ALL PROJECTS Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen 6 Nov 2022 Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman FICA and Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) delighted to present a collaborative online performance, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen" by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman, launching their project, "A time comes when we hear nothing." The artists were awarded a grant for their project through the aegis of Stitching Screens, a platform instituted by FICA and SAF for supporting artistic collaboration across India, Bangladesh and the digital space in 2020 - 2021. Having worked on the project for over a year, Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman shared the final iteration of "A time comes when we hear nothing." The project was imagined as a means of solidarity for global working-class people. An expression by two artists across borders reflecting on the collective experience of social divides during lockdown. The projected connected them through common concerns and emotions for people. Common deep pain ran through the veins of Bangladesh to India despite a geographic border. As part of our virtual launch event, we screened an online performance by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman titled, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen," realized in 2022 as an addition to "A time comes when we hear nothing." The performance was a cross-national conversation between two artists, a conversation symbolic of what might be shared between two laborers from Bangladesh and India. Questions of communication in two different languages. This conversation was inspired by the theatre script of Amol K Patil, referring to a long distance conversation between a migrant labourer and his wife. Here is a mundane conversation of people of different nationalities and different genders transcending borders through screens evoking the monotony of a digital life. Getting into the deeper feeling of the working class. A conversation between two digital voices, two screens. The performance followed by an interaction with the artists. Details for the screening: Date: Sunday | 6 November, 2022 Time: 7 PM IST / 7:30 BDT

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

ALL PROJECTS Speak, Lokal Kunsthalle Zurich, 4 March – 7 May 2017 Rafiqul Shuvo and Samsul Alam Helal were selected to participate in the group show Speak, Lokal curated by Daniel Baumann, Director of the Kunsthalle Zürich and guest curator for the Samdani Art Award 2016. Samdani Art Foundation supported their participation.

ALL PROJECTS MAHASSA Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia The Dhaka Art Summit, Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) at Cornell University, and Asia Art Archive, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, launch a new research project entitled Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia. The project brings together a team of leading international faculty and emerging scholars to investigate parallel and intersecting developments in the cultural histories of modern Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These regions have been shaped by shared institutional and intellectual developments during the twentieth century, including the rise of modern art practices associated with the withdrawal of colonialism and the consolidation of nationalism, the founding of institutions such as the art school and the museum, and increasing exchange with international metropolitan centres via travel and the movement of ideas through publications and exhibitions. Viewing them in terms of statist and national art histories obscures their analysis in a comparative framework. By contrast, this programme emphasises a connected and contextualised approach to better understand both common developments as well as divergent trajectories. The curriculum will cover both core concepts and emerging perspectives from postcolonial, decolonial, transnational, transcultural, and global discourses, with seminar topics that range from art and social difference, creolisation, exhibition histories, postcolonial nationalisms, media and popular culture, multiple modernisms, pedagogy, and transnational networks, among others. Participants will be actively engaged in the sessions as experts in their own respective disciplines. By presenting two papers during the course of the programme, early career scholars will be encouraged to pursue their research informed by the theoretical and art historical contexts of this project. By integrating presentations by participants with core faculty lectures, the programme is envisioned as a reciprocal process of learning exchange. Presentations will also take place at peer institutions in Hong Kong and Bangladesh, as well as at the Dhaka Art Summit. Field trips such as collection, museum, and modernist architecture visits and guest lectures will be organised during both the Hong Kong and Dhaka sessions. With the goal of optimising the impact of in-person workshops, virtual meetings will be held in addition to the respective Hong Kong and Dhaka sessions. Emerging scholars from and with connections to Africa, South Asia, and/or Southeast Asia currently enrolled in a graduate programme in Art