspond to the colours of amber and blue used extensively in the artist’s palette, evoking a sense of melancholy associated with the history of how these materials were misused to exploit people and lands. Al Mamoon works with drawings, paintings, kinetic sculptures and installations, addressing issues of knowledge, history and identity. Constructing complex experiences, he is interested in deconstructing the collective memory of his homeland of Bangladesh. He focuses on the ways in which colonialism de-humanised, exploited and dislocated people from their own land, culture and tradition, separating them from traditional systems of knowledge. Elia Nurvista b. 1983, Yogyakarta; lives and works in Yogyakarta Sugar Zucker, 2016–2020 Crystallised sugar, mural Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from the Indonesian Embassy of Bangladesh Beyond their sparkling surfaces, sugar and jewels are linked by stories of violent exploitation of labour and the environment. From Africa and the Caribbean to Asia, from Europe to the Pacific, the history of sugar is tied to the mass movement of people around the world as part of exploitative plantation economies that fuelled a global demand for its sweet taste. This model of commodity production continues today; the amount of money that producers of commodities make is far removed from the taxes that foreign governments levy on them and from the profits that traders and corporations enjoy as a result of addictive cycles of consumption. Elia Nurvista’s gemstone-shaped candy sculptures remind of an underlying bitterness behind the sweet ‘taste’ that we have grown accustomed to. Nurvista presents her social research through mixed-media installations, food workshops, and group discussions. Her predominant focus is on the production and distribution of food, and its broader social and historical implications. Nurvista’s works explore the intersection between food and commodities, and their relationship to colonialism, economic and political power, and status. Faiham Ebna Sharif b. 1985, Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka and Uppsala Cha Chakra: Tea Tales of Bangladesh, 2015–ongoing Photographs, archival material Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist The Baganiya communities of Bangladesh are made up of tea workers who originate from at least ninety different ethnic groups from across South Asia formerly known as British India. While their ethnic and linguistic origins differ, their histories are intertwined as they were forcefully moved as indentured servants to the tea gardens of Sylhet and Chittagong, where they remain to this day. After the partition of British India in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, these people became citizens of Bangladesh and lost touch with their ancestral homelands. Cha Chakra is Faiham Ebna Sharif’s research-based work that uses old printed materials, advertisements, and historical documents show the ongoing story of inequity and exploitation behind the second most consumed drink (after water). His research extends into the resistance of the community as it strives to hold onto its traditions in this newly commissioned presentation. Faiham Ebna Sharif is an artist and researcher interested in long-term explorations of subjects such as tea plantations, the film industry of Bangladesh, the Rohingya refugee crisis, HIV patients, climate change, and migration from the micro-scale of the local bus to the meta-scale of humanity. Although Sharif studied international relations, he chose photography as his medium of expression. Sharif collects manuscripts, published primary sources (such as newspapers and other local media), as well as visual records (painting, photography and video) and oral histories parallel to and contributing to his artistic practice. Gisela McDaniel b. 1995, Bellevue; lives and works in Detroit I am M(in)e, 2019–2020 Oil and assemblage on canvas with sound Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist Many people are unaware that the United States still holds five inhabited territories from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean that fall under the definition of a colony. The power and interests of the US military are given as reasons to deny the people of these colonies the same rights of self-governance that America fought for in the War of Independence in 1776. Gisela McDaniel is a mixed-race Chamorro artist whose DNA carries the complex history of colonisation on the American territory of Guam. Her paintings subvert traditional power relations by allowing the subject to talk back to the viewer through overlaid audio interviews. As evidenced in the works of artists like Paul Gauguin, power dynamics can be extremely problematic between native women and the men colonising their lands, and McDaniel’s work pushes back against a primitivist gaze. This haunting new series of portraits provide a portal into the struggle of mixed-race people to find a sense of belonging and to pick a side in conflicted cultural and political battles for autonomy. McDaniel’s work is based on a process of healing from her own sexual trauma while engaging with other female survivors through the practice of portraiture. Interweaving assemblages of audio, oil painting, and motion-sensored technology, she creates pieces that ‘come to life’ and literally ‘talk back’ to the viewer, giving agency to the subjects of her paintings. Hira Nabi b. 1987, Lahore; lives and works in Lahore Good Seeds | Bad Seeds, 2019–2020 Relief prints in vitrine Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist Any attempt to map a history of plant species reveals that it is as migrant and varied, if not more than the human species. Can territorialization be temporal as well as geographical? Good Seeds | Bad Seeds is a series thinking through botanical imaginaries and their influence upon identity making. Building upon a collection of archival Pakistani postage stamps as a site of initial inquiries into marking terrain, cultivating and farming it, extracting from it, hydrating and dehydrating, and designing it in specific ways – Hira Nabi proposes an allowing for a set of future possibilities as a way to expand an inclusive, regional identity of cross-pollination and care. The work explores the arrival and transfer of seeds via colonialism, failed botanical migrations, and economies of land usage. Nabi is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. Her practice moves across research and visual production interrogating the relationship between memory, history and place. She is currently working on researching cinema houses in urban Pakistan, and on identity-making and cultural production in Lahore through a study of its gardens and botanical influences. Hlubaishu Chowdhuri b. 1992, Khagrachhari, Bangladesh; Lives and works in Chattagram Shape of Map 1, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Shape of Map 2, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist Shape of Map 3, 2019 Acrylic on canvas. Commissioned for the DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist The Chittagong Hill Tracts in Southeast Bangladesh are comprised of three districts (Khagrachari, Rangamati and Bandarban) hosting eleven different ethnic communities with over a thousand years of diverse cultural, linguistic, and ethnic histories that differ from those of the majority Bengali population of Bangladesh. Chowdhuri’s paintings depict the map of Chattagram (previously Chittagong) division, and forms of figures and objects emerge in the voids of intertwined lines that seem to pulse like veins. In her map series, the artist paints internally conflicted lands. She explores the paradox of forced migration of indigenous people in the face of their non-severable spiritual connections to their lands, stressing the importance of overcoming conflict derived from cultural and ethnic differences in order to find new ways to peacefully coexist. Chowdhuri works predominantly with painting. As a member of the Marma indigenous community of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, her art is greatly influenced by the region’s socio-political instability and cultural history. Chowdhuri’s paintings reflect the existential crises of indigenous people over time through motifs drawn from indigenous knitting and craft techniques. Kamruzzaman Shadhin b. 1974, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka and Thakurgaon The Fibrous Souls, 2018–2020 Jute, Cotton Thread, Brass, Clay Realised in collaboration with Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s collaborative work interweaves strands of history that seem innocently distinct from but are in fact connected to present-day peasant conditions in South Asia. The artist invited ecological migrants residing in his village who moved from the ‘jute tracks’ of Southern Bangladesh to create a memorial reminding us of how the desire and pursuit of a commodity economy continues to transform the land that we stand on. Seventy giant shikas hang in a formation based upon the Assam Bengal Railway that operated under British India from 1892–1942. Railways were a form of connectivity that displaced people and their ways of life; their construction transformed Bengal’s lands from growing food to producing globally desired commodities (jute, indigo, opium). Shadhin’s participatory practice incorporates sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, and public art interventions. His work maintains a satirical edge, dealing directly with the politics of environmental degradation and destruction and its effects on communities across Bangladesh. Migration, social justice, and local history are recurring themes in his works. He is the founder of the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts (founded 2001) and a founding member of Chhobir Haat (founded 2005). Liu Chuang b. 1978, Hubei; lives and works in Shanghai Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, 2018 Three-channel video, 4K, 5.1 surround sound, 40 min Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.Commissioned for Cosmopolis #1 .5: Enlarged Intelligence with the support of the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation Liu Chuang observes the displacement of indigenous peoples and cultures left in the wake of harvesting massive amounts of energy from hydroelectric dams, connecting historical narratives and stories of material and immaterial profit and loss across Asia via the mountainous region known as Zomia – which extends into the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The work links political power, the extraction of minerals and energy from deep within the earth, and new currencies seeking to evade centralised national control, moving from the fifth century BCE to present-day China through a mixture of shot and found footage, the narration of fact and fiction, and sound. Chuang works with found materials, such as window grilles and pulp-fiction books, in addition to video, installation, architecture, and performance. He critically reflects upon life in contemporary China, focusing on its culture of intensive industry and globalisation. The artist is interested in attending to larger socio-political phenomena that often go unnoticed in day-to-day existence. Madiha Sikander b. 1987, Hyderabad; lives and works between Karachi and Vancouver Majmua, 2017–18 Cloves, monofilament, glass, metal beads Courtesy of the artist The artist would like to acknowledge the labour of the students who wove with her: Habiba Saleheen, Mohammad Omer,Yumna Ahmed, Sana Zahid, Azher Khan, Aiman Rauf, Humaira Salaams, Danyal Begg, Hussain Sanjwani, Bakhtawar Majeed, Mansoor Elahi, Salman Siddiqui, Mohammad Abbas, Attika Shahab, Shanzay Ikhlaq, Zulfiqar Ali, Vimal Khatri, Mehwish John, Ayesha Sabih, Nimra Shoaib, Aniqa Sohail, Shayan Nasir, Fiza Batool, Shahrukh Shafique, Sidra Sohail, Sobia Sohail and Maisam Hussain Madiha Sikander’s Majuma (‘assemblage’ in Urdu) is an installation inspired by the similarities in the practices of miniature painting and Canadian First Nations weaving in terms of their relationship with labour and materiality. Cloves, beads, and microfilaments are woven together to create a transparent and powerfully scented curtain that invites us to consider how the world we experience today was designed by labour and trade routes drawn up by imperial powers. ‘Each lozenge refigures how the lines of the Silk Road and the routes of the Spice Trade map the Indian subcontinent, trade routes tracing to the Neolithic and extending to Southern Europe… Africa… and Asia. Each bead recalls the European expropriation of indigenous lands in the Americas and of human beings in the African continent – the ‘slave trade beads’ Europeans used in their dealings with indigenous American groups.’ (da Silva, 2018) Sikander works with found objects, such as books, newspaper images, and family photographs, as well as items from flea markets. Her work addresses historical erasure and memory, notably in relation to labour, space, and material. Through repurposing and layering familiar materials, Sikander collapses the different tenses of time and space. Mahbubur Rahman b. 1969, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Transformation, 2018–2019 Two-Channel HD Video, 14:35 min Courtesy of the artist. This work will be activated by a performance on 7 February 3.30pm Unlike individuals, ideas have the potential to become immortal. Since 2004, Mahbubur Rahman’s performance, sculpture, and video work has been embodying the popular folk story of the hero Nurul Din from the Rangpur Peasant Rebellion of 1783, specifically drawing references from the late Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq’s 1982 play Nuruldiner Sara Jibon (Nuraldin: A Life). Just as Haq revived Nurul Din (Nurul Uddin) as an allegory to fight back against the military rule of the 1980s, Rahman evokes this figure to encourage standing up against the injustices of today. Rahman’s fascination with this story begins in a scene when Nurul Din was a child accompanying his emaciated father to the paddy fields to help plough the field. Everything had been taken away from his family, including their bull, as a consequence of their unpaid tax bills to the British Raj who controlled the land and demanded it grow indigo rather than food. Straining under the hot sun, Nurul Din’s father tried to tow the land without a bull, and he collapsed and died under the weight of the plough, groaning like a bull in the process. Rahman created this two-channel video from a performance he realised with Bangladeshi indigo farmers of today, Bihari migrant rickshaw pullers in Kolkata (likened to human horses), and horse riders on the bank of the Padma river in Bangladesh (the same source of water as Kolkata’s Ganga river) surrounding the Farakka Barrage that has divided these once continuously flowing waters between India and Bangladesh since 1975. These locations and stories link East and West Bengal via their shared British colonial history; times have changed, but the stories of oppression of the working class persist. Rahman’s Transformation is a call to rise up, remembering brave figures whose ghosts (that live on through stories) can’t rest until justice is served. Rahman works across painting, video, installation, and performance and is one of the most internationally recognised Bangladeshi artists of his generation. He pushes the experience of art beyond visual pleasure, addressing wider social responsibilities in reference to his personal experience of anguish and anxiety in the context of contemporary Bangladesh. He is a co-founder of Britto (f. 2002), a non-profit space that initiated a successful alternate art scene that breaks from and challenges the persisting colonial barriers found within academic art institutions that discourage cultural reform. Munem Wasif b. 1983, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Spring Song, 2017–2019 Series of 27 Archival pigment prints Sutra, 2019 Silkscreen and Pigment print on archival paper Kala Pani, 2019 Series of 14 Archival pigment prints and ambush text prints on archival paper Documents, 2017–2019 Photographs, text, found footage, archival material, variable sizes Realised with partial support of Samdani Art Foundation and NTU CCA Singapore. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai Munem Wasif’s work has long been exploring the concept of a border, re-examining the questions around its formation. How are borders constructed? Who constructs them? How are they broken and re-formed? Wasif began visiting Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar/Bangladesh border in 2009. The size of the camps has grown exponentially since the violent incidents beginning in 2017 that have caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee into Bangladesh. The artist is unable to type the word ‘Rohingya’ correctly because his computer lacks Burmese language programming; in Myanmar the word ‘Rohingya’ is expunged from official discourse in favour of the term ‘Bengali.’ Silkscreened onto a British colonial map, the distorted typography of the word ‘Rohingya’ hints at Myanmar’s denial of the existence of this ethnic group which has been living within its borders for generations. Kala Pani – which translates to Dark Water – is a new series of black and white photographs which seems innocuous at first. The presence of dark, featureless masses of water, an empty ocean in its most ordinary form, stands as a stark reminder of what Rohingyas have gone through to escape mass extermination. Recalling harrowing details that were told to him by survivors, Wasif created texts which he paired with images to reveal the refugees’ escape at sea. The works reflect the constant flow of migration in the Bay of Bengal across many centuries, where border lines are lost in the shade of night. What can you hold onto when running away to save your life? How can you be, belong, or settle when nobody accepts you as a citizen? How do you legally prove your very existence after decades of systemic violence? Spring Song (2017–2019) is a work in progress that revolves around objects found in Rohingya camps. Placed against vivid monochromatic backgrounds, these precarious assemblages, decaying documents, and faded photographs convey fragmented memories and feelings of displacement. These objects are a testament of determination; a will to eat, to play or to simply reminisce about one's past –in other words, to have the freedom to feel human. Nabil Rahman The Taste of Tea, 2019 Collage of images, texts, objects, artworks collected from tea garden Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from Kabi Dilwar Foundation Born into Tea: Conversation and Songs with artists who currently live in Bangladeshi tea estates. Sunday 9, 5pm First Floor Nabil Rahman was born in and currently lives in the tea-district of Northeast Bangladesh, Sylhet; he was raised in New York and has experienced how value and values (mis)translate across these vastly different yet connected contexts. The least expensive cup of tea at Starbucks costs around $1.75 in the United States, while the daily wage of a tea picker can be less than the equivalent of $1.25 per day of work. Women sometimes collect more than 23kg of tea in one day, and tea is the second most consumed drink after water. The artist plays the role of facilitator when sharing his privilege with creative individuals working in neighbouring tea gardens, allowing their creativity to bloom in ways not tied to capitalist production, searching for new shared tools of expression. On Sunday 9 February at 5pm, artists who live in Bangladesh’s tea estates will perform songs and engage with visitors of DAS in the South Plaza, facilitated through the work of Rahman. Rahman’s practice archives the industrial present using found objects, mark-making and the written word. Creating ironic references to the histories and languages of abstraction, he investigates its politics by weaving traces of the global flows of material into his work, destabilising the supposed aim of abstraction in search of a ‘pure form.’ Neha Choksi The American President Travels (East), 2002 (remade 2019) Installation with wood, bamboo, paint, printed fabric. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Project88 As a study of the possible ecologies of powerful males, this installation visually configures a scratchy and deteriorated archive of the 20th-century travels of nine U.S. Presidents to over two dozen eastern nations, both revealing the paper diplomacy conducted through American newspapers and revelling in the comedy of each President filling his predecessor’s shoes for the public’s family album. A sheen of romantic getaway as well as ‘I-scratch-you-if-you-scratch-me’ is lent to the many recorded moments through the use of sheer silky fabric, backscratchers, and the form of a massage table. Working across performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, Choksi disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of everything – from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Embracing a confluence of disciplines, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialisation. b. 1973, Belleville; lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai Rossella Biscotti Clara, 2019 VOC document transferred on wall (cargo list ship Knappenhof, departed from Bengal on 30–11–1740 arrived in Delft/Rotterdam on 20–07–1741 passing through Cape) Realised with additional support from the Italian Embassy of Bangladesh and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh Rossella Biscotti is interested in the power of storytelling and how this can open up a deeper exploration of untraced by history that reveals changing value systems. One of the stories that fascinates her is the story of Clara, a female rhinoceros who was brought to the Netherlands from Bengal in 1741 by a captain of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) along with a large shipment of textiles. While the detailed listings of textiles was declared and can be deduced from the reproduction of the ship’s original manifest document reproduced on the wall, Clara was not, suggesting that the captain was trying to profit off her exoticness as a separate source of income from his official VOC duties. Clara toured around Europe for seventeen years. While she is not visible in this official document, collective memory keeps stories (like Clara’s) alive. Surati and Princess of Kasiruta, 2019 Material line natural rubber, food colouring Courtesy of the artist and Mor-Charpentier. Realised with additional support from the Italian Embassy of Bangladesh and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh Made from cast natural rubber embellished with food-colouring and batik-inspired patterns, this installation carries Biscotti’s interpretations of the powerful female characters in the Buru Quartet (1980–88), a series of novels by the late Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer while he was in prison. On a material level, the first rubber seeds were brought to Indonesia from the Belgian Congo, and batik techniques were exported to Africa via Europe as African Wax Cloth, speaking to the global scale of colonialism. Pramodeya’s novels tell the story of nationhood narrated on the bodies of women, whose only inheritable possessions were batik fabric and jewellery. Among the characters is a woman called Surati who deliberately infects herself with smallpox to avoid colonial subjugation as a concubine on a sugar plantation, and Annalies Mellema, who is shipped to Holland as property. Biscotti was inspired by the journeys and survival strategies employed by these women to resist the patriarchal colonial regimes they were born into, and imagines their characters in design motifs cast into these seductive floor-based forms. Biscotti describes the constitution of sentient beings as they are, instead of how they may be perceived, using sculpture, images and other materials. Her work explores forgotten or untraced events and the changing value systems they reveal. She explores the individual narratives of those affected by mining, exploitation and confinement, drawing from oral, technical, archival, and field research. b. 1978, Molfetta; lives and works in Brussels and Rotterdam Samsul Alam Helal Disappearing Roots, 2019 Photography, pigment prints, video with sound, 2:20 min Courtesy of the artist Samsul Alam Helal’s series Disappearing Roots considers the displacement of indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The Kaptai Dam was built in 1962 as a hydropower source, and it produces about 5% of the total electricity consumed by Bangladesh. However, its creation displaced over 100,000 people (70% Chakma) and also submerged many homes, including the palace of the Chakma king which remains buried deep underneath a lake that is currently frequented by tourists. Globally over 10 million people per year are displaced by World Bank development projects (dams and infrastructure projects), according to an article on the adjacent video by Liu Chuang published in ArtReview. Using video and photography created through the artist’s long-term engagement with the Hill Tract communities, Helal’s work captures the remaining traces of ancient ways of life, highlighting the violence of gentrification and the trauma found in submerged symbols of cultural autonomy. ‘If even a royal palace can drown, what hope is there for ordinary people?’ asks the artist. Helal works with photography, sound, 3D models, and video to document the experiences of communities that are often part of the working class or a minority. His work explores the identities, dreams, and longings of their individual members. Helal prefers to explore these in a studio set-up, blurring boundaries between documentary photography and fiction. b. 1985, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Sawangwongse Yawnghwe The Opium Parallax II, 2019 Acrylic on silk and canvas Commissioned for DAS 2020 with in-kind support from the Rijksakademie and Jim Thompson Art Centre. Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh In Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s painterly practice, historical and political analyses of Shan State (Burma) are intertwined with personal and familial histories. This work contextualises the Shan State heroin-opium complex within opium’s long and invisible history of impacting the drawing of borders across vast geographies. Opium traverses not only national borders, but blurs the line between the legal and the illegal. ‘Because relationships are informal and regulated in irregular and informal patterns and because the balance of power and coalitions among the powers-that-be are unstable and shifting… no single economic-commercial actor can dominate the field… Entrepreneurial groups… operate with only one goal in mind… making and maximising profit. It is a world where the colour of flags or ideology is not as important as the colour of wealth.’ (Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, The Political Economy of the Opium Trade: Implications for Shan State, 2003) Yawnghwe works with painting and installation, addressing often fictional archives as a critique of Myanmar’s ethnocentric nationalism. Growing up in the context of the country’s patterns of military repression and domination, his work intertwines his personal experience with politics. Yawnghwe’s family history of political engagement represents a point of crossing of the two. b. 1971, Shan State; lives and works in Chiang Mai and Zuphen Shiraz Bayjoo b. 1979, Port Louis; lives and works in London and the Indian Ocean region Pran Kouraz, 2019 Mixed fabrics, dye-sublimation ink on canvas, super 16mm HD video, 14:48 min Commissioned by INIVA and Art Night London. Courtesy of the artist and Ed Cross Fine Art Shiraz Bayjoo’s immersive environment Pran Kouraz (meaning ‘take courage’ in Mauritian Creole) is inspired by his own history in Mauritius, once known as the Maroon Republic, a place created through the will and imagination to escape and overcome slavery and colonial subjugation. The story of the escaped slave becomes a wider metaphor about creating a new world on the back of migration and displacement where hybridity becomes a tool for freedom, survival, and self-transformation in the wake of trauma. Bayjoo worked with a group of eight-year-old migrant students in the UK, asking them to explore their rights as young people and to consider their own stories of courage and overcoming. The children critique the experiences of transmigratory groups today from their experiences of isolation, loss, and displacement stemming from patriarchal colonial legacies, power structures, and relationships that continue to endure and dominate. The resulting conversation, presented in the form of a film, creates a visual metaphor for the multiplicity of pressures facing humanity today. Bayjoo works with painting, photography, video, installation, and artefacts stored in public and personal archives. His work addresses ideas of nationhood and the exploration of identity tied to the history and legacy of European colonialism. Drawing from a past of complex relationships of migration and trade, he traces the meaning of postcolonial collective identity. Somnath Hore b. 1921, Chittagong; d. 2006, Santiniketan Wound series, 1979 Two Pulp Prints Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation ‘The Famine of 1943, the communal riots of 1946, the devastations of war, all the wounds and wounded I have seen, are engraved on my consciousness…Wounds is what I saw everywhere around me. A scarred tree, a road gouged by a truck tyre, a man knifed for no visible or rational reason… The object was eliminated; only wounds remained,’ reflected Somnath Hore, an artist celebrated in Indian art history who was born in what is now Bangladesh. He transformed hand-made paper into scarred, blistered, pierced, and wounded surfaces reminiscent of human skin in the aftermath of trauma in the highly experimental Wounds Series from the 1970s. This body of work speaks not only to the violent regional history that the artist lived through in the build-up and aftermath of the 1947 partition of British India and Bangladesh’s subsequent war for independence in 1971, but also to the social scars of division found across our shared human history. Hore worked to document and reinscribe the suffering working class into public memory, testifying to his important role as an artist-witness in a time of historical crisis. His works were published in various revolutionary publications, notably those of the Communist party. Hore invented and developed various printmaking techniques in addition to working in painting and sculpture. Later on in his career, Hore worked as an educator at multiple arts institutions, such as the Indian College of Art and Draftsmanship (Kolkata), Delhi College of Art, MS University (Baroda) and Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati. Thao Nguyen Phan b. 1987, Ho Chi Minh City; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Mute Grain, 2019 Three-channel video, colour, sound, 15:45 min Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for SB14. Courtesy of the artist Mute Grain (2019) examines the little-discussed 1945 famine in French Indochina during the Japanese occupation (1940–5), in which over two million people died of starvation, partly due to Japanese demands to grow jute over rice to support their war economy. This three-channel film poetically weaves together oral histories, folk tales, and lyrical chronicles to tell a story that history left behind in Vietnam, creating narratives that sit at the border of fantasy and reality. Beyond her research in Vietnam, Thao Nguyen Phan also consulted Bengali literature in creating the work, notably Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath (1882), set in the Bengal famine of 1770. Her film revolves around a young woman named Tám, who becomes a hungry ghost unable to move to the next life, and Ba, who anxiously searches for his sister. Ba (‘March’) and Tám (‘August’) represent the poorest months of the lunar calendar, when farmers once borrowed money and worked side jobs to sustain themselves. Phan works with painting, video, installation, and what she calls ‘theatrical fields,’ such as performance gesture and moving images. Utilising literature, philosophy, and open poetic spaces conducive to reflection, she highlights unconventional issues arising from history and tradition. This allows her to challenge received ideas and social conventions. In 2012, Phan co-founded the collective Art Labor, whose work can be experienced in the South Plaza exhibition The Collective Body. Yasmin Jahan Nupur b. 1979, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Let Me Get You a Nice Cup of Tea, 2019–20 Antique furniture, antique tea set, embroidered textiles, tea, performance Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Exhibit320, with support from the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Performance is live from 7 to 12 February, 10am–1pm and 4–5:30pm Tea has impacted cultures and changed the course of world history by bringing people together and tearing them apart: from the Opium Wars and the American Revolution to the mass movement of workers as part of plantation economics; from the fostering of friendships to marriage proposals through the ritual of tea ceremonies. Yasmin Jahan Nupur has arranged a tea party through a performative process. She has harvested the tea at home and, through the act of sharing, brings participants together to think more closely about the origins of this everyday commodity. Nupur works with sketches, installations, and performances. Her work explores human relationships from various perspectives, reflecting her belief in democratic rights regardless of social position. She explores social discrepancies such as those of women and migrants in South Asia, hoping to support increased understanding between peoples of different backgrounds. Zainul Abedin b. 1914, Kishoreganj; d. 1976, Dhaka A suite of Untitled works from the Famine Sketches series, 1943 Ink on paper Courtesy of Rokeya Quader Untitled from Monpura’ 70, 1970 Ink on paper Courtesy of Anwar Hossain Manju Zainul Abedin is considered by many to be the founding father of modern art in Bangladesh. In response to the Great Famine of Bengal (1943) under the British rule of India, he made hundreds of sketches depicting starving victims, serving as a form of visual testimony. His sketches spoke to the atrocities experienced by victims under what was a man-made famine and fuelled the public’s will for independence. Throughout his artistic career, Abedin remained true to the representation of the struggles of those most vulnerable in society, notably the rural peasantry. He was actively involved in the Language Movement of 1952 and the Liberation War in 1971. Having witnessed the Bhola Cyclone devastation, he expressed solidarity through his scroll painting Monpura ’70, drawing parallels between the struggle of the victims of the cyclone and that of the people of Bangladesh. Abedin travelled extensively, depicting those suffering under oppression, often returning to his Famine sketches such as in his series on the people of Palestine. In addition to being one of the most important artists of his generation, Abedin was also an academic and bureaucrat who helped establish the first art college in Dhaka in 1947, after the partition of British India. He was given the title Shilpacharya (‘great teacher of arts’) for his contribution towards art education in Bangladesh. Abedin also established the Folk Art Museum and a folk village in Sonargaon in 1975. Zhou Tao b. 1976, Changsha; lives and works in Guangzhou Winter North Summer South (2, 3, 5, 17), 2019 Inkjet prints on paper Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space. This project extends from a film produced with support from Samdani Art Foundation and Kadist and commissioned by Council Zhou Tao spent nearly two years in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains creating these images that swiftly alternate between natural landscapes of sandstorms, dust clouds, and the changing seasons, and realistic portraits of humans and other species fighting for survival in a state of exception. Human agency is not only manifested in transforming the external world but can also be exercised by preserving an internal, poetic space. Co-commissioned by Times Museum and Council and supported by Samdani Art Foundation and Kadist, his latest work, North of the Mountain, was shot with an 8K-resolution camera that is able to capture shades of brightness and darkness beyond the capacity of the human eye. It is the artist’s radical attempt to ecologise the body of the filmmaker as well as filmmaking technologies in a place that is largely shut off from the gaze of the world outside. Zhou Tao predominantly works with video, producing plotless events in a documentary language with a core focus on the sense and sensation of time. His works connect disparate milieus, often on the threshold between the natural and the artificial as a metaphor for the spatial multiplicity of modernism, incomprehensible to the human mind.

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

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

ALL PROJECTS Today Will End 21 May – 12 Sept 2021, M HKA Antwerp Shilpa Gupta work on the Chitmahals of Bangladesh-India border, previously shown at DAS 2014 was part of her solo exhibition Today Will End at MHKA.

