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

Privacy Policy The Samdani Art Foundation processes the following personal information: Name Address Telephone number Email address Personal information is kept in the following forms: Computer database Online newsletter software Staff within the organisation who will process personal information are: Administration and communications staff Type of information processed In line with international data protection principles the Samdani Art Foundation will ensure that personal data will: Be obtained fairly and lawfully Be obtained for a specific and lawful purpose Be accurate and kept up to date Not be held longer than necessary Be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects Be subject to appropriate security measures The Personal Data Guardianship Code suggests five key principles of good data governance on which best practice is based. The Samdani Art Foundation will seek to abide by this code in relation to all the personal data it processes, Accountability: those handling personal data follow international data principles to safeguard personal data Visibility: Data subjects should have access to the information about themselves that the Samdani Art Foundation holds. This includes the right to have incorrect personal data corrected and to know who has had access to this data. Consent: The collection and use of personal data must be fair and lawful. Personal data should only be used for the purposes agreed by the data subject. If personal data is to be shared with a third party or used for another purpose, the data subject’s consent should be explicitly obtained. Access: Everyone should have the right to know the roles and groups of people within an organisation who have access to their personal data and who has used this data. Stewardship: Those collecting personal data have a duty of care to protect this data throughout the data life span. Aims of this Policy The Samdani Art Foundation keeps personal data for its vendors, collaborators, funders, and extended network to carry out its day to day operations, to meet its objectives and to comply with legal obligations. The Samdani Art Foundation is committed to ensuring any personal data will be dealt with in line with international standards. Although the Samdani Art Foundation is a Bangladesh based organisation, its contacts and operations are global. To comply with international laws, personal information will be collected and used fairly, stored safely and not disclosed to any other person unlawfully. All members of Samdani Art Foundation staff handling personal data are fully aware of the requirements in accordance with international data protection procedures and follow the policy outlined in this document which highlights the organisation’s key data protection procedures. Definitions Notification As an organisation based in Bangladesh, the Samdani Art Foundation is not required to record our needs for processing personal data on the public register to any international regulatory bodies. As the Samdani Art Foundation operates on a global platform, we have been careful to understand our obligations, and to ensure our policies adhere to international data protection standards. Responsibilities The Data Controller is responsible for: Understanding and communicating obligations put in place by international regulatory bodies Identifying potential problem areas or risks Producing clear and effective procedures All administration staff who process personal information act in line with this policy and international data protection principles. Training and awareness raising about data protection and how it is followed by the Samdani Art Foundation’s staff will take the following forms: On induction: A copy of this policy will be given to new staff Procedures for collecting personal data will be demonstrated to all new staff General training/ awareness raising: Training will be carried out to ensure new staff are clear about the use of personal data Awareness will be made about the miss-use of personal data and its consequences Passwords will be changed when staff leave the employment of the Samdani Art Foundation Training To meet our responsibilities in line with international standards, all the Samdani Art Foundation’s staff will: Ensure any personal data is collected in a fair and lawful way Ensure it is kept safely The Samdani Art Foundation will ensure that: Everyone managing and handling personal information is trained to do so Any disclosure of personal data will be in line with our procedures Queries about handling personal information will be dealt with swiftly and politely Policy Implementation Gathering and checking information Before personal information is collected, we will consider: The minimum personal details required as part of our relationship with the data subject depending on our relationship with them No personal information in hard copy will be kept after it is required and will be securely destroyed after use We will take the following measures to ensure that personal information kept is accurate: Information supplied is checked and recorded No sensitive information is required by the Samdani Art Foundation except for the purposes of visiting artists, speakers or academics. In these cases, passport details will be taken for the purposes of booking flights, and dietary/medical requirements for assisting the comfort of their visit to Bangladesh. None of the aforementioned personal information will be used apart from the exact purpose for which permission was given. Data Security The Samdani Art Foundation will take steps to ensure that personal data is kept secure at all times against unauthorised or unlawful loss or disclosure. The following measures will be taken: Passwords will be changed regularly Passwords will only be issued to regulated and trained staff Data backups will be stored securely and kept away from main data Subject Access Requests Anyone whose personal information we process has the right to know: What information we hold How to gain access to this information How to keep it up to date What we are doing to comply with international data protection standards They also have the right to prevent processing of their personal data in some circumstances and the right to correct, rectify, block or erase information regarded as wrong. Individuals have a right to access certain personal data being kept about them on computer and certain files. Any person wishing to exercise this right should apply by email to info@samdani.com.bd. The following information will be required before access is granted: Name Email address We may also require proof of identity before access is granted. The following forms of ID will be accepted: Photographic ID, such as a passport We will aim to comply with requests for access to personal information as soon as possible but will ensure it is provided within the 30 days from receiving the written request. Review This policy will be reviewed annually to ensure it remains up to date and compliant with international laws. The Samdani Art Foundation is committed to ensuring any personal data collected will be handled in line with international standards. To comply with international law, personal information will be collected and used fairly, stored safely and not disclosed to any other person unlawfully. To meet our responsibilities in line with international standards, all the Samdani Art Foundation’s staff will ensure any personal data is collected in a fair and lawful way and is kept safely. All our staff managing and handling personal information are trained to do so. Any disclosure of personal data will be in line with our procedures and queries about handling personal information will be dealt with swiftly and politely. Samdani Art Foundation Data Protection Policy Statement