History, Architectural History, or Cultural Studies, or who have finished their graduate training in these fields in the last three years, were encouraged to apply. Twenty-one scholars were selected from a competitive international applicant pool. The scholars and their research proposals can be found on the right-hand column. Building on the initial convening at AAA in August 2019, the MAHASSA curriculum in February will focus on methodologies and specific histories, through seminars, panels, guest talks, and field trips with core and invited faculty. Working closely with host and partner, Dhaka Art Summit, topics such as architecture, art schools, and the place of collectives will be explored in depth from a conceptual and practical approach. This was a closed-door event. The open call for participation ended on 28 Feb 2019. Image: Muzharul Islam, College of Arts and Crafts, Dhaka. Photo: Randhir Singh. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYnQJm-CPlw Afropolitan: Contemporary African Art as Paradox Fri, 7 Feb 2020 Respondents: Simon Soon and Sanjukta Sunderason, Diana Campbell (mod.) Art historian and curator Salah M. Hassan (Cornell University) delivered a keynote on contemporary African art and its global significance. Respondents art historian Simon Soon (University of Malaya) and historian Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Leiden) engaged with Hassan in a discussion on parallel developments that emerged in South and Southeast Asia since the 1980s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dc3ZBekwXRM Art and Hunger: Transnational Frames Sat, 8 Feb 2020 Art and Hunger: Transnational Frames Panelists: Elizabeth Giorgis and Sanjukta Sunderason, Noopur Desai (mod.) This panel by art historian Elizabeth Giorgis (Addis Ababa University) and historian Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Leiden) explores the politics of famine in the context of anti-colonial and antiauthoritarian struggles in South Asia and North Africa, and how competing narratives of nationalism were articulated through social realism and abstraction in response to Bengal (1943), Vietnamese (1945), and Ethiopian famines (1984–85). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHhEE02o-gk Modern Architecture Sun, 9 Feb 2020 Modern Architecture Panelists: Sean Anderson, Farhan Karim, Simon Soon, Nurur Rahman Khan, Sneha Ragavan (mod.) This panel by architectural historians Sean Anderson (Museum of Modern Art), Farhan Karim (University of Kansas), architecture historian and architect Nurur Rahman Khan (Muzharul Islam Archives) and art historian Simon Soon (University of Malaya) examines modernisms as they played out in the built environment of the Global South. Panelists will discuss how innovations in domestic and urban life engendered hybrid building typologies and visual motifs that simultaneously resonated with universal modernist tropes, while incorporating local vernacular traditions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqmff02k-kA Rise of the Art School Mon, 10 Feb 2020 Rise of the Art School Panelists: Ming Tiampo, Sneha Ragavan, Chuong-Dai Vo, Shaela Sharmin, John Tain (mod.) This panel investigates the role of art schools as important sites of transcultural encounter, knowledge sharing, and art production during the modern period. By discussing case studies such as Santiniketan, Baroda, Dhaka and Chittagong Charukala, and Slade, among others, panelists will explore the relationship between pedagogy and community. Panelists include art historian Ming Tiampo (Carleton University), researchers Sneha Ragavan and Chuong-Dai Vo (Asia Art Archive), artist collective The Otolith Group, and Dean of Visual Arts at University of Chittagong and artist Shaela Sharmin. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWxAnLgpCkM Collectives from the 1950s to the Present Fri, 14 Feb 2020 Collectives from the 1950s to the Present Panelists: Melissa Carlson, Samina Iqbal, Dana Liljegren, Dhali Al Mamoon, Michelle Wong (mod.) By reviewing four case studies: Pakistan in the 1950s, multiple sites in the 1960s, Bangladesh in the 1980s, and presentday Senegal, panelists will examine how artists fashioned modes of resistance and solidarity through new forms of collectivity. Here, formal and informal artist groups created frameworks for negotiating between international, national, and local agents. Panelists include MAHASSA participants Melissa Carlson, Samina Iqbal, Dana Liljegren, and artist and art historian Mustafa Zaman. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GalLxai6pys Reflections on Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia Thu, 25 Jun 2020 Reflections on Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia Panelists: Iftikhar Dadi, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Elizabeth W Giorgis, John Tain (mod.) Organised by Asia Art Archive in America, this panel gather four of the MAHASSA faculty members, Dr. Iftikhar Dadi, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Dr. Elizabeth W Giorgis, and John Tain, who provide an overview and share their thoughts on the impetus behind and outcome so far of this evolving project. Programme Partners: Sponsor: THIS PROJECT IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE GETTY FOUNDATION THROUGH ITS CONNECTING ART HISTORIES INITIATIVE.