ALL PROJECTS Srijan-Abartan A Workshop for Exhibition Making and Unmaking led by common interest with support from Pro Helvetia-Swiss Arts Council How is the practice of exhibiting—be that of art, design, history, or science—fundamentally implicated in the imminent threats of climate change? And, conversely, how can exhibition-making help us attain political momentum and agency around ecology? How can it support communities fighting on the frontline of climate change who are leading the way in safeguarding our collective future? These are the fundamental questions that prompted the start of a workshop for exhibition-making and unmaking at the heart of DAS. Srijan-Abartan was a cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research project aimed at developing new tools and methodologies for creating culturally rooted, ecologically sustainable, and socially responsible exhibition displays. Its international team consisted of artists, designers, researchers, architects, engineers, exhibition-makers, curators, and producers from Bangladesh, Switzerland and beyond. They worked alongside to discuss, problematise, envision, conceive, conceptualise exhibition displays, and support structures that take sustainability as their core concern. The generated design strategies and solutions developed collaboratively made up the exhibition design for the DAS 2020. Nodding to the summit’s impetus of igniting a movement beyond the confines of an art exhibition, Srijan-Abartan’s process, methodology, and learning outcomes has been compiled and shared in the form of open-access research. The goal was to provide thinking tools to help others and also to start reimagining exhibition-making as a practice of resistance that strives for more just and sustainable forms of living. Background Often referred to as the ‘ground zero’ for climate change, Bangladesh has long been trailblazing innovative strategies to adapt to threats such as rising sea levels, water-logged land, and increased salinity. Ecology and sustainability are core concerns for DAS which happens biannually at the Shilpakala Academy. Dr. Huraera Jabeen, a core member of Srijan-Abartan, assessed the environmental impact of DAS 2018 utilising the Equity Share Approach. The aim is to create a baseline to determine the upcoming DAS 2020. The operational process will follow PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act). Based on the information received on materials, venue design, communication materials produced, estimated waste generated, and energy usage, the estimated total emission for DAS 2018 comes to 18043 tons of CO2 emission. Which is equivalent to: An average car could be driven for 80.02 years Non-stop A 747 could fly for 23.73 days non-stop Taking 3,538 cars off the road for a year Producing 1,357 tons of Beef A 42-inch LCD TV could be used for 12,334 years continuously The assessment points to multiple strategies that can be used to reduce the negative ecological effects of DAS 2020, for example: venue design accounts for about 77% of the emission. The use of particleboards with timber frames forms 58% of the 77%. Although they are assumed to be reused by vendors, management of them as waste accounts for almost 14% of the emission. Additional new surfaces also require additional paint. Therefore, CO2 emissions can be significantly reduced intelligently through venue design. One possible way could be to use the existing spaces and infrastructure of the building rather than creating new temporary structures that cannot be reused or recycled multiple times. Plastic films used for printing communication account for 15% of the total emissions, and they have no options for recycling or reusing and end up fully as waste. Paper-based publications for communication form 0.03% emission production and 0.09% for managing waste. Consideration can be given to how to reduce waste, especially for communication. Waste management accounts for around 20% of the emissions. Food and water waste accounts for 6% of emissions. Vendors running food stalls can be given recommendations to reduce waste as much as possible. About 0.02% of emissions result from electricity usage for lights and air conditioning. Considerations can be given to make spaces less environmentally controlled if not needed. Process Srijan-Abartan officially started in February 2019, when the Bangladeshi and international participants met in Dhaka for the first time. They visited museums, galleries, cultural sites, monuments, artist studios, factories, workshops, and more. In the process, they spent time together and slowly started to get acquainted with each other. At the end of the eight-day visit, the team agreed on a working structure: the project’s core members would assemble again in Switzerland to conduct an intense schematic design workshop. At that point, the team started collectively brainstorming the project’s name, and unanimously agreed it should be formulated in Bangla. ‘Srijan-Abartan’ in English means creation and revolution/ rotation, speaking to the idea of creating something new using existing structures with negligible changes. In other words, why not see the Bangladesh Shilpakala Building for its potential rather than its shortcomings, and enhance the existing building with local materials and know how, reducing waste and bettering the building for future exhibitions? The resulting plan would be subsequently developed by the Bangladeshi team, with the international participants regularly following up on the process to provide alternative perspectives, thoughts, and ideas on the design. Methodology The schematic codesign workshop took place in Basel in April 2019. The local participants hosted the Bangladeshi participants, which helped strengthen the bonds between the group. Each workshop day started with a collective breakfast, also meant to foster an informal space of togetherness. Through different group dynamics, participants shared references, thoughts, and perspectives around display practices and discussed strategies to challenge the so-called ‘white cube’. Inteza Shariar shared samples of local recyclable, biodegradable, and alternative materials that could be used to build up temporary exhibition displays, for example bamboo, mud, coconut straws, canes, hogla leaves, recycled board, and corrugated boards, jute, coconut ropes, fishing net ropes, cotton ropes, and etc. Considering the widespread vernacular usage of such materials, Shariar stressed the importance of ‘tweaking’ those elements so that they do not appear ordinary or banal to local audiences. The team worked with a 1:50 scale model of the Shilpakala Academy, which could be stacked and unstacked to reveal the different floors and levels of the building. The model helped the participants to analyse the spatial opportunities of the Shilpakala Academy and provided a common ground for discussions. Participants were able to intuitively place the artworks that had been confirmed up to that point, which were also rendered as scale models. The set-up ultimately allowed for team members to play different roles, for example, for the curator to act as an architect or exhibition designer and vice versa. The process eventually led to the sketching of different schematic solutions, which were discussed and consolidated into one plan. The schematic design is currently being developed, refined, and tested. It is supplemented by the set of guidelines overleaf, which were also generated by the group. Guidelines Approach environmental impact holistically Take into account other types of sustainability alongside environmental (i.e. social, cultural, economic, etc.) Design for the experiences of the local audiences instead of those of international audiences (i.e. privilege the use of local language, local script, and local artists/practices/works) In case the minimized displays generate any savings, these should be re-allocated into wages (first local wages and secondly into international wages) Work with the building instead of against it Minimise material resources by building as little as possible (new walls or structures should be essential and sized to support a given set of artworks and not more than that) Place artworks site-specifically where the building already provides the best support (i.e. artworks that require darkness should be allocated to windowless rooms, artworks that require climate control should be placed in rooms with pre-existing air-conditioning, artworks that require security should be allocated to enclosed galleries, etc.) Harness natural light whenever possible (new lights should be added only when necessary, opt for LED tubes as night lights, and a few intentional dramatic/spotlights). Make use of natural ventilation and avoid the use of air-conditioning whenever possible (i.e. AC rooms should be used only for artworks that require climate control or museum conditions) Minimise, recycle, and reuse Opt for reusable or recyclable materials whenever possible Opt for sea freight over air freight whenever possible Opt for local labor, local materials, and local modes of production/fabrication whenever possible Minimise size, page count, and print runs for publications, whenever possible Opt for sustainable curatorial strategies. When selecting and sorting works and planning their transportation, fabrication and building logistics. For example, by opting to produce new commissioned works on site using local materials and local labor For example, by planning ahead so that there is less energy consumption and human stress. Address the actual impact rather than the aesthetics of ecology. Avoid ‘greenwashing’ or ‘symbolic environmental’ moves such as mock/fake usage of natural materials or using natural materials in an unsustainable way Improve the building as a lasting collective resource Clean, fix, restore, renovate, and upgrade existing structures whenever possible; their reuse is also a contribution for future sustainability Strip back unnecessary and redundant past constructions whenever that improves the building's usability for the future (i.e. in terms of circulation, spatial experience or aesthetics) Srijan-Abartan is funded by Pro Helvetia, the Swiss Arts Council, and led by the Swiss design research practice common-interest in collaboration with the Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. The project’s core team is comprised of Diana Campbell Betancourt (chief curator, Dhaka Art Summit), Dries Rodet (architect, Truwant + Rodet), Huraera Jabeen (architect, Brac University), Inteza Shariar (artist/architect, Bangladesh), Khan Md. Mobinul (engineer, Dhaka Art Summit), Mohammad Asifur Rahman (architect, Dhaka Art Summit), Mohammad Sazzad Hossain (head of administration, Dhaka Art Summit), Nina Paim (design researcher, common-interest), and Prem Krishnamurthy (exhibition maker, Wkshps). The team was further supported by the expertise of Ashfika Rahman (freelance artist, Bangladesh) and Shawon Akand (freelance artist and researcher, Bangladesh).

ALL PROJECTS A BEAST, A GOD, AND A LINE | PARA SITE HONG KONG CURATED BY COSMIN COSTINAS 17 MARCH - 20 MAY 2018 | PARA SITE, HONG KONG Dhaka Art Summit 2018 exhibition, A beast, a god, and a line travelled to Para Site in Hong Kong for its second iteration, featuring many works commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation as part of exhibition's the initial edition during DAS 2018. This exhibition was organised by the Samdani Art Foundation in collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Installation image of A beast, a god, and a line at Para Site, Hong Kong. Photo credit: Eddie Lam, Image Art Studio.

ALL PROJECTS Stitching Collective Envisioned by Gudskul, Jakarta Stitching Ecosystem Stitching Ecosystem is a mini-festival format comprised of a series of workshops, sharing sessions, and market spaces with a focus on five of Gudskul’s eleven ‘collective studies’ subjects: Collective Sustainability Strategy, Public Relations, Spatial Practices, Art Laboratory, and Knowledge Garden. Gudskul will connect and reconnect collective networks and foster inter-collectiveness in order to understand and collaborate across different themes and contexts. We take this opportunity to build a bigger ecosystem, while maintaining the valuable organic intimacy found in any collective praxis. Further, this series of activities will cultivate, foster and distribute knowledge among the participating collectives in DAS, while also expanding network and sharable resources with the general public. Collective as School Collective as School is a sharing session between over forty collectives participating in DAS 2020 from Africa, Australia, Central and South America, Oceania, and South and Southeast Asia. Each collective will share their respective stories about how and why their collectives were established, what their goals are, how their regeneration processes unfold, what they learned, what their structure looks like, how they have sustained and survived, how they self-evaluate, how knowledge gets distributed within the collective internally and externally to broader communities, and how their collectives support each member as an individual. This closed-door introductory session will produce a series of schemes/maps of potentials, strategies, and common understanding to prime the remaining nine days of DAS. Speculative Collective Speculative Collective is Gudskul’s latest iteration of a knowledge-sharing and mapping module that was conceived as a tool to explore forms of collectivising through direct practice, forming a kind of know-how. Compressed both spatially and temporally, the project extends from ongoing work within the context of Jakarta. In a loosely defined process, Gudskul invites strangers to meet and share what they consider to be ‘knowledge’ by playing the roles of both teacher and student in a quick reciprocal exchange. This newly formed pair must then couple with another pair, forming a temporary collective. Gudskul has designed a ‘tool’ to enable participants to record this process for themselves and carry it on past these random yet choreographed meetings. Gerobak Cinema Gerobak Cinema is a mobile screening station presented as part of The Collective Body curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt and Kathryn Weir. The Chattogram based collective Jog and the Jakarta based collective ruangrupa collaborate using a rickshaw, producing screening sessions in several spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment will be collaboratively designed by artists, designers, IT technicians and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos/movies, or even particular Bangladeshi movies. With these activities, we are trying to strengthen the relationships and collaboration potentials with the local community who may have not arrived at the world of contemporary art. Printmaking Workshop A collaborative workshop and sharing session between Grafis Huru Hara (Jakarta) and Pangrok Sulap (Sabah) and Shunno Space (Dhaka) will explore and raise similar issues the collectives are facing through specific media: woodcut and linocut techniques. This workshop will be open to students. Loneless Market One of our central focuses in developing an ecosystem is how sustainability could be understood through different perspectives. Not only in monetary aspects, but also values and notions, network and regeneration. Loneless Market is a session designed by Gudskul to develop exchange activities in material and immaterial things, and also at the same time generating revenues to benefit all of the participants of this marketplace. This will be a celebration of the nine days of collective work built across DAS. DAS is a Non-commercial research platform that exists to support grassroots art ecosystems – and all proceeds go directly to the collectives involved in this platform. Cooking & Karaoke Tent For the last evening before DAS closes, Gudskul will collaborate with local collectives to imagine a big dinner through creating a fusion of Bangladeshi and Indonesian food recipes. A karaoke session will play some well-known Bangladeshi and Indonesian songs and the group will be open to song requests. Open to all participating collectives and artists in DAS, this event serves to strengthen the bonds and networks built up across DAS 2020.