ALL PROJECTS Citizens of Time Curated by Veeranganakumari Solanki The future is yesterday’s tomorrow. The ephemeral elements of time are permanent frames that layer perceptions, and everything that one refers to is in context with a time frame that determines the existence of a moment. Whether it be seconds, minutes, hours, centuries or light years, change is an inherent factor of time; nothing can be preserved forever. There is a desire to hold time, to let time go, to want time to stay or to disappear. ‘Citizens of Time’ are the keepers of these universal borders of time. They explore the variables in time folders while realising the crucial existence of an alternative presence and engagement within their time vaults of space and works. The impermanence of time filters in-and-out of landscapes, glass jars, homes, objects and the mind’s perceptions. The contemporary perception of telling time has been transformed from its history of division through sundials, shadow clocks and light. ‘Citizens of Time’ are divided into four time pockets – the residue of time through natural elements, memory traps from spaces and personal environments, translated time maps of imagination and mindnarratives of distorted time. Each of these edited spans of created moments is layered with elements of the artist’s personal rendition of time. They exist as analogies of experience that differ from created utopias to documentations of timed reality. Stephen Hawking’s book, “A Brief History of Time” renders time from the evolution of the Big Bang Theory into the futuristic possibility of time travel and alternative realities. He further explains Einstein’s theory of time as the fourth dimension of our three-dimensional world. The artists of ‘Citizens of Time’ explore the minute details and texture which make up this fourth dimension. These are elements that build up relationships, societies, cities, countries and eventually the universe. Time goes beyond its metaphysical existence to translate into visual forms of a new aesthetic of time in fantasies, nostalgia and memories. These personal capsules of time plant themselves into a universe of subjective interpretations of history and the future. Time, in the form of natural elements, parallels global warming to an unknown land; and bottled time with notes of precise minutes and thoughts captured, converse with an artist’s rendition of personal notes in timeless frames of landscapes of a mountain and lake. The places and works, similar to the nature of time straddle between timelessness and the precision of moments. Taking time into personal spaces, the second pocket explores the location of the body and frozen time frames. Here one experiences a revision of working processes, frozen time and peeled memories from homes and histories. Time seeps in through wallpapers, refrigerators and windows. A visual distortion of created realties follows to change the tradition of the history of time. The third pocket sees time repeating itself in created environments which are subject to the viewer’s imagination. History layers itself with contemporary happenings and loops into renditions of the artists’ compositions. In the final section, there is a departure from the material into a distortion of the present, through the past in time frames of the mind. Here, the property of time and places are blurred to become the ownership of the mind’s soul and time returns back into the personal universe. These time deposits carry forward into memories as experienced time frames, which pulse into the past, history, experienced present and travelled future. Hemali Bhuta Hemali Bhuta (b. 1978) is an internationally recognised artist whose works are closely related to architectural elements. Her interventions in space research through ephemeral materials, time, into the history of sites, and her minimal approach using imitation, deception, impermanence and concealment are seen in ‘The Residual Diameter’. In this work, Bangladeshi muslin cloth is time-consumingly and painstakingly crafted into a wallpaper roll. Bhuta says, “It is a transformation that involves Recycle as a phenomenon… The manifestation enables one to measure time by mapping the history of itself. [Here, it is the] exclusivity of the weavers’ craft, as [opposed to] the mass production of the roll!” Remen Chopra Remen Chopra (b. 1980) combines drawing, photography, painting, sculpture and installation to create works that are visually as layered as their conceptual depth. Elements of Renaissance art and architecture, central to Chopra’s works, are further layered with references to historic time periods merging into contemporary ones, through composed collectives of her imagination, as seen in Lives Within Time If Time Lives Within It . Through the reference of time as a moral concept, where past, present and future merge, Chopra addresses “the New Renaissance”, while drawing strongly from elements of history. Kiran Subbaiah Kiran Subbaiah (b. 1971) includes object assemblages, site/context-specific texts, short stories, videos, and proposals for utilitarian objects in his work. He has been working with digital art / media since 1999 and has constantly questioned the use of objects and their presence, while placing himself as a protagonist in most of his works. The process of the existence of the required object and fictitious realities in his series or videos and in ‘Doing Without’ deliberately places the artist in situations beyond the practical. His works raise existential questions of the necessary presence of another with relationship / relating to procrastination, convenience and time. Baptist Coelho Baptist Coelho (b. 1977) is a multi-media artist whose projects merge personal research with collaborations across cultures, geographies and histories. ‘Gurgaon to Panamik, 2008-09’ (a part of the