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

ALL PROJECTS Love- Power- Fall , Master Class Srihatta Driant Zeneli conducted an intensive six-day Master Class for five young Bangladeshi creatives at Srihatta: Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. The workshop revolved around his upcoming film, 'Love Power Fall,' which intertwines themes of a white peacock, Bangladesh’s iconic Parliament Building designed by Louis I. Kahn, and the country's six distinct seasons. During the Master Class, Driant provided insights into his creative process, exploring idea development, working methodologies, and his inspirations. A significant influence on the film is Baroque music and theatre, which will be heavily reflected in its storytelling, aesthetics, and dramatic structure. He encouraged the participants to research and integrate local Bangladeshi elements into the narrative, ensuring a fusion of their cultural heritage with his artistic vision. Under Driant’s guidance, the participants collaboratively developed the film’s storyline, connecting their research with the theatrical traditions of Baroque. They explored local knowledge systems, particularly drawing from Khona’s proverbs—an ancient collection of agrarian and meteorological wisdom that continues to influence Bangladeshi agricultural and architectural practices. Khona, a philosopher and astrologer from Bengal, is believed to have lived sometime between 400 AD and 1200 AD. Notably, Khona’s observations on vernacular architecture resonate with the design principles of Bangladesh’s Parliament Building, offering a compelling conceptual link within the film’s narrative. Beyond script development, the young creatives are playing an active role in designing the film’s costumes, scenography, and assisting in cinematography and musical composition. Their collective efforts are shaping a film that seamlessly weaves together local knowledge and Italian artistic influences, creating a rich tapestry of love, power, and downfall. Through this Master Class, Driant Zeneli facilitated a dynamic exchange of ideas, fostering cross-cultural dialogue and artistic collaboration. The resulting film promises to be a unique and layered representation of storytelling, blending the dramatic elements of Baroque theatre with the deeply rooted traditions and wisdom of Bangladesh. The five young creative continue to work with Driant Zeneli and will be part the core team throughout the whole production. The five participants are: Scenography : Md. Tasnimul Izaz Bhuiyan, Pulak K. Sarkar Storytelling and script: Rafi Nur Hamid Production: Sondip Roy Costume Design: Sumaiya Sultana

ALL PROJECTS Geological Movements Curated by Diana Campbell We may think of ‘land’ as fixed but it is constantly shifting: below us through erosion, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes; swirling above us as dust clouds. The earliest signs of life, the impetus of cellular movement, as well as aeons of extinction are inscribed in stone and fossils. Fossil fuels, created from the remains of life from the deep geological past, power much of our way of life and threaten our collective future through the violent process of extracting and burning them. Geological and political ruptures often overlap, and the artists in this movement excavate metaphors to consider our past, present, and future on this planet beyond human-bound paradigms. Their works challenge us to find commonalities and to emerge from this sediment to heal, imagine, design, and build new forms of togetherness. What will coalesce and fossilise our presence on this planet for lifetimes to come? Adrián Villar Rojas New Mutants, 2017–2020 Moroccan marble floor tiles encrusted with Devonian period micro Ammonite and Goniatites fossils; blue chroma key paint; spices (turmeric, chili powder, garam masala powder); plant-based pigments (indigo, sindoor, alta), gouache; sand; potatoes and coal, on aggregate rammed earth walls Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Marian Goodman Gallery, and kurimanzutto Realised with additional support from kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery New Mutants is a new immersive installation by Adrián Villar Rojas where visitors enter DAS by walking over a marble floor encrusted with 400-million-year-old ammonite and orthoceras fossils. These now-extinct species of undersea creatures thrived for 300 million years, swimming across the super-ocean Panthalassa and witnessing the creation and breakup of the single continent Pangaea. A painting of a burned-out fireplace emerges from the rammed-earth walls that rise from the fossil floor, tracing the seismic shift that occurred in the evolution of humanity and our planet when we learned to control fire, invented agriculture, and began to settle and build civilisations. This work serves as a metaphor to think outside of human-bound time, and to consider common ground on which to come together. Villar Rojas creates site-specific installations using both organic and inorganic materials that undergo change over time. Tied to their exhibiting context, they generate irreproducible experiences relying on a ‘parasite-host’ relation. His team-based projects that extend over open-ended periods allow him to question the aftermath of the normalised production of art in the Capitalocene era. Fragments of this installation will be permanently on display at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet in a dedicated pavilion designed by the artist. b. 1980, Argentina; lives and works nomadically Elena Damiani As the dust settles, 2019–2020 Watercolour on handmade Lokta Barbour grey paper. Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Revolver Gallery ‘There is a strange sympathy between the atmospheric particles that float through the sky and the human beings who migrate across the ground and then across the sea. Each body sets the other into motion – a pattern of movement and countermovement.’ Adrian Lahoud Elena Damiani has created a collage of watercolour renditions of storming dust particles in the atmosphere as captured by NASA. Several hundred million tonnes of dust unsettle and travel through the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from deserts to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. We imagine land to be static, but deforestation, desertification, and climate-change-related storms distribute dust across vast distances in our planet’s atmosphere. The handmade Nepalese paper beneath the layers of paint making up this work is a surface that could be read as stone tiles, an aerial view of a desert, or even a microscopic view of human skin. Damiani creates installations, objects, and works on paper that focus on the politics of space and memory. She portrays landscapes and geological processes to reinterpret natural stages and their generative processes. Her work draws inspiration from collage techniques and historical science books, while the stone and metal in her sculptures recall the environments she studies and refracts. b. 1979, Lima; lives and works in Lima Jonathas de Andrade b. 1982, Maceió; lives and works in Recife Pacifico, 2010 Super8 transferred in HD, 12 min Courtesy of the artist and Vermelho Through the process of animating a styrofoam board model with maps and paper, Jonathas de Andrade proposes a fictional geological solution for the political turmoil and violence that normally accompanies changes of borders. A massive earthquake erupts over the Andes, detaching Chile from the South American continent. As a consequence, the sea returns to Bolivia, restoring its lost coastline, Argentina gains coasts with both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, and Chile becomes a floating island adrift in the seas. The aesthetic approach of the film allows the artist to touch upon topics such as the notion of truth as an ideological construction and the fabrication of mass commotion/emotion as political artifice. De Andrade works predominantly with installations, videos, and photo-research. Addressing those overlooked in the dominant cultural narrative of Brazil, the artist ponders on the relationships between different social milieus. In collaboration with labourers, indigenous tribes, the disabled, and others, de Andrade commonly points out the inequality stemming from the discourses of colonialism and neo-imperialism. The artist co-founded the artistic collective A Casa como Convém in 2007. Karan Shrestha b. 1985, Kathmandu; lives and works between Kathmandu and Mumbai in these folds, 2019 Ink on paper, three-channel HD video Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist Within Nepal’s contained geography, the landscape presents possibilities for adversity to spring from any fissure: be it a decade of revolutionary upheaval, political instability, natural disasters, economic ruptures, repressed social edifices, or perpetual state violence. Through the installation of a three-channel video and an ink drawing, in these folds addresses the resulting precariousness that has characterised Nepal’s recent past. Incorporating documentary and fiction, Karan Shreshta questions the rhetoric of progress prescribed for paving the way forward and considers how transcendental practices that have endured over time are attempts at grappling with the everyday. Shrestha’s works overlay encounters in physical landscapes on mental maps of people and spaces he comes across so as to examine and restructure notions of the present. His practice – incorporating drawings, sculpture, photography, text, film, and video – seeks to blur the oppositions that build and define our individual and collective identities. Matías Duville b. 1974, Buenos Aires; lives and works in Buenos Aires Untitled, 2019 Sanguine on paper My red way, 2019 Sanguine on paper Levitating in red, 2019 Sanguine on paper, sandpaper Courtesy of the artist and Barro Gallery Matías Duville’s earthy mud and iron-oxide-infused sanguine drawings call to mind landscapes in transition from natural disasters and also from human interference from the extraction and clearing processes needed for infrastructure development. Similar to these methods, Duville’s drawings pulse with expressive brutality, trying to represent what the end of the world might look like both in a geographical and psychological sense. These works are inspired by the mental landscapes that are created inside our heads when we look directly at the sun and close our eyes to recover from its blinding light. The artist takes us along on his journey deep into the mind, trying to connect us with the idea of a universe out of control. Duville works with objects, videos, and installations, although he predominantly employs drawing. His works evoke scenes of desolation with rarified, timeless atmospheres like those that precede a natural disaster: hurricanes, tsunamis, or situations of abandonment in the forest that act as a dreamlike vision of a wandering explorer, like a mental landscape. Omer Wasim b. 1988, Karachi; lives and works in Karachi In the