The Samdani Art Award, Bangladesh's premier art award, has created an internationally recognised platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi Artists to an audience of international arts professionals. Since it was founded in 2012, the Samdani Art Award has steadily developed into an internationally recognised platform, highlighting the most innovative work being produced by young Bangladeshi artists. Created to honour one talented emerging Bangladeshi artist, the award does not issue the winner with a monetary prize, and instead funds them to undertake an all-expenses paid, six-week residency at the Delfina Foundation in London: a career-defining moment for the artist to further their professional development. The award’s latest winner, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, travelled to London earlier this year in July to undertake his residency. Providing him with the time and space to revisit old ideas, and explore new, while expanding his networks. I caught up with Chowdhury while he was in residence to discuss his ongoing practice and how winning the award has impacted his career to date. Samdani Art Award 2020 INTERVIEW: MIZANUR RAHMAN CHOWDHURY Emma Sumner: You initially studied printmaking, how did your practice evolve to become what it is today? Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury: It is very interesting for me to talk about this shift. When I studied printmaking at Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. I tried to embrace the fact that many of the printing processes I learnt were all steeped in tradition, but no matter what I tried, I never felt that the process fitted with what I wanted to achieve and communicate within my practice. While I was studying, I tried to experiment with mixing and matching various print making techniques and introducing found photography into my lithograph prints, although it was prohibited in our academy at that time, so in parallel to my studies, I continued my own experimental art practice. ES: So, printmaking did not allow you to communicate what you wanted to get across to your audience? Did this change at all after you graduated and had more freedom with the way you were able to work? MRC: Even after graduating I was never really convinced that printmaking would give me the tools to communicate what I wanted through my practice. The sensibility of printmaking was a way to develop my ideas, but the outcome always became something else, like a form of assemblage, or an installation. During my study, I became interested in the moving image—especially the genres of psychedelic and experimental film—and wanted to explore them in my practice. Later, after graduation, I also began to experiment with performance, photography, collage, object sculpture and video installation. These multiple approaches helped steer my practice into the direction it has taken today. ES: Do you still make prints now? MRC: I love woodcarving, and I did begin working in this way during my graduation but my lifestyle doesn’t allow me to practice like this anymore. Its partly for this reason, and the limitations of the media itself, which have moved my practice in a very different directioN. ES: Your practice today is interdisciplinary and embraces installation and many other media. How do you decide what media you want to work with? Do you keep objects of interest to you in stock that you feel you might use later, or you source everything after you have devised an idea for a project? MRC: My work has always been sensitive to the time and space in which I create it so my processes are never fixed and I allow my intuition to guide me when developing new works. I usually find an object which forms the basis of an idea which I then begin to ‘open-up’ through my working processes to explore its core subject in greater depth I only ever select objects that appeal to me, a process which is very subjective as the same object might not appeal to others in the same way it does to me, making the process very much about my connection to the objects I work with. ES: Where do you go to source your materials? Is there anywhere particular where you feel more inspired? MRC: I find my materials in all sorts of places but generally I never go looking for things as I tend to just come across things as I go about my daily tasks, making most of the objects I source ephemeral. For one of my more recent projects I collected a lot of boxes over the period of Ramadan. The boxes contained oranges which had been imported from Egypt, but I was drawn in by the striking logo on the front of the box. Ramadan was the only time that the boxes had been in stock in my local market. As I was already familiar with the store owners, I took the time to talk to them and gained a lot of information about how the boxes had come from Egypt to Bangladesh, making me question the ideas of globalisation and international trade and how these matters might affect the everyday person. This formed the foundation for a new work which I am still developing the work in my studio now. ES: So the conversations that you have with other people as you develop your ideas are also a key part of your working process? MRC: In my project The Soul Who Fails to Fly into the Space (2017), which I exhibited during the Dhaka Art Summit, the chairs on which the television was placed were rented from a local company in Dhaka. The man who owned the company was very open and welcoming towards me, and he was very excited to be playing a small part in my project. But when he showed the chairs to me, every chair had a very shiny sticker of his company logo placed prominently in the centre of the back rest, which wasn’t part of how I’d originally envisaged the work. I thought about it all night but slowly realised that I couldn’t remove the logos, as the interactions between us had helped us to build a relationship of respect, a love that had an impact on my decision making and led to me keeping the logos as they were and allowing in the unexpected. In the end, the logo fitted magically on that installation. All the interactions and discussions that I have with the people I meet during my working process are very important to me and often influence my work in positive ways. The curator, Simon Castets also played an important role while installing the works as we discussed at length about how my work could respond to the space to create a more meditative and playful exhibit. ES: Since arriving in London for your residency at the Delfina Foundation have you started work on any new projects? or is there anything that you are working on now? MRC: I lived in London previously back in 2014 when my wife was undertaking her MA. During that time, I was struck by how many road signs there were and I began taking photos of the streets. I had began working on a project called Land, and now I am back in London for this residency, I have had a chance to restart and develop the ideas I was working on further. While I have been here, I visited the National History Museum and I saw that they had analysed Bangladesh by looking at the structure of our land, particularly our rivers, and the types of our soil. What interested me most about this display, was seeing how Bangladesh is divided by a tectonic plate that goes through the centre of the country which means that my native land could, at some point in the future, be shifted by nature dispelling the concept of land that we conventionally perceive through mapping. Overall, I am more interested in the land inside us, our spirituality and how this connects us to the cosmos and defines who we are and which land we ultimately belong to. SAF: After you have finished your residency at Delfina Foundation and return to Dhaka, what’s next for you? Do you have any upcoming exhibitions or are you planning to work on any new projects? MRC: It’s a big question, currently I’m a little overwhelmed by the spotlight of winning the Samdani Art Award and having many curators and fellow artists wanting to meet me, but it has been a great opportunity to develop my network which I know will be helpful in moving forward with my career. I am very thankful to Samdani Art Foundation and Delfina Foundation for establishing such a valuable platform for young artist in Bangladeshi artists. While I have been here, I’ve had the time and space to open up new critical perspectives on my practice and developed my approach to research and new projects. After developing them further in Dhaka, I am hopeful to show them in exhibitions soon.

ALL PROJECTS Footnotes For The Future Hosted by Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury As part of Samdani Art Foundation's continued support to work for the country's contemporary artists and architects during the pandemic, we have taken several initiatives, including virtual art programmes like 'Art Around the Table' and 'Footnotes for the Future'. Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury hosted the regular session 'Footnotes for the Future' that takes place at 10 pm on every Thursday. It is a part of the initiative 'Art Around the Table'. Through our social media channels, we brought together various artists, curators and writers to organise various art projects, workshops and discussion meetings. 'Footnotes for the Future' covered topics such as the artists' own work, the role of artists in social and political contexts, their collective works, and future plans. Through zoom, SAF invited various Bengali-speaking artists, gallerists, writers and researchers to join the art sessions and discuss different topics. Creators from around the global joined hands to battle Covid-19 in Bangladesh. They generously donated their honorariums to feed and support the ones in need, through a partnership with the JAAGO Foundation. There were 29 sessions in 7 months.

Rising from the red tinted alluvial soil of Sylhet, Northeast Bangladesh, Srihatta is the future home of the Samdani Art Foundation, rooted in the plurality found in Bangladesh’s history to conjure a more inclusive future through art, architecture, and culture. A unique combination of sculpture park, exhibition, residency, and education programme, Srihatta imagines what an experimental artist-centric institution can be in the 21st Century, beyond of western-centric paradigms. Srihatta Rising from the red-tinted alluvial soil of Sylhet , Northeast Bangladesh, Srihatta is the future home of the Samdani Art Foundation, rooted in the plurality found in Bangladesh’s history to conjure a more inclusive future through art, architecture , and culture. A unique combination of sculpture park, exhibition, residency, and education programme , Srihatta imagines what an experimental artist-centric institution can be in the 21st Century, beyond of western-centric paradigms. Founded by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani and led by Artistic Director Diana Campbell, this art centre and sculpture park will also feature works from their collection and will be free and open to the public in 2025. A lush and green rural tea district approximately 250km (or a 45 minute flight) from the capital city of Dhaka, and Sylhet International Airport has direct flights from London, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi. There are nearly 800,000 people living in Sylhet, and Sylhetis form a significant part of the Bangladeshi diaspora in the United Kingdom, United States, and Middle East. Founders Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani are both from Sylhet and Srihatta is part of their long-term dream to share their love of art and this region with artists and the public. The roughly 40-minute drive to Srihatta from the airport is a journey through the agriculture landscapes of Sylhet through villages built around winding rivers and tea plantations built on hilly mounds punctuating an otherwise flat landscape. The many paddy fields make the landscape appear like a massive waterbody during the rainy season. Srihatta’s landscaping will be inspired by the wild natural wonders of the lands around the site which include gnarled mangrove swamp forests, turquoise rivers, and multicoloured sand hills and the art gallery will appear to float within a lush grassy paddy field. Reflecting the energy and vibrancy of the Bangladeshi people, Srihatta will be a live, active, changing and dynamic space with an emphasis on process, which differs from traditional ideas of sculpture parks and artists will be at the centre of this project via Srihatta’s international residency programme. Srihatta spans across more than one hundred acres of landscape with views of India’s Assam Hills in the distance. ABOUT SYLHET EXPLORE SECTORS Our Focus Areas Sectors Aga Khan Award winning Bangladeshi architect Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury (URBANA) has envisioned the initial phase of Srihatta as an open plan design that references the vernacular brick architecture of Bangladesh, a practice dating back to 3rd Century BC. The architecture looks to the modernist legacy left by visionary architects such as Muzharul Islam and Louis Kahn, who built some of their best work in Bangladesh, including the Dhaka University Library (1953-1954) and Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban (Parliament House, 1961-1982). Aligned with the ideology of the Samdani Art Foundation, Chowdhury’s architecture is born from the land of Sylhet: the brick-dyed concrete found in Srihatta’s built environment is derived from the colour of the soil on site. Architecture 01 A 10,000-square-foot residency space houses eleven brick-dyed, cast-concrete apartments, with windows facing Srihatta’s landscape. Created as a meditative space to inspire creativity and mesmerize the senses, these apartments have 11-foot ceilings – each with a different species of local scented tree to grow inside. The apartments, dining, recreation, and reading spaces are visually linked by plazas and walkways made of local green-tinged grey Kota stone. Blending the residency space with the surrounding landscape and