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

ALL PROJECTS Critical Writing Ensemble Curated By Katya García-Antón, Antonio Cataldo, Diana Campbell, Chandrika Grover And Bhavna Kakar PREFACE “to reshape some histories, to bring back the forgotten others, to reassess and alter the already hazily known, to redefine some standards of writing and our understanding, thoughts and feelings of an era lost. More importantly, to allow this man to breathe his words […] Memory, collectively lost, can now be somewhat regained.” These thoughts are taken from the last pages of the publication The Art Critic dedicated to the Burmese born, India based critic and artist Richard Bartholomew. The words come from Bartholomew´s son Pablo, and they eloquently comment on the power of his father’s archive, in particular his writing, to critically build different pasts. Bartholomew’s thoughts do more than address the urgent need to fortify the interlinking of art historical narratives - many forgotten or simply unknown - within the South Asia region, but they inspire us to consider their impact beyond it. And they do more, since they demand that we persevere in new ways of nurturing critique that will strengthen regional histories of immense richness to the world. To do so we must nurture structures of empowerment, knowledge sharing and production, within which micro-histories will not just claim their place within macro-histories but also contribute to their revitalisation. It is on the wings of this impulse that Diana Campbell Betancourt, Artistic Director of the Dhaka Art Summit, together with Katya García-Antón, Director and Curator of OCA, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Chandrika Grover Ralleigh, Head of Liaison Office India of the Swiss Arts Council – Pro Helvetia, and Bhavna Kakar, Director of Take on Art Magazine are launched the CRITICAL WRITING ENSEMBLE as part of the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. The project was curated by Katya García-Antón, Director and Curator of OCA, with the collaboration of Antonio Cataldo, Senior Programmer of OCA. Research into the processes and structures that could help to empower writers today has been a part of the curatorial practice of Katya García-Antón in recent years. She was commissioned by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council in 2012-13 to devise a programme for the discussion and activation of critical art writing in Switzerland involving cross-generation peers across the linguistic regions and traditions of the country. CWE has drawn from this valuable experience, repositioning previous thoughts and posing new questions within the context of the Dhaka Art Summit, as well as the histories and currencies of the South Asia region. CWE took a cross-regional approach and was developed in collaboration with Bhavna Kakar, who in addition to convening with the peers in Dhaka, also developed CWE-1 in an official partnership with Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, by organising a series of discussions and workshops amongst regional peers during the month of December 2015 in the lead-up to CWE II at the Summit. Finally, in 2017, CWE will be developed as a further iteration within the context of Nordic Europe through a programme held in OCA, Oslo. CWE therefore brings together peers from the South Asia region and across the globe, into different working constellations to share writing histories and knowledge with each other, experiment together, and produce new critical impulses regarding art writing, which will be compiled in a specially dedicated publication with wide international distribution. Such an endeavour is positioned within a local therefore as much as a global framework, in more ways than one, for not only is this a project of some urgency regionally, it reminds us of the fact the crisis is a global one. Art writing has for some time endured challenges which vary in nature across the world. In some parts there are fewer places in which to write critically and experimentally about art and art history, there is less and less financing for this, there is less and less time; in others whilst platforms for writing may actually be on the rise, their value and impact has declined. Writing is by nature a lonely endeavour, but under these conditions, art writing is being pushed to the margins and alienated from the central and critical position it should have in our societies, as will the immediate contact it should have with our audiences. If this decline continues, art histories around the world will homogenise and the immense richness and diversity of our cultures, essential to rewrite and re-imagine present and past histories, will lose their critical edge as the very voices that should build it, which should experiment it and reinvent it, disappear over time. STRUCTURAL SUMMARY CWE seeks to foster a community of art writing peers working together. Breaking the isolation that characterises much writing practice, the platform hopes to create a lively environment for intellectual exchange. CWE seeks to connect art writers experience and knowledge of regional and national writing histories, across the South Asian region and other regions globally. CWE II seeks to develop these relations through a four-day platform of presentations, panel discussions, lecture performances, group debates and readings, within the context of the Dhaka Art Summit, its exhibitions and talks programmes. CWE views art writing as a practice in its own right. Writing in general is strongly shaped by the contexts in which it is practiced and where it appears, and so the platform will consider discussing writing in a variety of historical and formal contexts. CWE counted on access to the Asia Art Archive that was on site in Dhaka. CWE will publish the material presented during, and derived from these sessions and distribute it internationally by Mousse Publishing. The publication will include a variety of contributions from all peers. Session 1 Discussion, part 2 Al Fresco – Writing Within and Against the Art School Date: 3 February 2016, 3.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy With Yin Ker, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Chus Martínez, Anshuman Das Gupta, moderated by Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo Session 1 Discussion, part 2 Al Fresco – Writing Within and Against the Art School Date: 3 February 2016, 3.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy With Yin Ker, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Chus Martínez, Anshuman Das Gupta, moderated by Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo Rebranding Mesopotamia: The Inextinguishable Fire by Övül Durmusoglu Date: 7 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Turkish curator and writer Övül O. Durmusoglu will focus on the flow of information which builds our disjointed everyday life to address the reality of war and its virtual manifestations. Starting with the reading of contemporary cinematic and installative propositions she asks questions which are immanent upon us – Where did Daesh come from? How did the migrant population increase in Europe? Or, how did the populist right-wing Pegidas movement against non-Muslims and immigrants in Germany, started in Dresden, draw thousands of participants in 2014? – to morph on our future from within and outside the arts. Övül O. Durmusoglu is a curator and writer. She is the director/curator of YAMA screen in Istanbul. She works as a curatorial advisor to Gulsun Karamustafa's monograph in Hamburger Bahnhof in 2016. She also co-leads 'Solar Fantastic’, a research and publication project between Mexico and Turkey. Durmusoglu has recently curated 'Future Queer', the 20th year anniversary exhibition for Kaos GL association in Istanbul. In the past, she acted as the curator of the festival Sofia Contemporary 2013 titled as 'Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground'. She organised different programmes and events as a Goethe Institute fellow at Maybe Education and Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). Indian Printed Matters after Independence by Devika Singh Date: 8 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation by Paris-based art historian and curator Devika Singh (who is currently writing a book on artistic practices in India between 1947 and 1991) takes the title of this session on ‘printed matter’ as a point of departure to discuss a moment when art reviews were a critical site of transaction in India between the public sphere and contemporary art currents. For writers of the immediate post-independence period, few issues mattered more than the relation between India and the outside. Opinionated and polemical, writings on art contributed to debates on the nature of art and its dialogue with history and ideas of the nation. Commenting on Indian art of the 1950s in the pages of the review MARG in 1967, Jaya Appaswamy described this changing decade as an opening onto the world, from ‘local nationalistic idioms to a world international language’. Using the first years of MARG as a central example, the presentation explores this period of radical reconfiguration to ask what its internationalism amounted to and how we can make sense of it today. Devika Singh is an art historian, critic and curator based in Paris and an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge. Singh was the Smuts Research Fellow at Cambridge (2012-2015) and has held fellowships at the French Academy at Rome (Villa Medici), the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Washington DC. She has published extensively in catalogues, art magazines and journals, including frieze, Art Press, Art Asia Pacific, Art History and Modern Asian Studies and is currently writing a book on art in post-independence India for Reaktion Books. She is also curating several exhibitions on photography in India. Letters– ‘The long awaited morn’ by Salima Hashmi Date: 4 February 2016, 12.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Artist, cultural writer, activist and founding Dean of School of Visual Arts at the Beaconhouse National University at Lahore Salima Hashmi, will read and comment letters of her father Faiz Ahmed Faiz to address the power of the epistolary form as a critical tool for resistance. Salima Hashmi is an artist, curator and contemporary art historian. Professor Hashmi was the founding Dean of the School of Visual Art and Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore; she taught at the National College of Arts (NCA) Lahore for 31 years and was also Principal of the College for four years. Salima Hashmi has written extensively on the arts. Her book Unveiling the Visible- Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan was published in 2002, and Memories, Myths, Mutations – Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, co-authored with Yashodhara Dalmia for Oxford University Press, India, was published in 2006. She has recently edited The Eye Still Seeks – Contemporary Art of Pakistan for Penguin Books India in 2014. In addition, Salima Hashmi curated ‘Hanging Fire’: an exhibition of Pakistani Contemporary Art for Asia Society Museum, New York in 2009, which was accompanied by an extensive catalogue. The Government of Pakistan awarded her the President's Medal for Pride of Performance for Art Education in 1999. And the Australian Council of Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) nominated her as Inaugural International Fellow, for distinguished service to art and design education in 2011.She is a practicing artist and has participated in many group exhibitions and has had six solo exhibitions at a national and international level. She is Council Member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Dislocating Authority in a Colonial Art School: critical interventions of a “native” insider by Dr Shukla Sawant Date: 3 February 2016, 4.00pm Venue: 2rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Focusing on the autobiography, periodical columns and official reports written by Madhev Vishwanath Dhurandhar (1867–1944), a ‘native’ art educator and administrator within the colonial bureaucracy of the Bombay Presidency, the presentation will examine the curricular interventions and nuanced resistance offered by him through his arguments published in English and Marathi to address different language publics. In contrast to the colonial era education policy that insisted on a revivalist typology rendered through language of academic rigor and directed towards design education for the ‘natives,’ Dhurandhar, who was to rise to the position of the headmaster of the venerable Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, while adhering to academic means, was to make his career primarily as an independent ‘History Painter,’ illustrator and landscapist. While Santiniketan’s credentials as a site of Tagore’s resistance project have been dealt with extensively in art historical writing in India, the everyday opposition of figures entangled in colonial institutional structures have received little attention. With her presentation Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor Shukla Sawant, based in Delhi, by drawing attention to rare archival material, hopes to further the discussion on the fissures in colonial structures of power that were chiseled out from within. Dr Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and Professor of Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where she has taught since 2001. She is also currently visiting faculty at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai. Prior to joining JNU, Shukla Sawant taught for twelve years at the Department of Fine Arts and Art Education Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi. After graduating in painting from the College of Art, New Delhi she specialised in printmaking at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later went to the Slade School of Art and Centre for Theoretical Studies, London on a Commonwealth grant. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, art in colonial India, photography, printmaking and new media. Shukla has ten solo shows to her credit and has published various catalogue essays and contributed chapters in books on Contemporary Indian Art. She is a founding member of the Indian Printmakers’ Guild and was a working group member of Khoj International Artists’ Association between 1998–2005. She has delivered lectures at the NGMA, New Delhi; University of Heidelberg, Germany; New School, New York and Brandeis University; and has participated in the 18th International Congress of Aesthetics, Beijing University, 2010. Her recent publications include: ‘Landscape Painting a Formal Inquiry’ in The Indian Quarterly, ‘A Question of Perspective’, The Indian Quarterly; ‘Instituting Artists’ Collectives: the Bangalore/Bengaluru Experiments with “Solidarity Economies”’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University; ‘Out Of India: Landscape Painting Beyond the Picturesque Frame’ in Landscape Painting, the Changing Horizon, Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2012. Art writing from below: Transversality in the country of mistranslation by Mustafa Zaman Date: 8 February 2018, 3.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Conceiving it as a site for raising and debating issues, Depart magazine’s editor Mustafa Zaman will offer the raison d’etre behind the art quarterly published from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose principal aim is providing critical reinforcement to the burgeoning art scene of the country. Zaman will look at the state of art criticism in Bangladesh while simultaneously examining some of the crucial critical interventions as activities from below. Often subject to mistranslation in the artistic circuit, what some writings set in motion is a social/collective reaction, while others pass without notice. Thus, the coincidence of art as a critical praxis and art writing as a critique remains even more misunderstood. Born in 1968 Mustafa Zaman received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1989 from the Institute of Fine Arts (now, Faculty of Fine Arts), University of Dhaka. In the late 1990s Zaman started contributing art reviews to Observer Magazine, a weekly supplement of the daily Observer. He joined The Daily Star in 2002 and worked in the scope of a feature writer for Star Weekend Magazine for three years writing on a gamut of subject matters including art, literature and politics. He has contributed numerous art reviews and articles on major Bangladeshi artists to a number of vernacular dailies including Bhorer Kakoj and Prothom Alo. Zaman is now editor of Depart: a magazine launched in 2010 and focused on contemporary art from South Asia with special emphasis on the emerging art scene of Bangladesh. He has written numerous prefaces to exhibition catalogues of major Bangladeshi young artists. Zaman’s major curatorial efforts include ‘CrossOver’ (2011–2012), which occasioned two back-to-back workshops and exhibitions planned in collaboration with co-curator Sushma K Bahl, sponsored by Art & Bangladesh in Dhaka, and Art Mall in Delhi, with artists from India and Bangladesh as participants; two solo exhibitions in 2013 including ‘DeReal’ by Bahram, a rickshaw painter who crossed over to mainstream art circle, and ‘Gravity Free World’ by expatriate artist A Rahman; and lastly a retrospective exhibition in 2014 entitled ‘In(site)’ by Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed. As an artist Zaman had his first solo in 2002 where sourced image were placed alongside texts to interrogate the order of knowledge; his second solo showcased his large paintings on canvases in an exhibition in 2010, at Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts; and the third was a playful mix of two and three-dimensional works framed as a series of seemingly disparate yet thematically related conceptual pieces at Alliance Francaise in 2010. His most recent multimedia installations and interactive pieces were presented at Bengal Lounge in 2013, at a duo exhibition with fellow artist Rafiqul Shuvo, under the title ‘Automated Subjectivity’. Aunohita Mojumdar Date: 8 February 2018, 11.30am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Mojumdar, editor of Himal Magazine, Kathmandu, will speak about the responsibility of the writer and the theatre of war by bringing to light stories of everyday reality in territories of conflict and violence. Aunohita Mojumdar is the Nepal-based editor of Himal Southasian: the region's only long-form independent print publication. She began her career as a freelance journalist in Delhi in the 1980s, and quickly moved onto explore the relationship between citizens and the state in Punjab and Kashmir. She worked for eight years in Afghanistan, writing on topics that ranged from the role of art in women's lives to the evolving social attitudes towards media, incarceration, and family planning. She has contributed to a wide variety of media that includes but is not limited to Eurasianet, Asia Times, Himal Southasian, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, NRC Handelsblad (Dutch), Sydsvenska (Swedish), Al Jazeera, Times of India and Hindustan Times. The Artist’s Apostrophe by Mike Sperlinger Date: 8 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy One of the features of recent discussions of art has been the proliferation of the possessive artist's apostrophe, in phrases like ‘artists’ moving image’ or ‘artists' writing’. Thinking about the phrase ‘artists’ writing,’ Professor of Theory and Writing at The Academy of Fine Art, KHiO (Oslo, Norway), Mike Sperlinger, will briefly examine some of the practices, histories and institutional dilemmas concealed by that seemingly innocuous grammatical mark – for example, what kind of relationship between the fields of art and writing does it imply? And who is really in charge of making this kind of attribution – to whom does the possessive apostrophe itself really belong? To do that Sperlinger will present a few examples – in particular Tracks: a journal of artists’ writings, a little-known publication edited by the American sculptor Herbert George in the mid-1970s. Mike Sperlinger is Professor of Writing and Theory at The Academy of Fine Art Oslo. Before that, he worked for more than a decade at LUX: a London-based agency for artists working with the moving image, which he co-founded with Benjamin Cook in 2002. As a writer he has contributed to a variety of publications including Afterall, Art Monthly, Dot Dot Dot, frieze, Radical Philosophy and Texte zur Kunst, as well as catalogue texts for artists including Ed Atkins, Gerard Byrne and Hong-Kai Wang. He has edited publications including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’ Cinema (2008). He has also curated a number of exhibitions, including ‘Let's Take Back Our Space’ (Focal Point Gallery, 2009) and a solo exhibition by Marianne Wex (Badischer Kunstverein, 2012); and he was the producer of the film Crippled Symmetries by the artist Beatrice Gibson, which won the Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2015. He is currently working on a volume of selected writings by the late artist Ian White and an anthology of Tracks: a journal of writing by artists published in New York in the 1970s. The Art Critic by Rosalyn D’Mello Date: 4 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Mumbai based artist and writer Rosalyn D’Mello played a central role in the research that enabled the publication in 2012 of The Art Critic – a historic selection of the art writings of art critic, poet, writer, painter and photographer Richard Bartholomew (b. Tavoy, British Burma, 1926, d. Delhi, India, 1985). D’Mello will present a lecture performance addressing significant points in Bartholomew’s poetic and literary legacy, from the period of the 1950s up to the 1980s that offered an insider’s account of the little known story of Modern Indian Art. Rosalyn D’Mello is a widely published freelance art writer based in New Delhi. She was the Editor-in-Chief of BLOUIN ARTINFO India. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Open, Mint Lounge, Art Review, and Art Review Asia. D’Mello was among five writers nominated for Forbes’s Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014 and was also nominated for the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014. She was the associate editor of The Art Critic, a 600+ page selection of the art writings of Richard Bartholomew from the 1950s to the early 1980s and was a member of the jury of the Prudential Eye Art Award 2015. Her first book, A Handbook For My Lover was published in 2015 by Harper Collins India. On Curating Webjournal by Dorothee Richter Date: 8 February 2018, 12.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Drawing from recent research and from her work as an editor of the independent international journal OnCurating, Dorothee Richter, Head of Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland, will discuss hybrid curatorial models to address experiences of working and writing across online and offline platforms. Dorothee Richter is head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and co-founder, with Susanne Clausen, of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme: a cooperation of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Reading. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues, urban situations, power relation issues and institutional critique. In 2005 she initiated, in collaboration with Barnaby Drabble, the Postgraduate Studies Programme in Curating. In 2007 she organised the symposium ‘Re-Visions of the Display’ with Jennifer Johns and Sigrid Schade at the Migros Museum in Zurich; in 2010 the ‘Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?’ symposium cooperation with Rein Wolfs; and in 2013 the symposium ‘Who is afraid of the public?’ at the ICA London, cooperating with Elke Krasny, Silvia Simoncelli and the University of Reading. She was curator of Fluxus Festival at Cabaret Voltaire in 2012, and worked as curator at the Museum Baerengasse in 2014. In 2008 she initiated the web-journal OnCurating.org and has been Publisher since. Her most recent publication is Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft (2012) and the new Internet platform www.on-curating.org which presents current approaches to critical curatorial practice. In 2013 she produced a film together with Ronald Kolb: Flux Us Now! Fluxus Explored with a Camera. What we left unfinished: Shahrazade in the archives by Mariam Ghani Date: 7 February 2016, 11.30am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy NY-based artist Mariam Ghani will give a performative, part-text-based presentation of the audiovisual material of What We Left Unfinished – a long-term research, film, and dialogue project centered around five unfinished Afghan feature films shot, but never edited, between 1978 and 1992. Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker and teacher. Her research-based practice spans video, installation, photography, performance, and text. Her exhibitions and screenings include presentations at the Rotterdam, ‘CPH:DOX’ and ‘transmediale’ film festivals, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul and Kassel, MoMA in New York, the National Gallery in Washington DC, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the CCCB in Barcelona. Recent texts have been published by Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, and the Manifesta Journal. Ghani’s recent curatorial projects include the international symposium ‘Radical Archives’, the traveling film programme ‘History of Histories’ and the collaborative exhibition ‘Utopian Pulse’. Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh since 2004 with ‘Index of the Disappeared’: an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions; with choreographer Erin Kelly since 2006 on the video series ‘Performed Places’; and with media archive collective Pad.ma since 2012 on the ‘Afghan Films’ online archive. Ghani has been awarded the NYFA and Soros Fellowships, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the Graham Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, NYSCA, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from SVA. Ghani currently teaches in the Social Practice MFA programme at Queens College and is a Visiting Artist at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Forms of Address: personal testimony and public engagement by Geeta Kapur Date: 7 February 2016, 11.00am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Art historian, curator, critic and an expert on contemporary art and theory, noted for her many accomplishments in curating and art criticism, Kapur will lecture on the importance of texts and documentation in witnessing and testimonials of the paradigmatic of the historical, political and ethical dilemmas of our times. Starting from her manuscript ‘Public Address: Citing Installation and Performance Art’ she will question the readability of texts in enhancing historical and political consciousness, and the fragility of such instances when annotating trauma, loss, and mourning. Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based art critic and curator. Her essays on alternative modernisms, contemporary art practice and curatorial interventions in India and the global south are widely anthologised. Her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2016). Kapur's curatorial projects include survey exhibitions at the Lalit Kala Akademi and the National Gallery of Modern Art (Delhi and Mumbai). She co-curated the ‘Festival of India’ exhibition, ‘Contemporary Indian Art’, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982); curated ‘Dispossession’, of Indian artists at the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995); co-curated ‘Bombay/ Mumbai’ for the multi-part exhibition, ‘Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis’, Tate Modern, London (2001); curated ‘subTerrain’, for the ‘ Body.City ’ project, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003); co-curated ‘DiVerge: Crossing Generations’, Chemould40, 2003; and curated ‘Aesthetic Bind’, five exhibitions in Chemould50, Mumbai (2013–2014). Geeta Kapur has been a member of the International Jury for the biennials in Venice (2005), Dakar (2006), and Sharjah (2007); she was also on the Advisory Committee of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012–2013). She was a member of the Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007-2009 and 2014); and is currently on the Advisory Board, Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong (since 2009). A founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, she was on the Advisory Council of Third Text for two decades and is now on the Advisory Board of ArtMargin. She is an editorial advisor and Trustee of Marg. She has lectured in universities and museums worldwide and held Visiting Fellowships at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She was awarded the Padmashri in 2009. Earth Poison: Environmental Writing as Militant Research by Nabil Ahmed Date: 7 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Artist, writer, curator, and team member of the Forensic Architecture research project based at Goldsmiths, University of London, Nabil Ahmed will deliver a lecture which combines video, performance and sound art to address the writing of the world as an accumulation of catastrophic events. Nabil Ahmed is an artist, writer and researcher. His transdisciplinary research explores contemporary status of nature in spatial relation to the law, conflict and development. More recently Ahmed has participated in the Taipei Biennale (2012), Cuenca Biennale (2014) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin where he has been part of the two-year ‘Anthropocene Project’ (2013-14) including the ‘Anthropocene Curriculum’ (with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin) that presented a range of artistic and theoretical approaches, concepts and experimental pedagogical projects addressing climate change and widespread environmental transformations. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and various art and architecture publications recently commissioned by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Third Text, Volume, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routlege, 2014), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014) and many others. Ahmed is co-founder of Call and Response, a sound art organisation based in London. He initiated the Earth Sensing Association – a research organisation for the diffusion of knowledge at the intersection of environmental change, conflict and cultural production. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London with a doctoral thesis that charted hidden narratives and evidenced the coupling of human conflict with natural environments in Bangladesh and West Papua. He is a member of the ERC funded Forensic Architecture Project at Goldsmiths, which brings together architects, artists, filmmakers, activists, and theorists to undertake research that gathers and presents spatial analysis in legal and political forums. Ahmed is a lecturer at The Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan and has previously taught in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a guest critic at the Architecture Association, University of Westminster Faculty of Architecture and the Royal College of Art, London. He is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. by Chus Martínez Date: 3 February 2016, 12.30pm Venue: 2rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In recent years Chus Martínez, curator and Head of the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, has reflected upon the relation between art practice, institutions and education in the years to come. For the Ensembles Martínez will give a talk on what she calls the ‘Metabolic Era.’ She will focus on the transformation of life through physical and mental ingestion—from diets to procrastination—and explore how such metabolic processes could potentially inform the future of art. Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. Currently she is the Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland. Before she was the Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, and in 2008 she served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. During her tenure as Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein she curated solo exhibitions of Wilhelm Sasnal among others; and a series of group exhibitions including ‘Pensée Sauvage' and ‘The Great Game To Come’. She was also the founder of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program for international artists, art writers, and curators.While at MACBA Martínez curated the Thomas Bayrle retrospective, an Otolith Group monographic show, and an exhibition devoted to television, ‘Are you ready for TV?’. In 2008, Martínez was the curator of the Deimantas Narkevicius retrospective exhibition, ‘The Unanimous Life’, at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which travelled to major European museums. Martínez lectures and writes regularly including numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum among other international art journals. Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990): Attempts at a Tenable (Hi)Story of a 20th-Century Artist Straddling Nations, Traditions & Disciplines by Yin Ker Date: 3 February 2016, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ker, an educator and researcher on Southeast Asian and Buddhist art based in Singapore, will explore the legacy of Śāntiniketan pedagogy in the work of Burma’s most important exponent of modernist practice, painter Bagyi Aung Soe. Following his return to Yangon in 1952 and over the next three decades, through illustration, which, in place of the virtually inexistent gallery and museum, served as the site of avant-garde artistic experimentations, he examined the linguistic rationale of a plethora of pictorial idioms, ranging from the ukiyo-e to cubism. In innovating new idioms, his non-figurative illustrations published in Shumawa Magazine in January and February 1953 provoked a furore which saw traditionalists branding his art as ‘seik-ta-za-pangyi’, meaning psychotic or mad painting – an epithet that would become synonymous with Aung Soe’s works as well as modern art in general in Burma. Ker’s presentation will share the challenges of developing an adapted narrative of his art which defies the conventions of art and art history. Yin Ker owes her training to the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), INALCO (Paris) and the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University (Yangon). Since 2000, she has been researching on Myanmar’s trailblazer of modern art, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990). Her research interests also include the constructs of ‘art’ and ‘art history’ beyond the Euro-American canons; the intersections of ancient and modern methods of knowledge- and image-making; as well as innovatory ways of telling (hi)stories of Buddhist art. Yin Ker continues to paint and to investigate new modes of image-making in parallel with theoretical research within and beyond the discipline of art history. She currently teaches (Hi)stories of Arts from Southeast Asia; aesthetic manifestations of Buddhist devotion and practice; and ways of seeing and thinking about pictorial strategies from different parts of the world at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She previously taught Art History at Nalanda University (Rajgir) and Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), and curated at the Singapore Art Museum (National Gallery Singapore). As an independent curator, writer and translator, Yin Ker worked on ‘Video, an Art, a History, 1965-2010’, a selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum collections, ‘plAy: Art from Myanmar Today’ and ‘From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar’. Her publications include ‘Kin Maung (Bank) and Bagyi Aung Soe: Two Models of ‘Modern’ Myanma Art and the Question of its Emergence’, in Modern Art Quarterly (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2014); ‘A Short Story of Bagyi Aung Soe in Five Images’ in Field Notes: Mapping Asia (Asia Art Archive, 2013); ‘L’ « art fou » ou l’art moderne birman selon les illustrations de Bagyi Aung Soe’ in La question de l’art en Asie orientale (Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008); and ‘Modern Art According to Bagyi Aung Soe’ in Journal of Burma Studies (North Illinois University, 2006). Borrowing your eyes, her words, my prose—the memoirs of a memory impaired by Filipa Ramos Date: 3 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Writer and Curator Filipa Ramos (currently editor of Art Agenda, London) will re-imagine traditional paedagogic formats, and standard exhibition review analysis, with a reading relating to an imaginary visit through exhibition we haven’t seen, but which we can experience through the eyes of an absent spectator. Filipa Ramos was born in Lisbon and is a writer and editor based in London. Currently she is Editor in Chief of art-agenda, commissioning and publishing experimental and rigorous writing on art. She is a lecturer in Art and Moving Image at the Experimental Film MA Programme of Kingston University, and at the MRes Art:Moving Image of Central Saint Martins/University of the Arts, both in London.Ramos is co-curator of ‘Vdrome’: an ongoing programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers, which she co-founded in 2013 with Edoardo Bonaspetti, Jens Hoffmann, and Andrea Lissoni. Previously she was Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal, curator of the Research Section of dOCUMENTA (13), and coordinator of ‘The Most Beautiful Kunsthalle in the World’ research project at the Antonio Ratti Foundation, Como. Interested in the ways in which art – and in particular moving-image based work – provides a site of encounter for humans and nonhumans, she has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions and film programmes on the topic and is currently editing an anthology of art writing on Animals, to be published this coming Autumn. She has been a guest curator at several public and private institutions and her writing has appeared in diverse journals and catalogues. Location Location Location by Sharmini Pereira Date: 8 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Pereira will discuss about her organisation Raking Leaves, a complex cosmogony of forms for commissioning and publishing artists' books based in Sri Lanka. During her presentation, Pereira will open up three specific projects, one with an artist from Sri Lanka and the other two with Pakistani artists, and she will address how Raking Leaves has catalysed in relation to the socio-political and art historical context of Sri Lanka. Sharmini Pereira is the director and founder of Raking Leaves: a leading non-profit independent publishing organisation. In 2013 she founded the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The archive collects materials in English, Sinhala, and Tamil and host talks, seminars and screenings related to its contents. She curated her first exhibition in Sri Lanka, ‘New Approaches in Contemporary Sri Lankan Art’ in 1994. Selected curatorial projects have included working as co-curator (Sri Lanka) for the Asia Pacific Triennale (1999), co-curator Singapore Biennale (2006), international guest curator Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2011), and as guest curator at Aga Khan Museum where she curated ‘The Garden Of Ideas – Contemporary Art from Pakistan’ (2014). Pereira's writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine, Guggenheim’s Online, Art Asia Pacific, Groundviews and Imprint amongst others. She is currently a nominator for the 2016 Anima/AGO Photography Prize and a judge for the 2017 Geoffrey Bawa Award for Architecture. She was born in 1970 and is based in Sri Lanka and New York. Towards 2019: The futurity of a location by Anshuman Das Gupta Date: 3 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Das Gupta, curator and faculty member of the Art History department in Kalabhavan, Śāntiniketan (Visva Bharati University) will discuss the singular approach of art paedagogy and its relation to text at Śāntiniketan as envisioned through its founder Rabindranath Tagore. Fostered through a pedagogical programme devised by Tagore’s right-hand man Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Śāntiniketan represented the sum of ancient Indian theories of aesthetics, Tagore’s humanist and universalist ideals transcending demarcations of national borders, and the debates on nationalist and Pan-Asianist ideologies initiated by many a luminary in the orbit of the ashram: Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), and Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947). Śāntiniketan as a Location/ site has many acquired dimensions to it; and this presentation will also consider the Location / site through some of its receptions by current scholars and past participants thus producing a discursive horizon leading to many possible directions for its future, in particular when looking at its upcoming centenary year in 2019 and beyond. Anshuman Das Gupta is a curator and currently teaching faculty in the Art History department in Kalabhavan, Santiniketan (Visva Bharati University) and is affiliated with the Curatorial/Knowledge programme in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London as a PhD candidate. Born in 1967 in Kolkata, India, he graduated in Art History from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, and received post-graduate degrees in Art History from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda in 1990 and 1992 respectively. Das Gupta’s essays and seminar papers have been published in several journals and publications such as the Marg publications: Art and Visual Cultures in India 1857–2007 (2009), Akbar Padamsee (in Press, 2009) and Contemporary Indian Sculpture, among others. Das Gupta has taken up several curatorial assignments at various times, which include an exhibition organised by the French Embassy in Delhi on the birth centenary of Antonin Artaud in 1996; Khoj International Artists’ Workshop events in Bengal in 2006; the ‘Ramkinker Baij Centenary’ exhibition in Santiniketan in 2007 (for which occasion he also organised