Heart of Mountains, 2019 Charcoal on canvas, lacquer, wooden armatures Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist In the Heart of Mountains situates us amidst Omer Wasim’s journey in the mountains of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, a contested terrain that he scaled with queer friends and friendships. The work, as well as his action, denounces romantic visions and imaginaries of the area perpetuated by the state, and instead relies on charcoal to make visible the mountains as witnesses to state violence, colonial and neo-colonial rule, and as sites where many death-worlds arise. These mountains anticipate their own demise, foreshadowing capital interests in the region that are in diametric opposition to nature, ecology, and people. Queer bodies and community enable this mode of inquiry, becoming, in the process, insurgents that counter state-sponsored redaction and violence. While it also stands alone as an installation, the work also becomes an environment for new readings into the future. Wasim is an intermedia artist whose practice queers space, subverting the frames of development and progress that shape human relationships to the city and nature. His work bears witness to the relentless erasure, violence, destruction of our times by staying with queer bodies as they hold space and enact desire. Otobong Nkanga b. 1974, Kano; lives and works in Antwerp Landversation, 2020 Site-specific installation and conversations from Dhaka Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Mendes Wood DM. Realised with additional support from Unilever Bangladesh. Project coordinator Helena Ramos Land extends beyond mere soil, territories, and earth. It relates to our connectivity and conflicts in relation to the spaces we live in and how humans try to find solutions through simple gestures of innovation and repair. As relationships with nature and people become affected, how can we find a platform to share, learn, exchange and heal? A series of tables forming a circular structure serve as the basis for an exchange between visitors and a group of people who all have close – professional, caring, vital – relationships with the earth. Otobong Nkanga weaves together strands of landversations realised in Beirut, Shanghai, and São Paulo in this project’s newest iteration in Dhaka, and her collaborators have included geologists, housing and land rights activists, farmers, and many others who transform the land itself into other realities. What is ordinarily constructed through their contact with land now forms the foundation for new situations of exchange and transmission, activating interpersonal networks that come together in DAS with the power to move the world outside the exhibition. Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances examine the social and topographical relationship to our everyday environment. By exploring the notion of land as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative meaning to the social ideas of identity. Paradoxically, she brings to light the memories and historical impacts provoked by humans and nature. Raphael Hefti b. 1978, Biel; lives and works in Zurich Quick Fix Remix, 2015/2020 Sculptures created from performance with thermite powder and sand Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from Pro Helvetia Raphael Hefti uses the language of material to communicate a fascination with the behaviour of liquid metals, a material history which is part of the epic story of human civilisation across vast geographies. This performance, a spectacle between blunder and precision, is a conversation with the world of heavy industries and iron casting. The artist misappropriates thermite welding processes typically used to repair high-speed train tracks, transforming liquid steel through a blazing landscape of incisions that leaves behind a bed of solidified metal debris. Just as volcanic eruptions make visible the hidden energy properties of the molten rock and liquid metal moving deep within the earth, Hefti’s ‘artistic alchemy’ makes visible the hidden industrial practices and processes that form the machine-made landscapes powering our way of life. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and performance, Raphael Hefti explores how humans transform materials in the everyday urban landscape by pushing and testing material limits, while removing these materials from utilitarian obligations. He often works with teams of industry technicians to modify and misapply routine procedures and construction methods to open up new possibilities and unexpected beauty through guided accidents that he documents in his work.

ALL PROJECTS Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together diverse members of their neighbourhood as well as artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created ‘Hamra’ to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, ‘Golpota Shobar’ performs local history and myths surrounding a small village and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south-to-north movements of climate change refugees. ‘Golpota Shobar’ is realized in collaboration with Jolputul Puppet Studio and was performed inside of Taloi Havini’s ‘Reclamation’ installation at 4pm on 7, 8, 9, 14 and 15 February, with periodic interventions within the puppet theatre within this amoeba. The children also conducted theatre workshops with Dhaka based children during the DAS school days, performing the results of their workshop from 12.45–1.15pm on 11 and 13 February.