sculpture park, the complex will exhibit works from the Foundation’s collection on a rotating basis. The first phase of the residency will begin with the Samdani Art Award short-listed artists from 2020 and 2023 as our first invited artists in residence. In addition to residencies with local and international artists, Srihatta will also host writing and curatorial residencies as part of a wider initiative of training a new generation of arts professionals in Bangladesh. The Residency program will be organized by SAF, with additional collaborations with international foundations and cultural councils, and independent from the Samdani’s collecting activities. Residency Spaces 02 Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury has also designed the first of several future gallery spaces at Srihatta. An undulating brick façade welcomes visitors into a 5,000 square-foot gallery with 14-foot ceilings anchored by an immersive installation of video, sound, and expanded cinema works from the Samdani collection by Cardiff and Miller, Olafur Eliasson, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Anthony McCall, and Lucy Raven which challenge boundaries between mediums. These expanded cinema works are also imagined as a teaching tool for artists in Bangladesh, where video/new media is not part of the art school curriculum. Future galleries will be built to allow for rotating temporary exhibitions produced by the Samdani Art Foundation. Galleries 03 Envisioned as a dynamic art centre, Srihatta embraces inclusivity with a welcoming design, an accessible public programme, and outdoor public works which engage the local community in their conception and production. More than just a private art museum, Srihatta aspires to cultivate a new community of art lovers in Bangladesh and the surrounding region. As with all Samdani Art Foundation activities, entry to Srihatta will be free, in an attempt to make art widely accessible to diverse audiences. Srihatta’s programming complements – but remains autonomous from the Dhaka Art Summit ( www.dhakaartsummit.org ). Led by Samdani Art Foundation’s Founding Artistic Director Diana Campbell, Srihatta encourages engagement with Bangladesh’s rural context. The organization will invest its roots locally – and broaden them internationally – by inviting artists, curators, architects, and writers from around the world to participate in its exhibitions, residencies, interventions in the landscape, and to engage in creative workshops with the local community. Srihatta is inspired by the ethos of Rabindranath Tagore, who created Shantiniketan in a village in West Bengal in 1901 – where the whole world could meet in a single nest. Artistic Programme URBANA’s plan for the landscape design embraces the natural phenomena that surround the site: winding rivers, a swamp forest, golden hills made of sand, and flaming natural-gas-fields with views of India’s Assam Hills and Sylhet’s tea gardens in the distance. Site-sensitive commissions by artists from Bangladesh and around the world will further transform the landscape. The first phase of architectural elements of Srihatta takes up less than a half-acre of the 100-acre property, with the majority of the grounds comprising a sculpture park. We don’t imagine a sculpture park as a space hosting static sculptures to be maintained in a landscape. Our expanded vision of a sculpture park invites artistic experiments with the weather as well as the human and non-human forms of life that inhabit our site and collaborate with the vision of artists. Over the past 9 years, Srihatta has been welcoming artists to develop long-term projects for the site, asking that each engage with the site and surrounding community. Once open, Srihatta will include a mix of permanent works, temporary works, and works on long-term loan, in an attempt to make Srihatta a living, evolving entity that changes regularly and welcomes repeat visits. All of the works in the sculpture park will be produced in Bangladesh, as part of the Foundation’s desire to engage the local community with craftsmanship and production, fostering collaboration as a tool for greater understanding. Sculpture Park While Srihatta officially opens in 2025, the first work for the Park, ‘Rokeya’, was completed in February 2017 after two years of development – and speaks to the socially engaged practices that the institution plans to regularly host. As part of the annual Samdani Seminars programme, Polish artist Paweł Althamer – along with members of his community (neighbours) from Bródno, Poland – engaged patients of Protisruti (the Promise) drug rehabilitation centre in Sylhet and the local community in an eight-day-long creative and collaborative Sculptural Congress workshop. This first project at Srihatta was realized in partnership with Bródno Sculpture Park, which Pawel Althamer inaugurated in 2009 with the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw. Bridging understanding across social and cultural divides, they created the communal work of art, ‘Rokeya’, which the village children named after the nineteenth century pioneer of female education in Bangladesh, Begum Rokeya. The resulting sculpture was a reclining woman constructed of locally woven palm fronds over a bamboo frame. She wears a colourful fabric costume stitched from local textiles by nearby village women, who also helped to drape the fabric. ‘Rokeya’ also contains a kiln inside, for village children to use in ceramic workshops. Srihatta continued its collaboration with Bródno Sculpture Park into 2019 with Polish artist Monika Sosnowska who created a monumental concrete river that becomes a walking path through the landscape. Here tributaries meander through and disappear into unexpected places, allowing for contemplation of one’s surroundings. The piece ties back to the natural terrain of Bangladesh, which has over 700 rivers (and is officially the country with the most rivers within its borders). Indian artist Asim Waqif is working on a monumental living sculpture titled ‘Bamsera Bamsi’ (meaning Bamboo flute in Bangla). The sculpture is envisioned as a living bamboo forest, consisting of several bamboo species researched and planted as part of a long-term collaboration with the Bangladesh Forest Research Institute, Chittagong. As it grows, Waqif is sculpting the forest into a sculptural wind instrument reminiscent of a flute, which will emit sound when the wind blows through it. ‘Bamsera Bamsi’ will take nearly twenty years to complete. The initial size of the work is 140 x 100 ft and will expand as the project develops. The interwoven Animist, Hindu, Buddhist, Sufi mystic, and Islamic histories that inform Sylhet’s plurality and distinct language remain powerfully visible in Bengali folk culture. Srihatta’s name is an homage to the multiple layers of history that have shaped this rich landscape; it is the ancient Indo-Aryan term for Sylhet. In this area once there was abundance of rocks know as shila. The hat (bazaar) sat on top of these rocks. The name of Sylhet was derived from the words ‘Shila’ and ‘Hat’ as Shila-Hat - to form Shilhatta. The last Hindu King Raja Gour Govinda kept large stones for protection at the entrance of his capital Shilhatta, whose name was transformed over time into Srihatta – with sri meaning, beauty, charm and wealth. The early 14th century brought the beginnings of Islamic culture and rule to Sylhet via the Middle Eastern Sufi mystic Hazrat Shahjalal and his 313 companions. On his arrival to the capital, Hazrat Shahjalal commanded the rocks to move away by uttering the term ‘Shill Hot’ (move away, stones), and local legend has it that the rocks moved to usher in a new era and the name Silhet came into existence. During the British colonial rule over the region, the word Sylhet was introduced to make ‘Silhet’ sound distinct from ‘Silchar’ (a town in Assam). Sylhet was a strategic location for the British during the colonial era because of its proximity to Burma and China. ABOUT THE NAME SRIHATTA

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

The Samdani Art Award, Bangladesh's premier art award, has created an internationally recognised platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi Artists to an audience of international arts professionals. Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury b. 1981, Noakhali WINNER Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury’s (b. 1981, Noakhali) interdisciplinary practice plays with everyday objects to create interactions, which sit between installation and assemblage. By creating unfamiliar situations for everyday objects, Chowdhury creates new interpretations of familiar objects while opening new experimental territories with open-ended possibilities. He received a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking at the University of Dhaka (2011). His work has been shown in group exhibitions throughout Bangladesh. DAS 2018 Commission : The Soul Who Fails to Fly into the Space (2017) Humans are the ultimate expression of freedom. Connected with the cosmos, with nature, and the higher forces through spirituality, the human body is a reflection of all such associations. The soul-body-mind desires to become immortal, to go beyond the vacuum of death, flying into the cosmos time and again, but failing to meet eternity. The shiny golden fountain is like a reservoir - the essence of life where the eternal sound of this cosmos reverberates. Samdani Art Award 2018 INTERVIEW SELECTION COMMITTEE Sheela Gowda (artist, based in Bangalore, India) Runa Islam (artist, based in London) Subodh Gupta (artist, based in New Delhi, India) Mona Hatoum (artist, based in London) Chaired by Aaron Cezar (Director, Delfina Foundation) IN PARTNERSHIP WITH New North and South Network Liverpool Biennial Delfina Foundation For the 2018 edition of the Samdani Art Award, each of the eleven shortlisted artists exhibited newly commissioned work in an exhibition at the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) from February 2-10, 2018, guest curated by Simon Castets, Director of the Swiss Institute, New York. During the summit, the jury selected Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury as the recipient of the 2018 award. Announced during the DAS 2018 Opening Celebratory Dinner on the 2 February by Tate Director, Dr. Maria Balshaw, Rahman Chowdhury will receive a six-week residency with the Delfina Foundation in London. In association with the Liverpool Biennial, each of the shortlist artists have also received curatorial mentoring support from the New North and South network. SAMDANI ART AWARD 2018 SHORTLIST Shikh Sabbir Alam Discern the shape, form, within space (2016), acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy: the artist. Shikh Sabbir Alam (b. 1982, Kushtia) embraces the practice of freehand drawing to plot out his thoughts, which evolve into a more permanent process, predominantly painting. Alam embraces each part of the process to express his understanding of a subject; each dot, line, shape or colour helps him to map out an idea. His work portrays the process of our sensory system, creating a map to describe the elements and their position within the process. Alam received a Master of Fine Arts from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway (2016). Rakib Ahmed Untitled (2016), new photograph taken on old set acquired from photography studio that closed. Image courtesy: the artist. Rakib Ahmed (b. 1988, Netrakona) is a photographer and director whose work has been published broadly. His project “Faces of the City” documents the lost black and white photography studios – those that used darkrooms – of Bangladesh’s past. Ahmed received a Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Patshala – South Asian Media Academy (2010). Palash Bhattacharjee Marked (2017), microphone set, photographs, hammer etc., on display at "Ephemeral Perennial" at the Daily Star-Bengal Arts Precinct, Dhaka. Image courtesy: the artist. Palash Bhattacharjee (b. 1983, Chittagong) bridges performance, installation, and video within his practice. His works present aesthetic experimentations derived from personal experience, set in relation to human sensitivities and emotion. These are conscious and unconscious expressions of his everyday behaviours, excitements, and obsessions within the context of a society where narratives of a human’s existential reality seems to lose meaning in the face of larger political, social concerns. His work and performances have been included in numerous group exhibitions throughout Bangladesh as well as South Korea, Argentina, and the United States. Bhattacharjee received a Master in Fine Arts from the University of Chittagong (2006). Opper Zaman Insulate (2016), casting plaster, found objects, nails, rope and projected film. Image courtesy: the artist. Opper Zaman (b. 1995, Dhaka) examines the daily scenarios and codes everyday people participate in to survive within society, addressing factors such as social standing as well as race and culture, in an attempt to understand what others experience. Using a wide variety of media, Zaman creates spaces in which his audience can be emerged, and engage with, his concepts on how other people, living very different lives to his own, experience life. Zaman is currently working towards a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Hertfordshire. Marzia Farhana Text Sculpture (2017), mixed-media installation including book shelf, books, wires, paper plates etc. Image courtesy: the artist. Marzia Farhana (b. 1985, Dhaka) constructs precarious multimedia installations informed by Joseph Beuys’ anthropological understanding of art. Her practice is time- and space-based and ongoing, open to interpretation. Art for Farhana is an act of resistance, an act to resist the horror of the present wild condition of the world. She received her Masters of Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2014) and bachelor of Fine Art in Graphic Design from the University of Dhaka (2009). Her work has been exhibited in multiple group