an international seminar); ‘Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture’ for the Museum of Contemporary Art, MuHKA, Antwerp (a collaborative curatorial venture) in 2008. He has participated in around thirty national and international seminars, including ‘Patterns of Reflection: Writing Contemporary Indian Art’ (2009, Santiniketan- Lalit kala and kala Bhavan), ‘Periphery’ in Guwahati, Assam (2009), MuHKA, Antwerp (2008), as well as a seminar organised by ZKM and MMB in Delhi (2008). He was a Joint-Convener, collaborator and speaker in Black House: an international collaboration between artists, curators and architects, with participants from CEPT (Ahmedabad), SPA (Delhi), HCU (Hyderabad) and Dhaka (2015). Mad heart, be brave by Nida Ghouse Date: 4 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Writer and curator Nida Ghouse has been researching the Soviet-funded multi-lingual Afro-Asian magazine Lotus: a forum for short stories, poetry, reviews of books and literary essays. Lotus was a quarterly magazine that for its time was a ground-breaking literary/artistic cum political expression. The writers of the journal placed themselves in relationship to the broader social and political mechanism of imperial powers. Youssef el Sebai, was the journal’s first editor, and the journal came out of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association, a group of African and Asian writers who spoke a multitude of languages and how met in Tashkent in 1958. Ten years later this organisation launched a journal called Afro-Asian Writings, which would go on to become Lotus. Lotus was published in Cairo and Beirut and was produced tri-lingually in Arabic, English and French. Nida Ghouse is a writer and a curator, and is currently Director of Mumbai Art Room. She has worked institutionally as co-curator for the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in 2010; as assistant curator for the Sharjah Biennial in 2011; and as associate curator for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2014. Ghouse's curatorial projects include the ‘Kharita Symposium on Urban Trajectories with Pericentre Projects’, ‘Untitled Exhibition #1 ’ with Padmini Chettur and the Clark House Initiative, ‘14 Proper Nouns’ with Hassan Khan at the Delfina Foundation, ‘In the Desert of Images’ with Melik Ohanian at the Mumbai Art Room, and ‘La presencia del sonido' at the Botín Foundation in Santander. Her ongoing projects include ‘Acoustic Matters’, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts, and ‘Emotional Architecture’, the first publication of which, launched in 2014, We, started by calling it a summer of two fires and a landslide and whose second publication No Fantasy without Protest was published in Cairo in October 2015. Ghouse’s essays and interviews have appeared in publications such as Arab Studies Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, ArteEast, ArtSlant, Bidoun, Ibraaz, and MadaMasr, and in exhibition catalogues of MuKHA in Antwerp, the New Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. She was the first recipient of the FICA-Delfina Research Fellowship in partnership with Iniva and Goldsmiths Curatorial/Knowledge PhD programme in London in 2011, and was a resident at Fondazione Spinola Banna per l'Arte in partnership with the Resò3 programme in Turin in 2013. A Letter From the People by Chantal Pontbriand Date: 4 February 2016, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Curator, critic and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Chantal Pontbriand will discuss how writing, editing, publishing, curating words as well as works are a continuous process in her work that seeks not to make fiction out of reality but to try to see in-between what words and reality have to offer. This way of working and of seeing is closely related to what she thinks the most relevant art practices have to offer. Pontbriand says: ‘Art or art writing is an on-going investigation into the world today and its issues, socio-political as well as individual. Art has relevance if it succeeds in articulating issues, what is to be worked through in order to go beyond what is known, categorized or classified. Art is the unknown. As such, it is of relevance, in producing knowledge, in advancing knowledge. As such, art writing functions as an open letter. A letter which seeks to understand the world and propose that interpretation to others. It should not be however a letter to the people, but taking the form of an investigation, a mapping of emerging ideas, concepts and forms, it is in that sense a “letter from the people”. Our task is not to dictate a pre-formated way of thinking, but to be enabling, in the sense that we, together with others, as this cannot be done alone, seek to see what lies in-between, as that which lies ahead.’ Chantal Pontbriand is a contemporary art curator and critic whose work is based on the exploration of questions of globalisation and artistic heterogeneity. She has curated numerous international contemporary art events: exhibitions, international festivals and international conferences, mainly in photography, video, performance, dance and multimedia installation. She was a founder of PARACHUTE contemporary art magazine in 1975 and acted as publisher/editor until 2007, publishing 125 issues. After curating several major performance events and festivals, she co-founded the FIND (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse), in Montreal and was president and director from 1982–2003. She was appointed Head of Exhibition Research and Development at Tate Modern in London in 2010 and founded PONTBRIAND W.O.R.K.S. [We_Others and Myself_Research_ Knowledge_Systems] in 2012. In 2015, she was appointed CEO-Director of MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, and curator and advisor of Demo-Graphics 1 (Greater Toronto Area, May-July 2017).In 2013, she received the Governor General of Canada Award for an Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts, in 2014, an Honorary Doctorate from Concordia University, Montreal, and the distinction of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France (Officer of the Arts and Letters Order of France). Most recent exhibitions include: ‘I See Words, I Hear Voices, Dora Garcia’, The Power Plant, Toronto; ‘Mark Lewis Above and Below’, Le Bal, Paris, 2015; ‘PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words’, CA2M, Madrid; ‘The Yvonne Rainer Project’, Jeu de Paume, Centre d’art de la Ferme du Buisson, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ‘Photography Performs: The Body as the Archive’, Centre de photographie d’Île-de-France (CPIF); co-curated with Agency, ‘Dora Garcia, Of Crimes and Dreams’, Darling Foundry, Montreal, 2014; ‘Higher Powers Command’, Lhoist Collection, 2010; ‘HF|RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham]’, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2009. Recent publications include: Mutations, Perspectives on Photography, Steidl/Paris Photo, 2011; The Contemporary, The Common: Art in A Globalizing World, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013; PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words, CA2M/Sternberg Press, Madrid/Berlin, 2014; PARACHUTE : The Anthology, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2012-2015 (4 Volumes). Readings from Anthology: Essays or Poems, a book in process by Quinn Latimer Date: 4 February 2016, 11.30am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Latimer is an American poet and writer based in Basel and Athens, and currently editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. Her work pays special attention to the literary format of the letter as a space of criticality and community occasioned by the intimacies of its address. In this session she will read from and discuss the work that comprises Anthology – a forthcoming collection of critical prose, poetry, and more hybrid texts that move between genre, and pull from history letters and fiction. She will specifically explore the form and function of the refrain, its serial ecstasies and political possibilities. Quinn Latimer is an American poet, critic, and editor based in Basel and Athens. She is the author of Rumored Animals (2012); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); and Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2014). A regular contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor to frieze, her writing also appears in recent publications for Michel Auder, Ida Ekblad, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Joan Jonas, Julia Wachtel, Kelley Walker, and in Time, for MIT Press. Her writings, readings, and video collaborations have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy; Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; and Qalandia International, Ramallah/Jerusalem. Additionally, Latimer is coeditor of No Core: Pamela Rosenkranz (2012); Paul Sietsema: Interviews on Films and Works (2012); Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created (2013); and Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder (2014). A Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of an Arts Writing Grant from Creative Capitol/Warhol Foundation, Latimer has taught and lectured at Geneva’s Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD); FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel; and The Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Publications for documenta 14. Metabolistic Writing by Maria Lind Date: 7 February 2016, Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Drawing from her curatorial research on abstraction, and from a number of texts by various intellectuals and artists, Maria Lind, Director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and Artistic Director of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, has analysed how in the past few decades economic abstraction was primarily dealt with by art as a subject matter or theme which increasingly mirrored the economic, social and political condition of the world. She also analysed how this system affects spatial and temporal concepts, and the writing of a future within it. In Dhaka, Lind is taking as a starting point the writing of Keller Easterling, Paul B Preciado and Matias Faldbakken, to talk about ‘metabolistic writing.’ Such an approach implies digesting and in other ways dealing with specific material at the same time as the process of writing and the use of language make up a performative and generative way of producing text. Maria Lind has been the Director of the Tensta Konsthall since 2011 and was appointed as the Artistic Director for the 11th Gwangju Biennale 2016. She was the director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College from 2008-10. Before that, she was the director of lASPIS in Stockholm (2005–07) and the director of the Munich Kunstverein (2002–04). Previous to that she was the curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (from 1997–2001) and in 1998 co-curated Manifesta 2, Europe’s nomadic biennial of contemporary art. Responsible for the ‘Moderna Museet Projekt', Lind worked with artists on a series of 29 commissions that took place in a temporary project-space, or within or beyond the Museum in Stockholm. She is currently a professor of research at the Art Academy in Oslo. In terms of publications, she is the co-editor of the following books: Curating with Light Luggage (2005) and Collected Newsletter; Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art (2007); European Cultural Policies 2015; and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (2008). Lind’s recent co-edited publications include Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (2012); Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art (2012); and Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe (2015), all with Sternberg Press. She edited Abstraction as part of MIT’s and Whitechapel Gallery’s series ‘Documents on Contemporary Art’. In 2010 a selection of Maria Lind’s essays, Selected Maria Lind Writing, spanning from 1997-2010, was published by Sternberg Press, edited by Brian Kuan Wood. Furthermore, Maria Lind won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2009 and was a board member of IKT from 2006–2011. Notes on Process: Writing a Life by Belinder Dhanoa (Read by Sabih Ahmed in Belinder’s absence) Date: 4 February 2018, 11.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Dhanoa is a writer and an artist, and currently teaches Creative Writing at the School of Culture and Creative Expression at the Ambedkar University, Delhi. With a brief introduction on her singular approach to the writing of a life, Dhanoa will read excerpts from the script she wrote for artist Vivan Sundaram’s exhibition-as-play 409 Ramkinkars that opened in Delhi in the spring of 2015. The performative exhibition paid homage to one of India’s most charismatic artist, Ramkinkar Baij, and his work as innovator of sculptural form in the space, revisiting the creative milieu of sculptor-painter-scenographer-theatre artist Baij. Sabih is an art historian and currently a Senior Researcher at Asia Art Archive (AAA). With AAA, he has overseen numerous research initiatives pertaining to modern art which include putting together personal archives, digitisation projects, and bibliography compilations of vernacular art writing. Ahmed is stationed in New Delhi and has co-organised and participated in workshops and conferences in various institutions that include the Clark Art Institute Massachusetts, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Jaffna University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University among others.His recent writings have been published in volumes such as the Sarai Reader and Marg Publications, and he also delivers lectures on art and technology in Ambedkar University's School of Culture and Creative Expression in New Delhi. Sabih’s research interests include institutional histories of art, and in particular the shaping of the art field through second half of 20th century with changes in infrastructures, technologies, and shifting centres of authority.

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