EMK Center, Dhaka, 27 April 2017 Sean Anderson: A Talk about Moma’s Young Architects Program around the world Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, 21 April 2017 Rehearsing The Witness: The Bhawal Court Case, A Talk By Zuleikha Chaudhari Pathshala South Asian Media Institute & Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 10 - 11 April 2017 Breathe In Breathe Out: Susan Philipsz Soni Mongol Adda, Segun Bagicha, 4 April 2017 Tarun Nagesh: the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: Art and Curating in the Asia Pacific Srihatta- Samdani Art centre & Sculpture Park, Sylhet, 20 - 28 February 2017 A Sculptural Congress: Pawel Althamer and the Neighbours National Art Gallery, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 19 February 2017 Sebastian Cichocki: Art in Post Artistic (and Post Democratic) Times 7 - 8 April 2015 Workshop and Presentation with Tori Wranes Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 2 - 6 April 2015 Performance Workshop by Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore and Jana Prepeluh Faculty of Fine Arts, University Of Dhaka, 24 March 2015 'Death Class' and Draftmen's Congress' by Pawel Althamer Lecture Theatre, Faculty of Fine Arts, University Of Dhaka. 23 March 2015 'Painting Performs' - A Presentation by Sandeep Mukherjee The Samdani Residence, and Alliance Francaise De Dhaka, 21 - 22 March 2015 'Introduction to Council'- A Presentation by Sandra Terdjman and Grégory Castéra 20 - 21 March 2015 Performance Workshop Tour by Myriam Lefkowitz Year Seminars The annual Samdani Seminars are a lecture and workshop programme that facilitates engagement between international arts professionals and local communities across Bangladesh through participatory artworks, lectures, and workshops. Open to all and free, the Seminar programme complements the existing syllabi of Bangladesh's leading educational institutions covering the mediums and subjects not currently included while expanding the audience engaging with art. LOAD MORE

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

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun The Bay of Bengal once supported an amphibious life. Water was not a force to keep at bay, but an entity to live with, and through. In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather , mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans Delta of Bangladesh that has soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. Mud complicates the relationship to liquid, which is no longer delineated, discrete. The attempt to extract oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees as a result of the resulting effects of global warming. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them; a catastrophe on one hemisphere inevitably impacts the other. With colonialism came the attempted erasure of muddiness as condition – amorphous zones became hardened into coastlines; lines were even drawn in the muddy space between the human and the non-human. The time of stones, of tides, of swamp, of earth, became subsumed to the relentless measure of the clock. Omer Wasim and Saira Sheikh’s drawings and text in The Impossibility of Loving a Stone (2017) reconstitutes the human in geological time, where the present stretches back two million years – they soil the skin between the Earth and us, slowly moving us like shifting mud through the present. Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st century. He transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the 19th century colonial surveyor morphs into today’s corporations that are exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this haunting essay film. Moving further away from the generation of knowledge as mere data, Neha Choksi turns her attention to the sun, both as planetary sustenance and a point of reference for dialogue across generations and within the self through multiple modes of narration. The artist’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Choksi invited ten Bangladeshi children to embody a fictive dream of a child obsessively drawing suns, and to consider the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They considered the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities. They imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Each day of the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Choksi invited a different adult professional to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature drawing the visitor back to their primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as they morph from atoms into beings and back. Artists Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) 2 or 3 Tigers, 2015 2 Channel CGI Video, 10-channel sound courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery Technology supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Presented here with additional support from the National Art Council Singapore and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/Shanghai Taking inspiration from 19th Century wood engraving, Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st Century. The wood engraving chronicles the story of George Dromgoole Coleman, the then Government Superintendent of Public Works in Singapore who was surprised by a tiger who was determined to attack not Coleman and his entourage of convict laborers, but rather the theodolite (surveying instrument) they were using to conduct a survey on the unexplored forests of Singapore. Post-colonial historians have noted that the imperial methods of data collection, through