shows in Bangladesh. She has attended residencies at the Khoj International Art Association Residency in Goa, India (2017) and the 16th International Festival in Iran (2010). Debasish Shom Untitled, from the artist’ ongoing project, In the Rivers Dark. Image courtesy: the artist. Debasish Shom (b. 1979, Bagerhat) was raised in rural Bangladesh and is part of the country’s Hindu minority. Shom’s work is a very personal form of self-expression motivated by his socio-political background and the psychological tension in the subjects he tackles. Working in the medium of photography, Shom uses alternative image-making and printing techniques, choosing the way he captures light through his lens based on the feelings he wants to communicate. He is currently a lecturer of Photographic Technique at Pathshala – South Asian Media Institute. His work has been published in CANVAS, The Daily Star, and Lens Culture among others. Asfika Rahman Untitled (2016), hand painted photograph from the artists Suspected project. Image courtesy: the artist. Asfika Rahman (b. 1988, Dhaka) is currently studying photography at the University of Applied Science and Arts in Germany, and received a professional degree in Documentary and Photojournalism from Pathshala – South Asian Media Institute (2016). Her practice sits between art and documentary, drawing inspiration from 19th century prints, which she recontextualises with new media. Photography has become the predominant medium and vehicle for expressing her views on complex systemic social issues. Aprita Singh Lopa Freedom in Femininity (2017), performance. Image courtesy: the artist. Aprita Singh Lopa (b. 1986, Kishoreganj) holds a Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from the University of Dhaka. Her work examines the relationship between the natural landscape and the creatures that reside within it. Lopa searches for ways to maintain and develop the worlds green spaces, while communicating the importance nature plays in everyday life through the mediums of ceramics and performance. She has been included in numerous group exhibitions within Bangladesh. Ahmed Rasel Untitled (2016), from the series Memories of Water in Tafalia, Dhaka. Image courtesy: the artist. Ahmed Rasel (b.1988, Barishal) is a faculty member of the Dhaka-based photography institute, Counter Foto. He earned a Masters in Bengali Literature from the University of Dhaka (2013) with the ambition of becoming a poet, before realising that photography could better blend his poetic feelings with his inner vision, memory, and personal history. Rasel is a visual storyteller. He presents the world as a continuation of the great human story, intertwined with his personal experiences, believing that every story forms part of our overall world history and that every human being is a historical element. His work has been published in Trouw, Private Magazine, F-stop magazine, and The Daily Independent, among others, and exhibited in photo festivals in Bangladesh and India. 2023 2020 2018 2016 2014 2012 Award Archive

ALL PROJECTS Rehearsing The Witness: The Bhawal Court Case, A Talk By Zuleikha Chaudhari Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, 21 April 2017 The Bhawal court case was an extended pre-independence Indian court case that revolved around the identity of a sanyasi (or Hindu religious ascetic), claiming to be the second Kumar of Bhawal (the heir of one of the last large zamindari estates in Dhaka), who was presumed dead a decade earlier. The claim was contested by the British Court of Wards and by the widow of Ramendra Narayan Roy (the second Kumar of Bhawal) Bibhabati Devi. The case was in trial from 1930 – 1946. Over the course of sixteen years, the physical attributes, birthmarks, portraits and testimony were collated as forensic evidence to establish the claimant/sanyasi’s identity as being the Kumar. Hundreds of witnesses, including doctors, photographers, artists, prostitutes, peasants, revenue collectors, tenants, holy men, magistrates, handwriting experts, relatives and passers-‐by were deposed. The case went from the District Court in Dhaka to the High Court of Calcutta to the Privy Council in London, finally ending in 1946 with a victory for the plaintiff, who died a few days after the verdict. Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case uses this trial about a possible impostor to re-examine the enormous archive that the case produced, through performance as a means of problematising the notions of evidence, archive and identity. Both the domains of the law and theatre/acting frame larger questions that pertain to the production of truth and reality, assumptions of stable, consistent and believable identities and the construction of a credible narrative. The project explores the questions of law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. The talk at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute described the three-day performance at the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 which drew a relationship between re-enactment, (crime-scene) reconstruction and retrial; the complex tension between forensic evidence, the act of speculation/imagination and truth-finding and truth-making. . Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer. Her current research uses archival documents (texts and photographs) to develop theatrical performances as a way of thinking about the relationship between production of memory and the role of the archive and how this pertains to the retrieval and reliving of an event. The constructed narratives within the works looked at the relationship between personal lived experience and memories and larger historical events and narratives. These works use a combination of reportage, portraiture, documentary and fiction - the editing, re-interpretation and re-positioning of speculative ideas, opinions, beliefs and anecdotes towards the production of new narratives is central to these investigations about the relationship between history and theatre. Her ongoing research considers the structures and codes of performance as well the function and processes of the actor as reality and truth production. It investigates the tension between looking or watching and doing or acting. Her current projects include three court trials – The Bhawal Court Case (1930-46), The Trial of Bahadurshah Zafar (1858) and the India National Army Trials (1945-46) within the framework of law as performance; the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. Her works have been shown at performance festivals, galleries and exhibitions in United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Vienna, South Africa, South Korea, China, Japan, The Netherlands, Pakistan and India.

Partners The Samdani Art Foundation is proud to have partnered with the following organisations and institutions on its various initiatives.

ALL PROJECTS Purposeful Goods Curated by Teresa Albor Social enterprises are businesses with a social or environmental purpose that prioritize transformative social impact-- entrepreneurship with a mission to change society. Socially engaged practice can involve social enterprise and a social enterprise can be considered process-based, socially engaged art. Bangladesh has played a revolutionary role in social enterprise. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, new ways of working collectively emerged including more socially viable and sustainable business strategies and organizational forms. Two internationally known examples are BRAC, the largest collaborative network of social business in the world, and the Grameen Bank, which paved the way for decades of micro credit initiatives. Purposeful Goods featured social enterprises, collectives and not-for-profit groups associated with DAS 2023, their stories and their products, most of which were for sale along with our book sellers (who operate with low/no margins). 100% of all purchases go directly to the groups represented. We are grateful to the Bangladesh Apparel Exchange for their in-kind support. AFIELD The impetus behind creating AFIELD (founded 2014) was the fundamental belief that artists are essential to the fabric of society, as thinkers, visionaries and changemakers. Despite changing the world in profound ways, there is not a support structure or advocacy platform for this kind of work. By providing resources and support, AFIELD supports them to lead transformational change in their communities and society as a whole. AFIELD was initially conceived as a fellowship for social initiatives for arts and culture. It is now a transnational network of practitioners from the creative, literary, scientific, academic and legal fields from 28 different countries . Every year, AFIELD provides resources to artists in the form of discussions, mutual aid, incubation and community building, to help members deepen and strengthen their work in their particular contexts. As a nonprofit organization AFIELD receives grants and donations from individuals and international foundations, starting with a pluri-annual grant of a private foundation and now expanding, thanks to a group of engaged collectors and philanthropists who support the program on an annual basis. AFIELD wouldn’t exist without the volunteer work of many members and advisors involved at different levels of the project. Resources are used to give fellowships to artists-led initiatives, to increase the visibility of their projects, to create educational programs in the form of events and workshops (online and irl). Every challenge is greeted as an invitation to align practices within AFIELD with their ethics: they are currently exploring horizontality in the decision making in their network, specifically regarding distribution of funds and programming, trying to find the right balance between consensus and efficiency, to advance projects and represent the voices of their communities. Finding a shared language to communicate and fostering cross-cultural understanding is critical to their work, as members are located all over the world. Out of practicality, AFIELD defaults to English as the lingua franca. This perpetuates the hegemony of the English language in arts practice. For this reason, it’s a necessity to develop common language groups, so people within the AFIELD network can meet and organize in ways relevant to their cultural and language contexts. AFIELD would also like to explore more opportunities for in-person gatherings. There’s a consistent schedule of online meetings (called “Kitchen Calls”) for their network, one-on-one calls, study opportunities, and regular contact by email. After meeting some of their members for the first time at documenta fifteen in 2022, they became aware more physical presence with their community was needed. Their biggest challenge is securing funding and ensuring accessibility for members of the network. Afield.org Artpro Artpro (founded 2016) is a group of artists who want to explore various forms of making art to engage a diverse public. Aware of the impact art can have for social good, one of Artpro’s first initiatives was to mobilize artists to help marginalized segments of Dhaka’s society through workshops and art projects hosted within their local communities. Keen to expand the impact of their work outside of Dhaka, in mid-2017, the group began conducting Weekend Art Works, a series of daylong public art projects which takes a group of selected contemporary artists to work within a rural village community outside of Dhaka for one day. The group continues to organize public knowledge-sharing workshops; these have included ceramics, image manipulation, performance art, and video art. The group also organizes festivals. Each year since 2017 they’ve hosted the Artpro Winter Performance Festival (AWPF) and, starting in 2019, the Artpro International Video Art Festival. Artpro does not focus on selling products made by communities, instead, they showcase the work when there is an opportunity to do so. This gives the people who have made the work a bit of cash and validation. In most cases Artpro splits the proceeds with the maker, using their share to cover their own costs for materials and running workshops. Sales are modest, what is more important to Artpro is the process. artpro.com.bd FRIENDSHIP FRIENDSHIP (founded 2002) began working with vulnerable communities in the most hard-to-reach, climate impacted areas (chars – riverine islands) of northern Bangladesh providing healthcare services via a floating hospital. It soon became clear that to make a lasting impact on people’s lives a holistic approach was needed to address other issues including education, human rights, and poverty. Among other initiatives, handicraft training as a response to the lack of economic opportunities soon followed. Establishing prefabricated training centers locally, women are taught traditional handloom weaving techniques, dyeing - using natural ingredients, and hand embroidery. Because the chars where they live are highly vulnerable to sudden and forceful flooding as well as erosion the centers can be moved in two days, reconstructed, and up and running in a new location in a month. Although the primary goal was and is to provide skills through which women develop their own social identities, enabling them to stand for their rights, it soon became clear the beautiful eco-friendly products made by the communities had real market potential. Following some small corporate orders, FRIENDSHIP moved beyond simply providing training, and established a brand, FRIENDSHIP Colours of the Chars. Women are paid by the piece, giving them total flexibility; FRIENDSHIP sets the retail price, using any profits to provide further services. There are many challenges and costs, the training and production centers are remote, making it difficult to get raw materials in and finished products out. But unlike a commercial enterprise, a social enterprise does not aim to maximize profits… more important are its social goals. In 2019, FRIENDSHIP opened its first retail outlet in Dhaka. Today there are two in Dhaka and a shop in Luxembourg, run under separate management, partly staffed by volunteers. 