multi-disciplinary project, “You can’t afford to have emotions out there…”) focuses on the life of the soldier; not as a machine of war but as a man coping with daily complexities of conflict. A collection of bottles and corresponding handwritten notes from soldiers and locals Coelho encountered on his research trip act as time capsules. The works become a testament to existence and the effect on people’s lives due to the Siachen conflict, while also drawing together a strong connection between air, natural space and thoughts of common / ordinary people. Vibha Galhotra Vibha Galhotra (b. 1978) employs various media, from photography to installation and sculpture to create, conceptually and symbolically, experiential spaces. She has worked with dimensions of art, ecology, economy /economics, activism, surreal time and created utopias. ‘15 Days of May’ was realised within a time-frame of 15 days. With a mundane act of leaving a clean white rope outside her studio, the artist documented the effect of the polluted air of her city as displayed on the rope. The harsh alterations of reality through the subtle passage of time are reflected along with the artist’s primary concerns of global warming and its effect on ecology. Nandan Ghiya Nandan Ghiya, (b. 1980) in his practice builds upon his background in fashion, with antiques and new technology. Ghiya refers to the 21st century as one of emulation, competition and pressure. Here one is striving to address routine challenges and adversities, which the artist refers to as ‘Glitches”. Ghiya’s work reflects these ‘glitches” through visual interventions, distortions and transformations of old photographs, sculptures and objects. The set of two wooden figurines in ‘Peer- Pressure Glitch’ is a distortion of ideal beauty, in a state of limbo, evolution, transformation and transition, from old to new or from physical to digital. Sonia Jose Sonia Jose (b. 1982) relates to the environment and personal/social history in her work, and this stems from a need to preserve and acknowledge lived experience that surrounds routine life practices. The ‘Untitled’ (Rug) with the screenprint of hand-written text – So Much to Say – was inspired at a time when the artist was looking for a solution to calm her mind. Jose chose the words ‘so much to say’ as a meditative repetition and response to eclipse her needs, desire or compulsion to have anything to say at that time. Manjunath Kamath Manjunath Kamath (b. 1972), a collector of images, draws his initial inspiration from Indian Nathdwara paintings and collages, juxtaposing them with a living room, animals and displaced imagery. He gathers images from various sources to create narrative panoramas that weave in-and-out of an amalgamation of history, experience and imagination, layered with constructed myth, fantasy and evidence of overlapped time. In ‘Familiar Music from an Old Theatre’ he plays with time and space to create a magical realism that is both subjective and unique in experience. Riyas Komu Riyas Komu (b. 1971) focuses upon the political and cultural history of Kerala; the artist is a co-founder of the KochiMuziris Biennale. ‘The Last Wall’ is a narrative of a man from the artist’s neighbourhood, who lives within time frames of his mind, disconnected from the maze of a city. Working mainly at night, this man’s mind time is seen through his graffiti which is more text based than visual. By documenting this through video, Komu creates a twelve-minute experience of a visually distorted perception of time narrated through sound. Nandita Kumar Nandita Kumar (b.1981) works with a range of media including new-media, technology, video and painting to create immersive environments. Through her artistic research and interactive works, she explores the elemental process through which human beings construct meaning. ‘Birth of a Brainfly’ is a surreal narrative dealing with the process of a person’s individuation of a mental-scape. Similarly, ‘Tentacles of Dimensions’ is a journey of a brain that has unplugged its cultural programming and is indulging in the senses. Both these flights into self-constructed labyrinths of ego and creative utopias deny all construct of time. Ritesh Meshram Ritesh Meshram (b. 1975) is inspired by everyday objects which he explores through painting, sculpture, video, installed assemblage and kinetic work. The series of sculptures and prints are related to the detail of transitional spaces and time in a home, where the residue of time is seen through passages, window frames and photographs. This abstraction and fragility of time is carefully crafted in this series which the artist describes as a process against his temperament. Prajakta Potnis Prajakta Potnis (b. 1980) enquires into the seepage of time, life-span and aura around mundane objects from daily life, through photography, painting and site-specific installations. While ‘Still Life’ explores the process of degeneration, ‘Capsule’ explores the idea of freezing time and age. Potnis uses the refrigerator as a connotation of controlled temperature, which enables one to create a sterile enclosed space similar to the one in a mall or an airport. She likens these capsuled, sometimes transit spaces to zones that are not affected by the outside. They appear to be cloned, sterile centres within a city. Gigi Scaria Gigi Scaria (b. 1973) works with painting, sculpture, photography and film to explore his interest in issues of urban and economic development, issues surrounding migration and urban architecture. The delusion and anonymity of the geographical locations he uses, makes the spaces he works with universal. Further incorporating objects that cannot be attributed to an identifiable time or space, the artist places his works within the frame of timelessness. In ‘Camel and the Needle’, and ‘Clueless’, barren landscapes of salt and sand, void of habitation are mirages of recognition. They go beyond any inclination of recognition of time and place. The large photographs leave the viewer to collect traces of memories in this ‘Dust’, which is the title of the recent series of the artist’s works, to which these photographs belong. Kartik Sood Kartik Sood (b. 1986) creates photographs, paintings and new-media installations that share autobiographical, invented and dislocated memories of a story-teller. The works are patterns of memories through photographs and personal notes, which work themselves into an idea of a timeless setting of space. Sood’s images are constructed with the idea of time -- outside and inside. The artist describes the locations as “spaces of contemplation, where one often stops by to introspect. While the outer time goes on running at the usual speed, there are inner time transitions at such spaces. Is it really an illusion of time shifting, or does time really bend on our day to day lives?”