census reports, and land surveys, were directed at the control of the lands and bodies of subjugated populations. The creation of these data sets belied the complex inter-relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of a place. Village folklore from South and Southeast Asia describes a symbiotic relationship between humans and tigers, where tigers assume roles of ancestors, gods, protectors, and even estranged brothers of man. The powerful figure of the were-tiger, or a person who can become tigers, and a tiger who can become a person and live in the village, points to the strong bond between man and animal. Contemporary versions of these tales often use the trope of the colonial census taker who asks about the number of tigers in a particular area. In myths such as that of Haru’r Pishima (Haru’s grand-aunt) in the Sunderbans and of Tsaricho in Nagaland, the villagers respond “sometimes 5, and sometimes 6”, alluding to the presence of the were-tiger in their midst, to the bafflement of the census taker. Producing confusion through untranslatable knowledge becomes a weapon of resistance against colonial control. Introducing the were-tiger into Coleman’s story, Ho Tzu Nyen transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the Coleman of the 19th Century morphs into today’s corporations exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this essay film. Ghosts and spirits can often move easily across lines drawn by man, and by transfiguring the agent of colonialism (Coleman), the tiger collapses the gap it attempts to create between man and nature. Neha Choksi (b. 1973 in New Jersey, lives and works in Mumbai and Los Angeles) Every Kind of Sun, 2017-2018 Installation activated with daily live performance involving 10 children and 10 adults Interaction from 1-2pm on February 2, 6:30-7:30pm daily Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Project 88 Neha Choksi’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Her latest salutation to the sun, Every Kind of Sun (2017-2018) debuts as a Solo Project, bringing to life her emotional piece of short fiction, which starts: Now and then…I have a repeating dream of me as a child coming home from school and sitting down to draw. And I draw suns. I use every crayon in the box. I draw every type of sun…A rainbow sun, a hollow sun, a scared sun, a new sun, a neat sun, a dirty sun, a magic sun, a spinning sun, a poem sun, a danger sun, a boss sun, an open sun, a tired sun, a breathing sun, a clapping sun, a mirror sun, a funny sun, a sour sun. Choksi invites ten Bangladeshi children to embody these dreams, drawing suns daily in the exhibition space, considering the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They consider the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities (such as a rock, the wind, or even a lizard). They also imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Venturing deeper into the fictive dream that inspires this work, the mother worries about the obsessive nature of her child’s drawings, and consults an ayurvedic doctor to interpret the meaning of these stacks of suns. Choksi invites a different adult professional each day to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature draws us back to our primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as we morph from atoms into beings and back. Omer Wasim (b. 1988 in Karachi lives and works in Karachi ) & Saira Sheikh (b. 1975 in Karachi, d. 2017 in Karachi) The Impossibility of Loving a Stone 2017 Drawings on paper Courtesy of the artists This work situates the makers amidst the changing peripheries of the ocean. Once porous, continuous, the coastline—carved over millions of years by the love of water for land and stone—is ravaged, pushed out, to make room for concrete. The mother—sea and adjoining land—and/or bearer is continuously mined for animate and inanimate beings. Hence, The Impossibility of Loving a Stone is indeed, or signals, the impossibility of loving the land, water, and other beings, hinting at colonial and neocolonial modes of knowledge construction and production, value, consumption, and bio-power. The desire to decipher, to fully understand, to grapple with the physicality of the stone is also informed by the need to get closer to the father—a geologist, a displaced body. His didactic words directed at deconstructing the physicality of the stone, allow the makers to traverse through boundaries, both permeable and impermeable, and make them visible on paper. And in this manifestation, with the original text next to its Bangla translation, the work comes full circle. A little part of the father returns home, albeit only as words and lines on paper for a short while. The father in this work is also a biographical reference, as Wasim’s father is a geologist and was born in Bangladesh. He lived there until November 1971—and has not been able to go back since. Ursula Biemann (b. 1955, Zurich; lives and works in Zurich) Deep Weather, 2013 Video Essay Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather (2013), mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans- the deltaic regions of Bangladesh that have soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. The attempt to conjure oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to massive displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the very insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them and naturally environmental catastrophes on one side of the earth impact the other.

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