350 women work on a regular basis and over 1700 have been trained. There are eight rural production centers, and in Dhaka, a separate management team including specialists in sales and marketing, production, design, accounts and so on. Annual fashion shows draw large crowds. Having their own ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets provides a steady revenue flow and steady work for producers, which means they maintain their manual dexterity. FRIENDSHIP is committed to ethical practice and fair trade, fair wages, and creating healthy and women-friendly working environments, ethical sourcing of raw material, and overall responsible product offerings. friendship.ngo JAAGO Foundation JAGGO Foundation (founded 2007) is committed to eliminating poverty and social inequality through providing free, quality education to underprivileged children. Influenced by the new development paradigm, which puts people before things, JAAGO Foundation follows a participatory approach in every sphere of its work. For example, volunteer and youth groups are established to empower young people and others living in the communities where they work. Besides education, JAAGO also runs climate change, governance and women’s projects. Starting with 17 students and a chalkboard; today 4500 children are in education and 50,000 youth leaders operate in 64 districts of Bangladesh. JAAGO’s innovative Digital Schooling Program, brings quality education to remote areas and others with access challenges. Its alternative learning opportunities project reflects the special needs of children and adolescents. JAAGO also provides nutrition, hygiene and health programs for their students, families and the wider community. The products on sale as part of Purposeful Goods were made specifically for the Dhaka Art Summit by JAAGO students. Taking every possible opportunity to empower the children and young people they work with, JAAGO also worked with curator Sean Anderson as contributors to ‘To Enter the Sky’, another DAS 2023 show. jaago.com.bd Jothashilpa Jothashilpa (founded 2016) is a center for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language. The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society which emerges from everyday art. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. The concept of social enterprise is central to their vision. It was not easy at first. The team had no business experience and without any investment planning they spent over a million taka in six months and had no products or sales. They had the mistaken idea that if they could somehow work with artisans to produce products someone would buy them. They now say that having a marketing strategy is critically important along with the reality of understanding operational basics. Working with and supporting over five hundred artists, artisans, and craftspeople from across Bangladesh, the group makes sure their collaborators are paid fairly and acknowledged for their work. They maintain a showroom and small shop where work made by collaborating artists can be purchased, as well as an online shop. They believe that every artist produces something that is a product, and can be sold, whether it’s an expensive painting or a notebook. They believe that we are all just doing our work as producers and they have no problem leaning into the reality of the capitalist world if it means continuing traditions. Jothashilpa wants to be a bridge between the contemporary and traditional, urban and rural, grassroots and elite and the processes of creating and selling. They believe one can be an artist and an entrepreneur. jothashilpa.com Re/DRESS Re/DRESS (founded 2021) is a response to the fact that less than 1% of the world’s textile waste is recycled into new clothing. It’s an environmental non-profit disguised as a responsible fashion brand. It has three goals: to promote cotton recycling in Bangladesh, to make sure textiles made from a high percentage of recycled fibers are readily available at factories for buyers, and to promote responsible fashion to the Bangladeshi consumer. The first task was to work with factories to develop lightweight textiles made of 100% recycled fiber. This led to developing a clothing collection made from these textiles. The clothes are retailed in both Dhaka and London and all profits support responsible fashion. In collaboration with Reverse Resources the project tracks and makes information available about cotton recycling in Bangladesh. Since the project started there’s been considerable investment in this industry, and Bangladesh is poised to become a global hub for cotton recycling. Along the way, Re/DRESS has faced many challenges: how to make a robust new textile from recycled fiber, working within the limited availability of very busy research/development departments of factories and having an all-volunteer staff. In addition, Re/DRESS’s commitment to making technical successes (i.e., the ‘formula’ for new responsible textiles) freely accessible goes against the competitive nature of the textile/garment industry. This is further complicated since, on the other hand, Re/DRESS needs to protect its designs and brand to have impact. Re/DRESS has been able to take advantage of opportunities, especially the access to and the generosity and willingness of factories who participate in the project. redress-recycle.com Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre and Artolution In the world’s biggest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, a cultural renaissance is in swing. Fighting back against the brutal violence and attempted cultural genocide inflicted on their people, who were forced to flee their homes in Myanmar, this renaissance is led by Rohingya artists, storytellers, musicians and artisans who create healing, hope and community, reviving tradition through art. The Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) and Artolution are at the movement’s forefront. A project of the International Organization of Migration (IOM), the RCMC is a community center, artist workshop, and safe space for cultural expression. Located in the heart of the Kutupalong-Balukhali megacamp, it is home to a collection of cultural artifacts made by Rohingya artists and craftspeople, including embroidered tapestries, model boats and houses, farming and fishing tools, recordings of folk songs, folk tales and proverbs, themed gardens, and more... Telling their stories in their own words and making these objects promotes positive cultural identity, challenges stereotypes, and reconnects Rohingya men, women and children to their ancestral language, land and traditions. A natural next step would be for the center to evolve into a social enterprise project, connecting skilled artisans to livelihood and market opportunities making them less dependent on humanitarian aid. However, despite initial hopes that refugee-made products could be sold on a small scale, this is now on hold: the Government of Bangladesh has not approved social enterprise projects for the Rohingya, and IOM policies prohibit staff from engaging in ‘business transactions’. Moving forward will require policy shifts at governmental and organizational levels. Also on display are works by Rohingya artists who have participated in community-based art programmes run in the camps by Artolution, a global organization that, in partnership with UNHCR, strengthens communities experiencing crisis through collaborative art-making. Although not a social enterprise, the RCMC team wanted to share the platform of Purposeful Goods with these artists, a good example of working collaboratively vs. competitively, a feature of social enterprise initiatives. More work by Rohingya artisans is on display in two other shows here at DAS 2023: ‘ Very Small Feelings’ and ‘ To Enter the Sky’. Rohingyaculturalmemorycentre.iom.int artolution.org Stools and mats This is the newest project participating in Purposeful Goods … so new, in fact, it is yet to have a name. This is the first time these products are available for purchase, and in part, their existence is the result of ‘To Enter the Sky’, another DAS 2023 show, which, amongst other considerations, looks at how architecture navigates notions of community. Architect Rizvi Hassan, whose practice explores the role of design professionals in unconventional fields, responded to the provocation of curator Sean Anderson, by seeking out artisans whilst in the field with the Institute of Architects on a flood response project in Sylhet and in Chittagong for a private client. He was intrigued by the process, planning and vision of the women who weave mats– from harvesting the inputs, to planning the design through to execution. He is currently working with less than ten artisans. The intention is to continue to explore how this work can be framed as an art form. Watch this space! TransEnd TransEnd (founded 2019) aims to support the marginalized and underrepresented hijra, non-binary, gender queer, transgender and intersex community in Bangladesh. Besides their focus on social and economic empowerment through skills development, they aim to sensitize society, providing visibility with the ultimate goal of achieving broader acceptance of these communities. TransEnd did not initially consider setting up a social enterprise. However, with economic empowerment as a goal it seemed an obvious option; secondly, as a small group with a young leader it was easier to set up a social-enterprise than register as a foundation or society. To date they’ve provided life skills such as cycling, basic computer, English Language, communication, leadership, and digital literacy skills. They’ve helped people find work as paid models, and with Pathao, FoodPanda, ChalDal, and Hyundai. Their public awareness campaigns are innovative using comic strips and animation. It is TransEnd's handicrafts project that is at the center of their social enterprise work. Making things and preferring more open-ended livelihood schemes (vs. having 9-5 jobs) appeals to many in these communities. In 2020, the first 40 tie-dyed T-shirts which were produced were featured on instagram and Facebook and sold out in five days. Profits went to a person who wanted to start poultry farming. The group immediately produced 200 more T shirts, only to discover that scaling up was challenging– sales, for some reason, slowed down. Most of TransEnd’s products are upcycled, eco-friendly and sustainable: macrame bags, beaded jewelry, tote bags, tie-dye, scented candles, and handmade soap and are featured on TransEnd’s social media and e-commerce platform. Customers can pay cash on delivery or through Bkash. They also showcase work at different craft fairs– but stall fees are going up and TransEnd is determined to pay fair prices to their makers. Without an office, and no regular core funding, everything operates on a temporal basis. One of the things TransEnd has learned is the value of a unique selling point. In their case it is their transparency about how they use their profits to uplift the communities they work with. Transendbd.org

ALL PROJECTS When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away (2025) A collaborative film project developed at Srihatta, exploring Bangladesh’s six seasons through a poetic collaboration between Driant Zeneli and young Bangladeshi artists. Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, came to life with the ideation and production of When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away (2025), a new film by Italy-based Albanian artist Driant Zeneli, created in collaboration with Md. Tasnimul Izaz Bhuiyan, Pulak K. Sarkar, Rafi Nur Hamid, Sondip Roy, and Sumaiya Sultana, with a special contribution by Mahmudul Hasan Dipu. The film was co-commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation and Museo Castromediano, Lecce. As part of this project, Driant conducted an intensive Master Class at Srihatta, exploring storytelling and the aesthetic influences of Baroque theatre while encouraging participating artists to draw on local cultural elements such as the proverbs of Khona, the legendary Bengali astrologer and poet, and the iconic Parliament Building by Louis I. Kahn. This collaborative process brought together a group of emerging artists whose contributions were central to shaping the film’s distinctive and visionary expression. The work draws inspiration from the “July Revolution, 2024,” during which more than a thousand people lost their lives in a series of protests that led to significant political change and the downfall of the autocratic regime in Bangladesh. Developed at Srihatta: The Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, this cross-cultural project reimagines the four seasons of Baroque music through Bangladesh’s six seasons. The project is supported by the Samdani Art Foundation (Bangladesh), EMΣT – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (Greece), the Art House of Adrian Paci and Melisa Paci in Shkodër (Albania), the Civic Museum of Castelbuono (Italy), and the Museo Castromediano with the Region of Puglia’s Department of Tourism, Culture, Economy and Territory Valuation (Italy). The film’s first screening took place at CineFIX, hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens, on September 4, 2025. The second screening was held on October 15, 2025, in Lecce, Italy, at the Church of San Francesco della Scarpa, accompanied by an exhibition on the film hosted by Museo Castromediano. The third screening was held in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at the Goethe-Institut on October 29, 2025. Screening at CineFIX, hosted by the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Photo: Melitini Nikolaidi. Screening in Dhaka at the Goethe-Institut. Photo credit: Ahadul Karim Khan. Upcoming Screening Kochi, India: The film will be screened at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in a purpose-built temporary pavilion in February 2026.