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 4 - There Once Was A Village Here Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 4 - There Once Was A Village Here There Once was a Village Here was a Bearing Point that considered what anthropologist Jason Cons describes as “sensitive spaces” – spaces that challenge ideas of nation, state, and territory where cultures exist that do not fit the image that the state has for itself. These spaces, which like many villages, are often razed with its people forced to succumb to the state, subue to its needs, or submit to the domination of majority forces. However, the social fabric of a village often remains intact through oral tradition. South Asian artists have been advocating for these “sensitive spaces” for decades, however this Bearing Point differs in the sense that rather than advancing the visibility of internationally acclaimed and highly networked artists, it provides a space for artists from these communities to join these networks and speak for themselves.When the British carved out Pakistan from an independent India in 1947, creating East and West wings, they created a country only united by its common majority religion, Islam, ignoring the plurality found in Islam’s cultures of worship, as well as the vast cultural contributions that Buddhism and Hinduism lent to Bengal, especially from the perspective of village rituals that inspire much of Bangladeshi modern art. The name Bangla Desh means the land where people speak Bangla (Bengali) and Bangladesh was born in 1971 on the back of the Language Movement in the 1950s where people fought for the right to speak, live, and work in their own language. Linguistic lines offer far more room for cultural diversity than religious ones, however there are 42 other languages spoken within this territory. Bangladesh has recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of its peace accord with the Chittagong Hill Tracts and the cultural ministry remains committed to supporting the visibility of the rich cultures present there. While we enter vastly different landscapes while navigating this exhibition from Thailand in the east to Afghanistan in the west, the plight of the minority cultures tied to these lands shares uncanny similarity as development needs of the state, capitalist greed, and religious fundamentalism seek to mine resources from below the ground these people stand on and erase the religious beliefs which they stand for, often tied to cultures of fear and oppression. These artists bear witness to religious and ecological violence unfolding in their locales, and their work often acts as a register for this trauma. Despite carrying the weight of enormous pain, the deeply poetic practices of these artists are able to create spaces of empathy through which new modes of solidarity might be imagined. Artists Amin Taasha (b. 1995, in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, lives and works in Jogjakarta) secret, 2017 Be quiet, 2017 the battle, 2017 no one talks about, 2017 freedom, 2017 Forgiving, 2017 The beginning, 2017 Watercolour, acrylic, silver and gold leaf on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface Indonesia based artist of Hazara origin Amin Taasha was forced to flee Afghanistan at the age of 18 after being accused of blasphemy resulting from his art practice. He addresses contemporary violence in a region where free passage was once possible via the silk road which stretched from China into his native Bamiyan. Bamiyan was once a bustling centre for Buddhist philosophy, religion and art, as evidenced by the monumental 4th and 5th Century AD Bamiyan Buddha sculptures that were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 as part of their attempt to remove this history from communal memory. Taasha uses ink techniques that span many Asian influences, from Iran to China, and tries to create landscapes to chronicle memories that risk being forgotten due to growing beliefs in iconoclasm. Taasha uses the scroll format, drawn from Chinese literati painting, in an attempt to imagine a space of co-existence for the many strands of history that create the conflicted identities of his former home. Ayesha Jatoi (b. 1979 in Islamabad, lives and works in Lahore, Pakistan) Residue, 2016/2018 Installation of garments with performance courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid Presented here with additional support from Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid. Photographer: Pablo Batholomew and Noor Photoface A large mound of white garments of all shapes and sizes and for all ages and genders lies conspicuously in the exhibition space. Looking closely, the pile begins to slowly disappear as the artist Ayesha Jatoi takes each piece of clothing and folds and stacks it across the room. White is the color of mourning worn to funerals in many cultures of South Asia, and Jatoi’s performance Residue, 2016/2018 is a metaphorically burdened act in uncertain times of putting away the remnants of love, of longing; trying to make sense of the senseless: of what, or who, has been lost. Gauri Gill (b. 1970 in Chandigarh, lives and works in New Delhi) Rajesh Vangad (b. 1975 in Ganjad, Maharasthra; lives and works in Ganjad) Birth to Death, 2016 Sacred Gods, Revered Things, 2016 Archival ink on pigment print Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Fields of Sight (2013-ongoing) is a moving collaborative project between Rajesh Vangad, a traditionally-trained artist from the Warli community of Maharashtra, and Delhi-based photographer Gauri Gill. The project investigates the idea of the site as formed by variant cultural practices, and how marginalized groups might occupy stolen landscapes. In both Maharashtra and Gujarat, the Warli community has been the target of dispossession to make way for industrial and energy projects. Gill and Vangad bring to question the politics of landscape as the site through which trauma is registered, drawing attention to the mass displacement of indigenous communities in an effort by governments, working with private corporations, to seize natural resources in the lands of these communities. Multiple points of focus are produced within Gill’s portraits of Vangad, and through Vangad's interventions on Gill's portraits, rejecting any unidirectional act of viewing. Layers of violent imperial history in both colonial and post-colonial periods share a continuum in their treatment of indigenous communities in the process of resource control. Hitman Gurung (b.1986 in Lamjung, lives and works in Kathmandu) This is My Home, My Land and My Country...