Partners The Samdani Art Foundation is proud to have partnered with the following organisations and institutions on its various initiatives.

Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh Connect with Bangladesh's Cultural Narratives Go PRESS NEWSLETTER Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh Founded in 2011 by collector couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) believes that the planet has much to learn from Bangladesh and South Asia and it supports research for curators to ground their thinking with experience thinking and working in the region. Its international collaborations (which know no geographic borders) seek to expand creative horizons and collapse outdated frameworks for considering art and culture within the limited frameworks of North American and Eurocentrism. All of SAF’s education and exhibition programs are free and ticketless, and the foundation supports the production of new thinking through residencies, exhibition opportunities, and other programs that it produces with its partners. The foundation has developed and continues to produce the Dhaka Art Summit, the world’s highest daily visited contemporary art event that is now entering its seventh edition. DAS is part of the foundation’s ongoing work of expanding The audience engaging with contemporary art across Bangladesh and increasing international exposure for artistic practices that do not lie within the "art capitals of the world” or which have not yet been written into the limited canon of art history. OUR STORY PARTNERS TEAM ALL PROJECTS SAF produces and participates in a variety of projects in Bangladesh and around the world as part of its ongoing commitment to increasing cultural engagement in Bangladesh and broadening the creative horizons of the country’s artists and architects. Initiatives SAF participates in a variety of projects, outside of the Foundation's regular programming, as part of a commitment to increasing world-wide engagement with the work of Bangladeshi and South Asian contemporary artists and architects. SAF assists and supports Bangladeshi artists in participating in art exhibitions and festivals around the world, and follows the international tours of projects it has produced as they grow and develop in the world. SAF AROUND THE WORLD VIEW The Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum is an initiative committed to supporting the work of Bangladesh’s independently established and self-funded art collectives and initiatives. Launched in 2017, this program will be revitalized in 2025 in partnership with Srihatta. ARTIST-LED INITIATIVES VIEW SAF participates in a variety of projects, outside of the Foundation's regular programming, as part of a commitment to increasing world-wide engagement with the work of Bangladeshi and South Asian contemporary artists and architects. The Foundation assists in funding travel grants that enable artists to attend residencies or undertake research abroad and supports international institutions and festivals to include South Asian artists within their exhibitions and programmes. COLLABORATIONS VIEW 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. SEMINARS VIEW Most SAF publications are available for free download on our website. SAF partners with institutions who publish books related to ongoing collaborations in Bangladesh, which can be ordered online. PUBLICATIONS VIEW The Art Mediation Program plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between art and its audience, enriching the cultural experience for visitors through meaningful engagement and interpretation. Established in 2018, the program began with 25 Art Mediators at the Dhaka Art Summit, and as our February 2023 the program has grown in depth and scope with the collaboration of 123 mediators. These art mediators come from diverse backgrounds, ranging from fine art to political studies, mechanical engineering, journalism, etc, all sharing a common enthusiasm for art. ART MEDIATION PROGRAMME VIEW Recent Projects PREVIOUS ALL NEXT VIEW 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: Phase One VIEW Crafting Togetherness is a collaborative programme initiated and led by Samdani Art Foundation, developed at Srihatta, Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. The programme brings together local artisans and architecture students through workshops and knowledge exchanges focused on sustainable, vernacular building practices. Crafting Togetherness VIEW Submission closed তন্দ্রা /TONDRA OPEN CALL FOR LOGO DESIGN VIEW A collaborative film project developed at Srihatta, exploring Bangladesh’s six seasons through a poetic collaboration between Driant Zeneli and young Bangladeshi artists. When Winds in Monsoon Play, the White Peacock Will Sweep Away (2025) VIEW The Six Seasons of the White Peacock VIEW Srihatta Love- Power- Fall , Master Class Load More @samdaniartfoundation @dhakaartsummit Load More About Upcoming DAS 2023 2020 2018 2016 2014 2012 The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Dhaka Art Summit INITIATIVES EXPLORE DAS 2023 aimed to listen to the lands and waters of Bangladesh and its people to tell stories and imagine futures where people regard what the planet and non-human bits of intelligence have to say, as opposed to the clock or the calendar. DAS 2023 was about the power of water and the double paradox of how floods and their impact may be (mis)understood. Bonna was also concerned with the power of translation– how do Bangladeshi understandings of life challenge those who might have only understood the flood and its manifestations as a mistranslation and those now experiencing similar climatic challenges? Bonna DAS EXPLORE Inspired by the geological reading of the word ‘summit’ as the top of a mountain, Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 (DAS 2020) considers the various ruptures that have realigned and continue to shift the face of our spinning planet. Seismic movements do not adhere to statist or nationalist frameworks. They join and split apart tectonics of multiple scales and layers; their epicentres don’t privilege historical imperial centres over the so-called peripheries; they can slowly accumulate or violently erupt in an instant. Seismic Movements DAS EXPLORE The fourth edition of the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) took place from 2 to 10 February 2018, featuring both an Opening Celebration Weekend (February 2–4) and a closing Scholars’ Weekend (February 8–10), and several tiers of new programming. Produced and primarily funded by the Samdani Art Foundation, DAS 2018 was held in a public-private partnership with the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the country’s National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts, with support from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Ministry of Information of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, the National Tourism Board, the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA), and in association with the Bangladesh National Museum. 2018 DAS EXPLORE The third edition of Dhaka Art Summit welcomed 138,000 visitors in four days, of which 800 were international visitors, and 2,500 students from 30+ schools. Those participating included over 300 emerging and established artists, 100 speakers who attended as part of the Talks Programme, as well as internationally renowned curators and writers. The Summit attracted visitors from over 70 international institutions, who attended to extend and further their research into the region. 2016 DAS EXPLORE The 2nd edition of the Dhaka Art Summit unfolded from February 7 to 9, 2014 at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Marking a strategic shift, the Summit decided to concentrate its focus on South Asia starting from this edition. DAS 2014 showcased a diverse array of programs, including five curatorial exhibitions by both international and Bangladeshi curators, along with 14 solo art projects curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, the Artistic Director of the Samdani Foundation. These projects celebrated artists from across South Asia. The summit encompassed a citywide public art initiative, performances, the screening of experimental films, speaker panels, and the active participation of 15 Bangladeshi and 17 South Asia-focused galleries. 2014 DAS EXPLORE The 1st edition of the Summit was held in collaboration with Shilpakala Academy and Bangladesh National Museum and showcased the works of 249 artists and 19 galleries. The 1st edition of the Summit focused only on the local artists and galleries. The Summit was visited by over 40,000 visitors The Summit also organised talks. 2012 DAS EXPLORE Our curators and art mediators have been dreaming up the 7th edition of DAS - TONDRA. In TONDRA we will float between dreams and reality. 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. Upcoming DAS DAS EXPLORE No events at the moment Notices 74 The Samdani Art Foundation collaborates with artists and creatives globally, fostering a diverse and inclusive artistic community. Countries 6 The 6th edition of the Dhaka Art Summit was held in February 2023 Dhaka Art Summits 248 Projects 1919 Participants Rising from the red tinted alluvial soil of Sylhet , Northeast Bangladesh, Srihatta is the future home of the Samdani Art Foundation, rooted in the plurality found in Bangladesh’s history to conjure a more inclusive future through art, architecture , and culture. A unique combination of sculpture park, exhibition, residency, and education programme , Srihatta imagines what an experimental artist-centric institution can be in the 21st Century, beyond of western-centric paradigms. Founded by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani and led by Artistic Director Diana Campbell, this art centre and sculpture park will also feature works from their collection and will be free and open to the public in 2025. INITIATIVES EXPLORE

ALL PROJECTS On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention Co-Curated by Diana Campbell with Sean Anderson and Nurur Khan and Assistant Curator Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury Observing the interplay and occasional confrontation inherent amongarchitectural spaces within an emergent nation-state, seventeen artists/collaboratives respond to the built and unbuilt legacy of the groundbreaking Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam (1923–2012). Active in politics because of his own conviction that ‘it was the most architectural thing he could do’, Islam humbly and uncompromisingly forged an architectural movement in what was East Pakistan as part of a broader claim toward decolonial consciousness in the 1950s leading to the country’s independence in 1971. His buildings and ideas influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects working today and subsequently international figures. Working across photography, painting, sculpture, performance, sound, and film, the artists in the exhibition present work that at once negotiates and builds worlds that are borne from the local environmental and cultural climate of Bangladesh. For Islam as well as these artists, architecture and art are conceived as benefiting all who make up the lands of any nation, no matter their origin, without the boundaries of class or caste. On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention Co-Curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt with Sean Anderson and Nurur Khan and Assistant Curator Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury If the inception of the monument connoted manifestations of power, how do histories of collective agency, that which builds and/or questions the monumental, begin to be made visible? Architecture, in its capacity to embody the simultaneous recording of historical narratives in addition to marking action across time and space, extends how bodies modify, represent and experience the environment. Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam, born a generation prior to the partitioning of the Indian sub-continent and at work during the 1952 Language Movement and the 1971 Liberation War, was alarmed to witness attempts to transform the territory of his birth from a communal ecology grounded in culture to an alienated society in which interdependence was reduced. He deployed architecture and the assembly of physical and institutional structures as a fortress against myopic singular views of Nationhood and citizenship. While Islam believed in the strength of a Bengali identity, he also recognised how modernism as an ideology and tool could be deployed to extend the country’s influence beyond the region. Bangladesh, according to Muzharul Islam, should be conceived as modern from the beginning. In a striking departure from his predecessors, Islam’s prolific works throughout the country ensured that the pursuit of a Bangladesh-born architecture was as much concerned with signifying the multiple worlds in which the individual and society functioned while also locating oneself, a calculation of value built from within and not externally construed. Islam harnessed the diachronic histories of the built environment in Bangladesh as a means to reject proscriptive views of Bengal rooted in vernaculars. He instead refocussed how his collaborators, workers, students, and leading architects of his time including Louis I. Kahn and Stanley Tigerman could witness a Bengal of 2,000 years ago that was building large scale cities and monuments in brick as a means imagine the future of a country that did not yet exist. Muzharul Islam’s practice and ideology influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects whose work has been increasingly visible internationally over the last five years. However, until recently, there has been little critical scholarly research in English about this architect who tirelessly and uncompromisingly fought to construct a new social order in cooperation with communities and partners of the land. Muzharul Islam’s conception of modernity in Bangladesh was conceived as an extension of its lands while also ensuring a way of life that was accessible to and responsive of an international community of architects, designers and artists. The production of a modern architecture in Bangladesh and more broadly, in South and Southeast Asia, expressed the potential of space with a materiality that was fluid in meaning and nature. While the introduction of concrete and cement in the region at the beginning of the 20th century promised the rise of new industrial techniques and forms, the use of brick in Bangladesh allowed for a return to the ground, to the unobstructed lands occupied for millennia by many different peoples. How brick might be conceived within modernist paradigms that privileged the multiple industries related to concrete, was crucial for an emergent nation attempting to assert its own visual and spatial identity. With an almost ontological connectivity to building, to histories in and out of time, brick remains an essential component that transcends multiple scales and contexts. Muzharul Islam’s brick architecture invests in tectonics that reconfigured how surfaces might be understood both as symbol and method. One may regard Islam’s drawings and buildings as a structuring of structures. For the architect, and the artists presented in this exhibition, contrasting (im-)materialities allow for the mutability of meaning even among precise configurations of settings. One may be able to observe how Muzharul Islam, as both an architect and an activist, revealed how communities and cultures could serve as agents in the imagining of new institutions. The conceit of the exhibition’s title reveals a paradox found within the reception of modern architecture in Bangladesh. On one hand, surfaces are both agents of and metaphors for what contains us. Buildings can be surfaces. And surfaces may embody how buildings are designed and built. Informing our visual and haptic faculties, surface is also that which collapses the negotiable nature of built space. Surfaces are a productive in-between, neither here nor there. In architecture, we are at once enmeshed among assemblies of surfaces that may have been ‘designed’ or ‘chosen’ while they are also subject to entropy, to the passage of time. By extension, the collaborative efforts for much of how Muzharul Islam’s projects transpired also allows for a questioning of labour; he built with and for the people of Bangladesh, refusing to inscribe himself as the ‘genius creator.’ Intention, likewise, is tied to internal and external processes that may broaden one’s understanding of affect. The invisible may subsequently become an index of strategies for making. Found at the horizon of the known, or perhaps at the threshold of building as object and form, intention remains ever-present, pointing a way forward, a movement toward a fragile yet more complete notion of self-knowledge. By surfacing intention, we are attempting to suggest how Muzharul Islam revealed subjectivities among his built and unbuilt projects. Consequently, the prompt for each of the artists allowed for expansive readings that are rooted in Bangladesh but also relevant to other local contexts such as Manila, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, among others. Each of the artists brought together for this exhibition use process, materiality and form to disassemble the boundaries that have long defined self and other. Conventional dialectics embedded within notions of gender and context are also questioned. In our discussions with each of the artists, how surface in all of its manifestations came to inform their own conception of Islam’s architecture was apparent. Surface was imagined as a modern agent for thinking through and responding to alternative spatial paradigms. Yet, we remained steadfast that such diverse perspectives resonate with how and why the (modern) architecture of Bangladesh might be reconceived through projection, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing and painting. What are the residues of intention? By circulating through this exhibition one participates in a journey that reveals elements of Muzharul Islam’s ideology that cannot be read by looking at an architectural plan or model. Fingerprints carry the material traces of a day’s activities and are unintended marks of our presence in a space. One of the first works visitors encounter when entering the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is an immersive installation on the winding central staircase of the venue choreographically built up by Rana Begum. Fingerprints of Bangladeshi collaborators of DAS come together to form a pattern of collectivity, a monument to democracy, speaking to what the hands of the people can achieve together, while maintaining the individuality of each person through the unique markings and spirals making up each fingerprint. If you look closely, similar traces of individual makers can be found on the terracotta screens and bricks of Muzharul Islam’s art school, Charukala, now formally known as the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (designed 1953–55). Similarly, works by Ayesha Sultana, Maria Taniguchi, and Prabhavathi Meppayil measure the markings of making that build up and transform over time through processes of accumulation, oxidation, and entropy. As we pass Begum’s installation and enter Gallery One, we become enveloped in another spiralling environment of iron rebar growing from what appears to be two stairs ripped out of the central staircase of Muzharul Islam’s School of Fine Art. The climb up and down this staircase in addition to the hidden (and often forgotten) emotions from those daily journeys are part of what makes up the art history of Bangladesh, inspiring Monika Sosnowska to reimagine this element of Muzharul Islam’s architecture in a seemingly displaced sculptural form. Hajra Waheed’s video The Spiral (2019) draws us into another reading of the spiral, taking this catalytic geometry as a starting point to reflect on processes of upheaval in human experience. The video is a meditation on undefeated despair and the possibilities for radical hope that Islam fostered in his practice as Bangladesh fought for its independence. The spiral staircase in Muzharul Islam’s Charulaka winds around a column, a pivotal support structure bearing silent witness to the generations of movement around it. Tanya Goel has wrapped the pillars of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy’s South Plaza with Bangla resistance poems that Muzharul Islam and his peers engaged with at the dawn of Bangladesh’s existence. These texts and their florid Bangla forms painted in textured brick dust unfold as visitors circulate around these co-dependent structures which float free from obstructing walls for the first time in DAS’s exhibition history. Muzharul Islam designed his buildings with the hope that they would provide culturally grounded upward mobility for all the people passing through them in their own pursuits of knowledge. Movement is key to the works by Aditya Novali, Shezad Dawood, and Dayanita Singh in this exhibition. Novali created rotatable paintings inspired by the situated modernism of Muzharul Islam and his Indonesian contemporary, Y. B. Mangunwijaya. These paintings change form throughout the course of the show, speaking to how influence moves and shapes architecture across space and time outside of nationalist frameworks. Drawing on the futuristic geometry of Muzharul Islam’s drawings, Dawood’s adaptable ‘stage set’ functions somewhere between architecture and tapestry. For a number of years, Dawood has been developing a notion of ‘paintings without painting’, that are created through the collaging and sewing of different textile elements, some incorporating Bengali kantha techniques. These works, inspired by Islam’s plans for the University of Chittagong (1968–71), function as hangings and room dividers which envelop visitors and connect to a video that documents a dance performance realized in collaboration with choreographer Adrienne Hart, composer Patten, costume designer Priya Ahluwalia and Dawood. Dayanita Singh’s ‘Museum of Shedding’ takes the elitist form of the museum off its metaphorical pedestal and puts it in the hands of the people, where they too can become the curators, adjusting the sequence and display of the individual images within it. Institutions are dynamic mechanisms for the making of society. Like Islam and his emphasis on change from within, Dayanita’s Museums are open structures, frameworks for the making and reception of multiple meanings and audiences. While movement was crucial to Muzharul Islam, so was standing still, a necessary state of being to learn from nature and its transformations across time. The open plan of most of Muzharul Islam’s university and educational buildings speaks to how he wanted students and others alike not only to learn about art and culture within the classroom, but also from the activities teeming beyond the windows and across the roofs, verandahs, and ponds hosting other components of student life. The National Library in Dhaka has one artwork inside, a monumental mural of a jungle, and Lucas Arruda’s exquisite jungle paintings speak to a kind of knowledge that cannot be taught from books. They are embodied and yet distant; seductive yet menacing. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film, shot in Chaukala, looks at the spiritual interplay between humans and nonhumans and the kind of interconnected ecology that Muzharul Islam tried to foster in his work in Dhaka in the 1950s, which has ongoing lessons for other parts of the world today. The Otolith Group’s film O Horizon grounds the spirit of Dhaka’s art school in its predecessor Santiniketan in West Bengal, speaking to the wisdom its founders and architects tried to glean from its surrounding structures and forests. While the works described thus far draw inspiration from Muzharul Islam’s built spaces, many of these spaces no longer carry the architect’s intentions due to bureaucracy, degradation or ideas of modernisation that implemented elements such as air conditioners and false ceilings, obscuring the quiet majesty of his spaces. The invention of blueprints, aspects of which are used today in contemporary architectural practice, carry the scores of intentions, of what was meant to come but might never appear or what may have ceased to be. Muzharul Islam and Stanley Tigerman spent nearly ten years developing five polytechnic institutes across the country, including detailed studies into different microclimates of Bangladesh, which were never realized beyond visionary drawings and blue-prints from 1965–71. Marlon de Azambuja awakens Dhaka’s multiplicity of densities at all scales in an installation inspired by the ‘bones and organs of the city’, shifting how we consider, deploy, and imagine the clamps, bricks and tools that both Muzharul Islam and architects today imagine and construct the urban environments that contain us. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh’s cyanotype prints of Muzharul Islam’s poorly preserved Central Library at Dhaka University employ conventional architectural representational methods, such as the plan and elevation, and function between the precise formalism of a blueprint and the intuitive nature of drawing. Haroon Mirza’s animated scores of light and sound derived from Muzharul Islam’s drawings and blue-prints for Chittagong University bring to life an architectural vision for sites that would train Bangladeshis (the East Pakistanis) to develop their own destiny (even if ironically many of these projects were funded by the World Bank). Sometimes it is not possible to think or operate in a free and radical way with radical transparency, and it is necessary to remain invisible, emerging when the time is right. William Forsythe’s work, A Volume within which it is not Possible for Certain Classes of Action to Arise (2015) locates the need to find new ways of navigating spaces that constrict freedom, akin to the kinds of social spaces that Muzharul Islam tried to create within his lifetime. If previous (Western) modernist paradigms for truth-seeking were in part coalesced in and around solutions, to finality, then this exhibition attempts to reverse course, to allow for an opening, even if brief, to the possibilities afforded by architectures that may not yet be visible. These are architectures of becoming. For this exhibition, inasmuch as for the architecture of Muzharul Islam, surfacing is thus an active method for articulating simultaneities in a society’s arising, an awareness of emergent parallel historicities among movements near and far, a reshaping of value’s precarity, of collaborations borne from collectivity, each of which threatens to disturb the surface. The authors wish to thank and cite the dedicated research of the exhibition’s curatorial advisor Nurur Khan. Many of the ideas in this essay and exhibition stem from long conversations with Khan and relate to his upcoming PHD thesis. Muzharul Islam b. 1923, Murshidabad, British India; d. 2012, Dhaka Muzharul Islam was an architect, urban planner, and educator and is considered to be one of the pioneers of South Asian architecture. He sought to develop a language of architectural modernism in South Asia that responded directly to the local social, cultural, and climatic conditions, while also establishing the groundwork for the development of architectural education in the region. Islam’s architectural projects include the Faculty of Fine Arts, Dhaka University (1953–1955), the Central Public Library (1953–1954), the NIPA Building (1963–65) and the Rangamati Township (1964), Jahangirnagar University (1968–71), Chittagong University (1971), the National Library and the National Archives (1980–84). His works remain as outstanding instances of situated modernism, as well as sensitive and visionary architectural masterworks of architecture that address history, society, people, economy, city, and, foremost, the building and aspiration of a nation. Aditya Novali b. 1978, Surakarta; lives and works in Surakarta Y/M/B/U/M/Z/A/H/N/A/G/R/U/U/N/L/W/I/I/S/J/L/A/A/Y/M/A #1 ,#2,#3,#4,#5,#6,#7,#8,#9,#10,#11,#12,#13,#14 (rotatable painting series), 2019–2020 Oil paint and ink on modular rotatable triangular zinc bars covered with canvas, wood and zinc frame Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Roh Projects. Realised with additional support from Roh Projects Aditya Novali finds inspiration in the ways that Muzharul Islam (1923–2012) and the Indonesian architect Y. B. Mangunwijaya (1929–99) created spaces that provided a better quality of life for the people building the new nations of Bangladesh and his native Indonesia. For both, the ambition of architecture was in part to create transcendent opportunities for mobility across class barriers with a humanist approach. Islam and Mangunwijaya demonstrated how architecture could cross the borders of the political, social, economic, and religious realms to invent solutions for living inspired by local wisdom, especially when considering how to live in variable climates. We live in a world where many people relate more to digital information than to the immediate environment around them. In this new body of work, the artist paints rotatable panels inspired by the work of Islam and Mangunwijaya as a means to create hybrid paintings that change across the course of the exhibition, drawing connections across time, space, and cultures through the rooted legacy of these figures to their land and people. Novali makes sculptures and installations using complex methods of production as well as commercial materials. Influenced by his background in architecture, his work addresses themes such as structure, space, and urban planning. Using audience participation, Novali’s works act as investigations of social issues related to space with the help of methodological techniques and orderly systems. Ayesha Sultana b. 1984 in Jessore; lives and works in Sylhet Breath Count Series, 2019–2020 Mark-making on clay-coated paper Courtesy of the artist, Experimenter Kolkata and Samdani Art Foundation Ayesha Sultana’s recent work negotiates space and distance by measuring the space between things- such as the breaks between taking breaths- marking the rhythm of the day. She contemplates the relationship between her hand, her body, and the rest of the landscape surrounding her, making visible the motion of rhythm without being seen. Through a body of scratch drawings on clay-coated paper, Breath Count are personal explorations of movement, mark-making and corporeality. Ayesha reveals staccato patterns that represent a delicate inward probe of her own body using count, distance, motion and removal in breath in these works. Like the marble lines in Louis Kahn’s parliament building, which mark the labour of a day’s work casting concrete, Sultana’s marks measure the labour of internal bodily systems. Sultana works with drawing, painting, object, and sound, through processes that translate notions of space. She employs drawing as a tool of inquiry, through cutting, folding, stitching, layering, recording, and tracing applied to her series characterised by repetition, variation, and rhythm. Sultana often draws inspiration from architecture and the natural environment. Daniel Steegmann Mangrané b. 1977, Barcelona; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro Fog Dog, 2019–2020 Film and ceramic installation Commissioned for DAS 2020 and produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Esther Schipper. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Esther Schipper. Presented with additional support from Mendes Wood DM Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film brings us into a community of human and inhuman inhabitants of Charukala, the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka (designed by Muzharul Islam from 1953–55). Mixing fiction and contemplation, this work explores the past and future spectres that haunt present-day Bangladesh from the viewpoint of the stray dogs who live in and among its shared spaces. While life revolves around the art school for the protagonists in this film, the horrors of climactic and political violence elsewhere in the world appear and speak to the interconnectedness of seemingly disparate contexts. Employing sculpture, installation, film, holograms, and drawing, Steegmann invites the viewer to critically reflect on how the divide between culture and nature is perceived while exploring their constructed interstices. Echoing his interest in biological systems, specifically Brazilian rainforests, Steegmann’s works often introduce elements from nature into exhibition spaces. Dayanita Singh What, when and where is a museum? For Dayanita Singh, the museum rests within, occasionally outside of the conventional market and aesthetic discourses that have come to instigate their articulation throughout history. One finds congruence with the institutional building projects of Muzharul Islam who actively sought to democratise spaces. For her Museum of Shedding, Singh has selected a collection of images that, with one box, suggests an origin or window into a visual and spatial language that does not seek answers. Drawn from her extensive photographic body of work, the box forms part of a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Like Muzharul Islam, the spaces that Singh has photographed are imbued with the relations, voices and rituals of their occupation. Viewers share in their unfolding. Each photograph in a Singh museum contributes to the making of unbound mythologies: of a chair, of an individual, of interiors that stand outside of time. Familiar but perhaps also unknown, Singh’s photographs and Islam’s buildings situate us in a continual state of becoming. Dayanita Singh deploys photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to photographic images and their construction. Stemming from Singh’s longstanding interest in the archive, her museums at all scales present photographs as interconnected bodies and spaces that are replete with narrative possibilities. b. 1961, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi Hajra Waheed b. 1980, Calgary; lives and works in Montreal The Spiral, 2019 Video work with narration, 7:10 min Courtesy of the artist. Presented with additional support from the Canada Council for the Arts Conceived and written by Hajra Waheed as a series of working notes for an exhibition, the narration of this film explores a single form – the spiral – as a starting point to reflect on processes of upheaval in human experience. The film acts as a meditation on undefeated despair and the possibilities for radical hope. For Waheed, spirals are reflexive and interdependent, much like Muzharul Islam’s belief in the ability of architecture to bring people together to radically transform society for an equitable future. Waheed’s multidisciplinary practice ranges from interactive installations to collage, video, sound, and sculpture. Among other issues, she explores the nexus between security, surveillance, and the covert networks of power that structure lives, while also addressing the traumas and alienation of displaced subjects affected by legacies of colonial and state violence. Haroon Mirza b. 1977, London; lives and works in London Lectures in Theology, 2019–2020 24-channel electrical signals for Hi-Fi speakers and LEDs, steel, electrical wire, bespoke media device, carpet, wall painting Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Lisson Gallery for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Lisson Gallery. Realised with additional support from Lisson Gallery How does one envision a building while also recognising its inhabitation through time and space? Even with the best of intentions, spaces change over time and often deteriorate if not maintained. This is the case with several buildings designed by Muzharul Islam, such as the Jaipurhat Limestone and Cement Project (which was built as housing for 1,700 workers and is now a girl’s military school) and the five polytechnic universities designed by Islam and Stanley Tigerman throughout Bangladesh. Architectural plans and blueprints are like scores for the future, and Haroon Mirza has composed a new sound and light installation reimagining Islam’s frequencies of thought. For both the artist and the architect, building a society relies on the ways in which education contributes to and informs how equality transcends previously encoded class divides. Mirza’s medium is electricity, which is seen and heard simultaneously. He adopts found objects and audiovisual equipment in his installations and performances. Inviting the viewer to re-evaluate their definitions of noise and music, Mirza’s work is known for its physical impact and its undermining of straightforward narrative by exploring the sociocultural histories of the objects, ideas, and processes he employs. Lucas Arruda b. 1983, Sao Paulo; lives and works in Sao Paulo Series of Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2013–2019 Oil on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM. Presented with additional support from Mendes Wood DM The National Library of Bangladesh (1978–9) reflects the architect Muzharul Islam’s engagement with Louis I. Kahn. Upon entering the lobby, one immediately encounters a monumental mural of a jungle painted. This immersive and magnanimous image, an unusual choice for a library, greets those seeking knowledge while conveying Islam’s belief that learning must be grounded in the demands of climate and place. Jungles rebuild themselves as dynamic and diverse ecosystems, akin to Islam’s ideas about Bangladeshi society, which had to rebuild itself after the Pakistani army brutally massacred the country’s intellectuals in 1971. Lucas Arruda creates images that concern the body’s relationship to light throughout the day and life. Like the mural in Islam’s National Library, Arruda’s jungles coalesce a metaphysical sensation that can’t be described by scouring all the books in the library. They allude to another form of feeling and knowing. Lucas Arruda works with painting, prints, light installation, slide projections, and films. His practice encompasses a wide spectrum of subjects, ranging from the conceptual framework of painting to metaphysical questions. Commonly portraying archetypal landscapes characterised by a subtle and intricate rendition of light, Arruda’s small-scale atmospheric compositions dwell on the viewer’s experiences as opposed to geographical specificity. Maria Taniguchi b. 1981 Dumaguete City; lives and works in Manila Untitled, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Untitled, 2017 5 works, acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin. Realised with additional support from Perrotin Like Muzharul Islam, Maria Taniguchi finds beauty in the marks of the human hand on objects that we associate with industrial production, such as bricks. These traces inform not only the contexts in which they were made but also the people who made them. Taniguchi’s painted architecture calls to mind the transformative and meditative process of brick-laying as well as the subtle changes that can be found across seemingly monotonous surfaces through the movement of light and shadow. Bricks are an apt metaphor for Muzharul Islam’s philosophy that can be read as nationalism expressed through modernity. ‘When I mention standing on one’s own soil’, writes Muzharul Islam, ‘it is to find oneself, but not to find oneself and become stagnant. What I am seeking is to stand on one’s own feet and then to proceed forward. If for that reason I have to take two steps backward to go one step forward, I have no problem with that. I think that there is no other way of moving forward.’ (Islam, Muzharul. An Architect in Bangladesh: Conversations with Muzharul Islam. Edited by Kazi Khaleed. Ashraf. Dhaka: Loka Press, 2014. p.37) Taniguchi works with painting and video in addition to printmaking, pottery, and sculpture. Her work focuses on concepts of composing, constructing, and framing, whilst referring to the craftsmanship and history of the Philippines. The repetitive process of creation employed in much of her work has been likened to the urban structure of Manila. Marlon de Azambuja b. 1978, Porto Alegre; lives and works in Madrid Untitled (from the Brutalismo Series), 2019–2020 Industrial metal clamps, building material sourced in Dhaka Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation and Instituto de Vision. Realised with additional support from Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) Marlon de Azambuja’s sprawling installation captures the density of Dhaka as well as its precarity in the wake of exponential urban growth resulting from climate change-related migration. The work unveils the inner organs of the city – construction materials such as bricks and concrete blocks, industrial clamps and building tools. Like unsung artists, Bangladesh’s construction workers transform these everyday materials into the buildings that make up the cityscapes of emergent massive cities such as Dhaka. Dhaka is the world’s most densely populated city, a fact that Muzharul Islam could never have imagined when he was the senior architect for the government of East Pakistan. ‘Cities should provide the environment for civilised life within the context of our own culture,’ said Islam. ‘The city can develop only as a part of the physical environment of the country – with the ultimate aim of abolishing all differences between the city and the rural areas. The traditional relationship with nature… should be continued in the cities.’ De Azambuja works with drawing, photography, sculpture, installation, and video to create new ways of looking at the structures that surround us. He is invested in the cultural and aesthetic impact of architecture and urban planning as spaces of confrontation between instinct and rationality, and the city as a living, breathing entity. Monika Sosnowska b. 1972, Ryki; lives and works in Warsaw Stairs, 2019–2020 Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation Nearly every Bangladeshi artist exhibiting at DAS 2020 has climbed up and down the spiral staircase at Charukala (the Faculty of Fine Arts) at Dhaka University as part of their artistic journey. Muzharul Islam viewed architecture as a vehicle to a better life, elevating local materials to their highest potential (while avoiding decoration). For Islam, the common Bangladeshi woman and man could rise above the circumstances in which they were born via education. Inspired by Islam and his vision, Monika Sosnowska has created a sculpture using similar materials to the staircase at Charukala, but removing its function. This sculpture leads nowhere, and while it pays homage to foundational structures, it also invites the viewer to consider the illusions inherent in built spaces. Sosnowksa uses building elements and materials to create disorientating installations, spaces, and objects that explore the psychological impact of architectural space. She is interested in architecture’s capacity to influence behaviour as well as reflect social structures and ideologies. Flaws, glitches, and deficiencies in her work are used to question aspects commonly attributed to global modernisms. The Otolith Group Founded 2002 by Anjalika Sagar (b. 1968) and Kodwo Eshun (b. 1966), who live and work in London O Horizon, 2018 4K video, colour, 90 min Commissioned by Bauhaus Imaginista and co-produced by the Rubin Museum, with support from Project 88 Screening: 10am, 11.30am, 1pm, 2.30pm, 4pm, 5.30pm O Horizon refers to the surface layer of soil, changed in the area around Santiniketan as the result of Rabindranath Tagore’s introduction of new flora to the planning and development of the campus. The film extends The Otolith Group’s ongoing consideration of the current geological age as one in which human activity spurs the primary changes on climate and the environment. O Horizon reflects upon modernist theories of dance and song developed by Tagore and the experimental practices of mural, sculpture, painting, and drawing developed by India’s great modernist artists affiliated with Santiniketan. O Horizon draws together visual arts, dance, song, music, and recital to assemble a structure of feeling of the Tagorean imagination in the 21st Century. The work also has resonances with Muzharul Islam’s campus of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka, where learning and convening of students unite the indoors and outdoors around circular forms such as the rooftops and ponds. The research-based work of The Otolith Group spans moving image, audio, performance, installation, and curation. These are utilised to explore the temporal anomalies, anthropic inversions, and synthetic alienation of the posthuman, the inhuman, the nonhuman, and the complexity of the ‘environmental conditions of life we all face.’ The Otolith Group also runs a curatorial public platform, The Otolith Collective. Prabhavathi Meppayil b. 1965, Bangalore; lives and works in Bangalore dp/twenty/thirteen, 2019 Copper wire and copper wire embedded in gesso panel dp/twenty/forty eight, 2019 Wood gesso and copper dp/twenty/six, 2019 Thinnam on gesso panel Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Pace. Presented with additional support from Pace Time is rarely subtle. Yet among Prabhavathi Meppayil’s works, one’s gaze is enmeshed in a rare confluence of multiple structures, temporalities and forms that reconfigure our notion of space in and of time. At once archaeological in process and expansive in reading, Meppayil’s multimedia paintings confound for their immediacy and immeasurability. These newly commissioned works observe how Muzharul Islam’s reliance on both social and empirical structures informed the making and occupation of space. For Meppayil, her work shares in a similar layering of ideas; of an intuitive composition of sublime architectures that may be affected by forces such as entropy while at the same time, resistant to present-day desires for immediateness and easy reproduction. In this oscillation between additive and subtractive connotations, of surfaces marked and degraded, Meppayil’s works encourage the generative act of looking closely and seeing beyond. Prabhavathi Meppayil’s practice rests in her meticulous approach to conceiving and executing processes specific to the materials that she uses. Coming from a family of goldsmiths, Meppayil adopts artisan techniques as a means to relocate particular materials as a generator of forms, providing a parallel reading to the way in which western art histories were received in the twentieth century. Through the use of non-traditional tools and often copper wire, she carves, erases and highlights carefully conceived lines and patterns into layers of gesso to underscore the blurring of painting, drawing, and other disciplines while establishing meditative installations. Rana Begum b. 1977, Sylhet; lives and works in London No. 972 Wall Painting, 2019–2020 Ink and fingerprints on wall Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary. Realised with additional support from Jhaveri Contemporary Many buildings designed by Muzharul Islam carry the marks of their makers. The architect reminded Russian-born American architect Louis I. Kahn that Bangladesh’s most skilled construction workers possessed a refined knowledge of building yet were illiterate, prompting Kahn to consider other ways of translating his vision for building in Bangladesh. In a similar spirit, writer Kazi Nasrul Islam invokes a benediction of indigenous forms of feeling and knowing in his poem Ink on My Face, Ink on my Hands. Inspired by her memories of growing up in Sylhet, Rana Begum creates an immersive participatory installation in the central staircase of DAS 2020, where the fingerprints of the individuals who come together to build DAS form an abstract portrait of the collective energy of the Summit and city. Begum utilises industrial materials such as stainless steel, aluminium, copper, brass, glass, and wood in her minimalist sculptures and reliefs. Her contemplative works explore shifting interactions between geometry, colour, and light, drawing inspiration from both the chance encounters of city life and the intricate patterns of Islamic art and architecture. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh b. 1975, Karachi; lives and works in New Delhi b. 1976, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi Dhaka Library (set of 9), 2017–18 Cyanotype prints on Arches aquarelle paper Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte. Presented with additional support from Nature Morte First presented at DAS 2018, Dhaka Library is part of a collaborative body of work by Seher Shah and Randhir Singh exploring overlapping ideas in architecture, photography, drawing, and printmaking. Cyanotypes were one of the first photographic printmaking processes developed in the 19th century and a precursor to the blueprint, which was an important reproduction method for architectural and engineering drawings well into the 20th century. Working with this printmaking process, Shah and Singh focused on Muzharul Islam’s Dhaka Library (1953–1954), fragmenting its unique architectural components through photographic images. The artists were drawn to Islam’s work due to its aesthetic qualities, including heavy massing, the sculptural use of concrete, and repetitive structural grids, along with a visionary intent driven by a desire to break from the status quo. Seher Shah’s practice uses experiences from the field of art and architecture to question the rational language of architectural drawing. Randhir Singh is an architectural photographer who draws on his education as an architect to focus on ever-changing meanings found within modern architecture and urbanism in South Asia. Over the past few years, they have collaborated on a number of projects to explore the relationships between drawing, photography, and architecture. Shezad Dawood b. 1974, London; lives and works in London University of NonDualism, 2020 Installation with painted textiles and programmed lighting sequence Musical score by patten Commissioned for DAS 2020, generously supported by the Bagri Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary University of NonDualism, 2019 Super 8 and HD transferred to digital, 3:27 min Commissioned by Frieze LIVE and DAS 2020, generously supported by the Bagri Foundation. Produced by Miranda Sharp and Sara Thorsen Fredborg for Ubik Productions. Costumes by Priya Ahluwalia / Ahluwalia Studio, musical score by patten, choreography by Adrienne Hart / Neon Dance, dancers Pepa Ubera and Devaraj Thimmaiah, production by Laurie Storey, lighting by Pete Carrier, editing by Sergio Vego Borrego, location Queensrollahouse, London Considering how the body and fabric may become architecture, and where architectural space is always a platform for human performativity, Shezad Dawood’s installation draws on the legacy of Muzharul Islam to create an adaptable stage set. His interior functions somewhere between architecture and tapestry. With the layering of sound, Dawood examines the influence of Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore on Muzharul Islam, but also how Tagore informed the later spiritual work of Alice Coltrane. Referencing Islam’s approach to nondualism, the project extends such flows into the space of the exhibition and enacts a series of dynamic collaborations much like the architect who regularly collaborated with artists, poets, and singers. Dawood works across disciplines to deconstruct systems of image, language, site, and narrative. His fascination with architectural modernism in South Asia recurs in several projects, interweaving these histories with those of the Non-Aligned Movement and the Cold War. His practice often involves collaboration, imagining a remapping across geographic borders and communities. Tanya Goel b. 1985, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi Tracing Modernity in Dust, 2019–20 Brick-dust paint Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Nature Morte. Realised with additional support from Nature Morte and Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation The brick is perhaps the oldest and most ubiquitous building material. Tanya Goel was inspired by the detailed texture found in the brick patterns of buildings by Muzharul Islam. In designing the Faculty of Fine Arts, for example, Islam introduced a subtle geometric pattern on the face of each handmade brick, integrating a modern architectural language with the vernaculars of regional building. The artist traced details of Islam’s ageing buildings in brick dust, protecting them for the next generation through the process of drawing. She juxtaposes these zoomed in details within their wider (material) context by framing them within her photographs of Islam’s Faculty of Fine Arts, National Library, and male dormitory at Jahangirnagar University (as they stand today), paired with paintings she made on fragments of debris collected from these sites. Goel is invested in the afterlife of construction, creating pigments from charcoal, aluminium, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite, and foils, all of which are sourced from building sites. Exploring abstraction within her painting practice, Goel works with the concepts of density and complexity inherent to the synthetic repetition of mathematical formulas, balancing unforeseen orders and potential chaos. William Forsythe b. 1949, New York A Volume Within Which it is Not Possible for Certain Classes of Action to Arise, 2015 Scaffolding structure, drywall Courtesy of the artist. The development and international exhibition of Choreographic Objects by William Forsythe is made possible with the generous support of Susanne Klatten ‘Choreography is about organising bodies in space, or you’re organising bodies with other bodies or a body with other bodies in an environment that is organised.’ William Forsythe Politics ‘was the most architectural thing to do.’ Muzharul Islam Both Muzharul Islam and William Forsythe extrapolate the tenets of their respective fields, choreography and architecture, into the realm of the political where these ideas have implications in ‘real life.’ This work is a metaphor for time, for political structures, for any physical or metaphorical barrier that might not allow for certain actions to arise. When Muzharul Islam was building the Faculty of Fine Arts and the National Library, such barriers could have been seen as colonial domination by West Pakistan. What are these barriers today? And how do they persist? This work offers the visitor the possibility of consciously and physically experiencing the loss of a broad degree of freedom, which is incorporated into our daily existence. In a world that is continuously creating impediments to movement, we must invent new strategies of transiting through them. Forsythe is known for his radical innovations in choreography and dance. His deep interest in the fundamental principles of organisation has led him to produce a wide range of projects. Parallel to his career as a choreographer, he creates installations, film works, and interactive sculptures, known as ‘Choreographic Objects.’