(I), 2015 Drawing on Digital Print on Archival Fine Art Paper Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface The act of portraiture becomes one of resistance when state and other actors work to deliberately deny or suppress certain communities or identities. Hitman Gurung’s work This is My Home, My Land, and My Country (2015) addresses the conflicted history between the Tharu indigenous community of the Terai region of southern Nepal and the national government. Like many indigenous people around the world, the Tharu consider that they have been denied equal rights and representation, resulting in widespread protests and demands for independence. Gurung presents a series of portraits of members of the community, holding identity cards, where their faces have been bandaged, visualizing the paradox of being identified by the state, while not being recognized by it. Htein Lin (b. 1966 in Ingapu, lives and works in Yangon) Mangrave, 2017 Iron, Charcoal, Monitor, Video Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the Artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Mangrove forests on the coasts of Myanmar and Bangladesh serve as natural bio-guards to the surrounding villages, buffering them against the rising dangers of cyclones and tsunamis in the age of climate change. Mangroves suffer among the highest rate of deforestation in South and Southeast Asia, in part tied to the monoculture of plantations and infrastructure projects such as power plants, but also due to local fuel demands of villages given rising population density. Mangroves are one of the easiest sources of charcoal. In his menacing sculpture crafted from iron and charcoal, Mangrave (2017), Burmese artist Htein Lin warns of impending destruction resulting from making short-term decisions based on convenience and comfort at the grave expense of the environment. Jakkai Siributr (b. 1969 in Bangkok, lives and works in Bangkok) The Outlaw's Flag, 2017 Installation with embroidered found objects and video Courtesy of the artist and H Gallery Bangladesh welcomed over half-a-million Rohingya refugees into its borders in late 2017 who were fleeing years of oppression in Myanmar as Muslim minorities in a place where Buddhist fundamentalism is increasingly accepted. Buddhist fundamentalism is also on the rise in the sangha in Thailand, where the Rohingya refugees migrating eastwards found themselves during the previous crisis of 2015. Jakkai Siributr provides a critical perspective on rising communal tensions and Buddhist-Muslim relations in the region, which have become intensified by the mass movements of populations. Siributr’s The Outlaw’s Flag (2017) consists of subverted flags of imaginary nations, created by a process of embroidering detritus from the beaches of Sittwe in Myanmar and Ranong in Thailand – respectively departure and arrival points of fleeing Rohingya refugees – these flags are hoisted around a video of these seemingly idyllic landscapes. Joydeb Roaja (b. 1973 in Khagrachori, lives and works in Chittagong) Generation-wish-yielding Trees and Atomic Tree, 2017 Pen and ink on paper Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface The militarization of the Chittagong Hill Tracts inspires the work of Chittagong based artist Joydeb Roaja who comes from the indigenous Tripura community. His performance practice inspires the seven intricate black and white drawings from the Generation-wish-yielding Trees and Atomic Tree series (2017), which are in turn activated by a performance on the opening day of DAS 2018. The thought, education, art, literature, and sports of the new generation reflect the fact that weapons were introduced to their visual landscape at a very young age. Roaja’s surreal drawings that fuse his indigenous community and its traditions with imported army equipment register the traces of this violence in his mental landscape of the hill tracts, and seek to invent ways of imagining another form of existence. Kanak Chanpa Chakma (b. 1963 in the Rangamati Hill Tracts; lives and works in Dhaka) Soul Piercing, 2014 acrylic and collaged photography on canvas courtesy of the artist Orange painting: The Fall, 2017 Red: And The Prayer, 2017 Blue: The History That Will Remain, 2017 Green painting: Snatched, 2017 Orange: The Burn, 2017 Red: But Life Will Continue, 2017 Acrylic and collaged photography on canvas Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist Photographer: Noor Photoface Bangladesh has layers of Buddhist history and in 2015 airport signage in the Dhaka international airport welcomed visitors to the catch phrase “home of Buddhist culture,” surprising for a country with a 90% Muslim population. While violence against Muslims and Hindus in Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka and Myanmar is well documented in the international press, there is far less awareness of persecution of Buddhists (and other minorities) in the country. In 2012 in Southern Bangladesh, someone set up a fake Facebook account under a Buddhist name, and posted an image of a burning koran, inciting mob violence where over 25,000 people mobilised against Buddhist communities, destroying 12 Buddhist temples and over 50 houses in the process, now known as the Ramu Incident. Kanak Chanpa Chakma created a series in 2014 that collaged photographic documentation of the incident and newspaper clippings against imagery of the peaceful Buddhist architecture that growing hate and division in society tried to destroy. We invited Kanak to continue this series for DAS 2018, not anticipating that a similar incident would occur later on June 2, 2017 in the village of Longadu, Rangamati, which left the community devastated with over 300 houses torched. Kanak comes from the Buddhist community that was targeted in both of these incidents, and she shares that “my paintings bring to focus the ongoing cycle of intolerance and aggression against Bangladeshis of different faiths or ethnicity. This is, in my rawest form, an urge for peace.” Khadim Ali (b. 1978 in Quetta, lives and works between Sydney and Kabul) The Arrivals 2, 2017 Inkjet, gouache, and gold leaf on hahnemuhle paper courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery The Arrivals 4, 2017 Inkjet, goache, and gold leaf on hahnemuhle paper courtesy of the artist and Milani Gallery Photographer: Noor Photoface Born of Afghan Hazara parentage now living in Australia, Khadim Ali grew up on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan and works in the miniature tradition, chronicling the plight of his culture and community who have been oppressed for centuries, even more so recently under the Taliban as a minority and Shia Muslim community. Biographically tied to his family’s experiences as refugees, as well as those of other communities around them, The Arrivals series places Rustom, the hero of the 10th Century epic poem Shahnamah (The Book of Kings) that charts the mythical history of Persia, in the plight of the refugee, placing him in a landscape of limbo adorned with motifs from Australian passport pages. Reflecting on this series, the artist states: War produces innumerable wounds, leaving scars of destruction that are carried through generations. It destroys and deconstructs societies and disrupts the sphere of time. In its displacement by war, the human body becomes the site of trauma and loss. It is exposed to harsh environments and a torrid political atmosphere. This displaced body has a name: refugee. The effects of the refugee’s fragmented journey of displacement differ from person to person. But in almost every case, the inner spirit is numbed, forcing memories to be forgotten. The smell of home, the scent of love, the delicacy of identity and the fluency of language are all erased by the trauma of loss. In our time, political circumstances and misrepresentation has painted these displaced souls as being beyond humanity. Even though they are merely attempting to escape the catastrophe of war, they are portrayed as demons (that is beings other than human) who threaten the social order. In doing this, our society represents the forlorn hope of human beings who have endured the very limits of survival, ignoring that they seek little more than peace. Yet what is at stake in how we treat them is not just their humanity, it is ours. Munem Wasif (b.1983 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka) Seeds Shall Set Us Free, 2016-2018 (ongoing) Cyanotype prints on acid free paper Courtesy of the artist and Project88. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Munem Wasif seeks to reimagine an indigenous “ecosophical” mode of agriculture, where grain is a companion species to humanity, having names, deities and spirits, around which the village organizes itself. He investigates the cultural history of grain, connected to memories of the 1944 Bengal famine. Seeds Shall Set Us Free (2017) is a series of cyanotype prints of rice seeds, referencing at once both scientific representation and the traditional practice of alpona, the Bengali tradition of creating ritual floor paintings using rice paste. The artist excavates layers of ecological colonialism from the destruction of agricultural ecologies with the introduction of plantation farming and cash crops. Indigo was one such cash crop, alluded to in Wasif’s use of bright blue hues in his cyanotypes. Agriculture moved away from the subsistence needs of the local communities as it was harnessed towards sustaining flows of capital with the introduction not only of crop monocultures, but also of genetically modified seeds, producing cycles of debt that lead to dispossession and displacement. Nilima Sheikh (b. 1954 in New Delhi, lives and works in Baroda) Construction Site, 2009-2010 Casein tempera on canvas Courtesy of Chemould Prescott Road Presented here with additional support from Chemould Prescott Road, Bombay. Photographer: Pablo Batholomew Nilima Sheikh creates an almost magical universe where rivers are woven and leaves clothe the towering figure of Lal Ded, the 14th Century Kashmiri saint and mystical poet whose vakh (spoken poems) occupy a significant space in the construction of a Kashmiri identity across religious lines. Construction Site (2009-2010) examines the layers of cultural history that produce an idea of the landscape of Kashmir. On the front face of the painting, we see a broken city, alluding to the Indian army’s occupation of Srinagar, being reconstructed by its citizens – using imagery drawn from Indian and Persian miniatures that she renders in the muted colours of Kashmiri textiles. She weaves these references together with texts from historical sources such as Kashmir chronicler Kalhana’s 12th Century Rajatarangini and excerpts from Lal Ded’s poetry, found on the back of the painting. Sheikh’s expansive use of washes pays tribute to the adoption of the technique by Abanindranath Tagore (whose work can be seen within Raqib Shaw’s adjacent presentation), whose pan-Asian vision imagined a modernity oriented eastwards. Using the form of the scroll, an oblique reference to Chinese scroll paintings and the patachitra painting of Bengal, Sheikh argues for the performativity of the narration of history. Pablo Bartholomew (b. 1955 in New Delhi, lives and works in New Delhi) Untitled, 2017-2018 (ongoing) Photographs, woven textiles, video Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Through several bodies of work created with indigenous communities in Northeast India, Pablo Bartholomew has observed that these communities wear their cultural DNA through their clothing, ornamentation and markings on their bodies; codes that they keep as a form of self identity. With a father hailing from Burma and mother who is of partial Bengali origin, Bartholomew traces in his newly commissioned project (a work in progress as part of a longer ongoing cross-border inquiry) the links between geographically fractured indigenous communities/ethnic minorities in Myanmar, India, and Bangladesh. Working within the Chakma community into which he is related from his mother’s side, he extends the scope of his practice by working with weavers. The artist asked these artisans to use their traditional idioms on back-strap looms (carried on the body through periods of migration) to weave graphic DNA patterns the imagery rendered through scientific testing. Through this project Bartholomew hopes to weave together science, myth, legend and tradition, exploring a cross border ethnic identity. Prabhkakar Pachpute (b. 1986 in Chandrapur, lives and works in Mumbai) The Resistance Movement, 2017 Charcoal and acrylic on canvas Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation Presented here with additional support from Experimenter, Kolkata. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew Hailing from the Chandrapur district of Maharashtra, a major site of coal mining in India, and belonging to a family who have worked as miners for generations, Prabhakar Pachpute imagines a landscape where the people of the land can hold onto their own resources and dignity in his surreal charcoal drawings on mill-produced cloth. The use of mill cloth ties Pachpute materially to the history of labour movements in Mumbai led by unions of textile mill workers. In The Resistance Movement, 2017, the artist creates fantastical labouring bodies, alluding to the effects that working in the toxic atmospheres of mines has on these workers, who must invent new modes of living with and inhabiting landscapes. Raqib Shaw (b. 1974 in Calcutta, lives and works in London) Generously supported by White Cube and the Arts Council England. Courtesy of Raqib Shaw, White Cube, Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth, the University of Manchester and the Bangladesh National Museum. Co-curated by Diana Campbell, Chief Curator of Dhaka Art Summit and Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation, Dr Maria Balshaw, Director of Tate, and the artist. This exhibition is part of the New North and South, a network of eleven arts organisations from across South Asia and the North of England in a three-year programme of co-commissions, exhibitions and intellectual exchanges. The network consists of Dhaka Art Summit (Bangladesh), Colombo Art Biennale, (Sri Lanka), Karachi Biennale and Lahore Biennales (Pakistan), Kochi-Muziris Biennale (India), Manchester Art Gallery, the Whitworth, Manchester Museum, Liverpool Biennial, The Tetley, Leeds (UK) and the British Council. Photographer: Noor Photoface Raqib Shaw’s paintings present a landscape of the imagination, bringing together a remembered Kashmir, his extraordinary studio in Peckham, London, and a passionate engagement with the history of Eastern and Western art. Born in Calcutta to Muslim parents, raised in Kashmir (a historically Buddhist territory), and educated by Hindu teachers at a Christian school, celebration of plurality and difference is core to the artist’s work and to the Kashmiri culture that fundamentalism strives to quash. Shaw’s meticulous attention to detail creates a surface of theatrical extravagance that draws on Renaissance architecture, Japanese prints and Hindu iconography. This complex imaginary space is populated by extreme re-workings of myths, gods, animals and humans as fantasies of excess through which the artist reflects back his own status as post-colonial subject and plays back ‘the oriental’ to both West and East for very different political, sexual and emotional purposes. This is the artist’s first major presentation in South Asia, and the newly commissioned wallpaper speaks to Shaw’s love of fairy tales and his use of motifs of tumbling coins and mythic creatures create an intense domestic disruption in the public spaces of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, where close inspection reveals the lush beauty of the decorative as turbulent and disturbing. Together with his paintings the wallpaper forms the backdrop to the display of historic collections, drawn together by the artist from his own collection, the Whitworth, Bangladesh National Museum, The Collection of Aysha and Shahab Sattar and the Samdani Art Foundation collection. Totemic objects such as the 19th century Kashmir shawl, Japanese woodblock prints, a rose water sprinkler and cloisonné charger map his cultural references and shape a new context in which we can read his work. Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran (b. 1988 in Colombo, lives and works in Sydney) Idols, 2016-2018 Earthenware, Glaze, Bronze, Cotton, Resin, Shells, Rubber Snakes, Human Hair and Concrete Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace, Sydney for DAS 2018 with support from the Australia Council for the Arts Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Artspace Sydney, and Sullivan + Strumpf Co-curated by Diana Campbell, Alexie Glass-Kantor, and Michelle Newton Photographer: Noor Photoface Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran fled Sri Lanka at the age of one with his Tamil Hindu father and Christian Burgher mother, escaping religious and ethnic persecution during the civil war. While he himself is not religious, the artist felt naturally drawn to the temple where he learned about a polytheistic view of the world, with multi-gendered gods who could change forms. Nithiyendran noticed that there were not very many public monuments in existence that celebrated non-White or non-Colonial figures, and by considering temple iconography and Brutalist architecture, which captivated his imagination in terms of scale and authority, the artist tried to envision a different kind of way of memorializing people who slip through the cracks of what is considered acceptable. While homosexuality remains illegal in most of South Asia due to draconian British laws, the recognition of multiple genders has gained legal standing due to complex indigenous understandings of gender. Nithiyendran’s work references totems and indigenous clay toys, found in villages around South Asia, attempting to create a mythology of a post-gender world, over which his towering figures preside. In this newly commissioned body of work, Nithiyendran creates 21st Century deities in drag, whose dripping multi-coloured glazes pay homage to the famously colourful festivals of South Asia such as Holi and Pohela Boishakh. Soe Yu Nwe (b. 1989 in Yangon, lives and works in Yangon) On Ghost, 2016 Sagger fired ceramics with sand, salt, underglaze and oxides, cone 10 Courtesy of the artist and Myanm/ Art Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Burmese sculptor Soe Yu Nwe chronicles her own need for protective space in the increasingly repressive environment of Myanmar that embraces Buddhist fundamentalism in her haunting ceramic installation On Ghost, 2016. Referencing the animist traces of Burmese culture found in spirit houses built around sacred trees, the artwork, weighed down by tangles of chains, evokes the violent tension that greed creates between nature, body, and spirit in a sinuous and violent form evoking an ashen sense of loss. Shahid Sajjad (b. 1936 in Muzaffarnagar, British India, d. 2014, Karachi) Hostage II, 1992-1993 Smoked Persian Lilac Courtesy of the Estate of Shahid Sajjad Hostage IV, 1992-1993 Smoked Mulberry Courtesy of Shezi Nackvi Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew The immaculate wood carving technique found in Shahid Sajjad’s Hostage II and Hostage IV (1992-1993) express the fear and state of limbo that indigenous communities have historically endured in the Rangamati Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The artist lived with indigenous communities in Indonesia to learn carving techniques and later had a profound encounter with Paul Gaugin’s Tahitian body of work while traveling in Paris, experiences which sparked his interest in indigenous modes of representation in South Asia in the 1960s. The artist lived in Rangamati from 1965-67, spending two years working with its native wood species and learning wood smoking techniques from the communities there. Inspired by animist and sufi traditions in the region, Sajjad tried to release the spirit of the wood and draw out its hidden mystic qualities. The Hostage series, made nearly three decades after his life in Rangamati, transforms foreign Persian Lilac and Mulberry wood to further draw out the pain inflicted on indigenous ways of life and nodes of knowledge. This series was exhibited soon after it was made in Bangladesh at the the Third Asian Art Biennale in 1993. Sonia Jabbar (born 1964, in Calcutta; lives and works in Darjeeling) Granted Under Fear, 2009 2 channel video with sound Courtesy of the artist One of the cruelest ways of keeping society “under control” is through the practice of enforced disappearances, where a family lives in suspense not knowing whether their loved one is alive or dead, and forced into submission in hopes of bringing them back. According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, around 8,000 to 10,000 cases of enforced disappearances have been reported in Jammu and Kashmir since 1989. Artist and activist Sonia Jabbar’s haunting two-channel video Granted Under Fear (2009) places side by side the haunting sound of military bagpipes, an echo from colonial era marching bands, with the frightening image of stomping army boots in a military parade alongside documentation of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers holding pictures of their missing relatives. Veer Munshi (b. 1955 in Srinagar, lives and works in New Delhi) Leaves like Hands of Flame, 2010 Two channel video with sound Courtesy of the artist and Latitude 28 Veer Munshi’s two-channel video, Leaves Like Hands of Flame (2010) juxtaposes images of the burnt-out houses of Kashmiri pundits in Srinagar, with a video of the artist walking laboriously through the snow. Munshi’s departure from the Kashmir Valley to work in New Delhi coincided with the forced mass exodus of Kashmiri Hindus due to rising communal tensions in the 1990s. The Kashmir valley is one of the most militarized zones in the world today and the Indian government has often been accused of using the trauma of exiled Kashmiri pundits to justify cruel measures of repression against those agitating for an independent Kashmir. Finally able to return home in 2008, Munshi attempts to reclaim this trauma, creating a slow, contemplative space to imagine modes of living with difficult histories as he walks through the desolate snowy landscape to the home he once inhabited, now in ruins.

ALL PROJECTS রিক্সা শিল্পীদের পাশে In partnership with Britto Arts Trust Part of the Samdani Art Foundation’s ongoing work was supporting research into pre-colonial knowledge of South Asia and blurring boundaries between art and life by empowering Bangladeshi artist-led initiatives. Artists from around the world often took motifs from vernacular artistic practices, and through our initiatives, we partnered with artists and artist-led initiatives to support the practices of artists who often did not have the privileges of resources and mobility found in “the art world,” such as Cinema Banner painters, Rickshaw painters, weavers, and other talented artisans who created the vibrant visual culture of Bangladesh. Dhaka Art Summit was a platform that realized Bangladesh’s largest cinema banner painting in collaboration with Jothashilpa, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and the Goethe Institut, and kantha stitched renditions of Bangladesh’s six seasons were realized in collaboration with Art Pro and were recently acquired by the Whitworth Museum in Manchester after their display at Dhaka Art Summit 2020. Protecting the heritage of Bangladeshi traditional arts also meant supporting the people behind these arts in their daily lives, so they could continue their practice once the world healed from the Covid-19 pandemic. Samdani Art Foundation is proud to have partnered with Britto Arts Trust to support 23 Rickshaw painters and Cinema Banner painters to produce each producing an artwork that highlighted the unique talent of each maker, while also financially supporting this at-risk community in a time when there were few opportunities for them to continue their work animating public spaces of Dhaka. The artist community forming Britto Art Trust had been working with Rickshaw painters and Cinema Banner painters for a long time. They had exhibited the works of the painters in Paris at Palais de Tokyo, and at other leading institutional platforms in Bangladesh and abroad. Britto Arts Trust had generously lent their talent and infrastructure to help bring 23 artists into the fold of Britto and gave them a platform to share their work with the world during this difficult time. The artists had painted on cut-outs representing parts of the human body, speaking to the fact that together, we were one collective body as residents and contributors to life in Dhaka. “The mission of samdani art foundation is to empower artists and to make art available for everyone to enjoy. It was a pleasure to support these wonderful artists during this difficult time, and we invite you to join us in this mission to show these artists how much the city of Dhaka values their talent and imagination. I am a proud collector of works from this project myself.” nadia samdani “Bangladeshi art owes a lot to the inspiration of its cinema banner painters and rickshaw painters, who we have worked with closely in our own artistic journeys in bangladesh and abroad. We are proud to share their work with you and look forward to these works finding permanent homes in offices and residences across Bangladesh, including our own.” Tayeba Begum Lipi and Mahbubur Rahman

FAQs Frequently asked questions General What makes the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) unique? The Samdani Art Foundation is a solely non-commercial entity, which is unique to both Bangladesh and a rarity across the South Asian region. While there are other art foundations in Bangladesh, SAF is the only one not tied to commercial activities within the art world. SAF also rejects the art camp model of other local foundations, which ask artists to produce works for free in return for participating in their programs. SAF is privately funded and does not sell any artworks, nor does it generate income by engaging with the commercial activities of galleries or art fairs. All of SAF’s programmes are free and never require registration or participation fees. In 2012 the Samdani Art Foundation founded the bi-annual Dhaka Art Summit (DAS), an international non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia, which re-examines how we think about these art forms in a regional and wider context. DAS’s interdisciplinary programme creates a generative space for art and exchange, and is unique in that it commissions, funds, and produces works as opposed to merely exhibiting them. Many projects commissioned and produced by SAF for DAS—such as those by Shilpa Gupta, Rashid Rana, Jitish Kallat, and Munem Wasif—have travelled to international institutions such as the Berlin Biennale, NYU Abu Dhabi, San Jose Museum of Art, Gwangju Biennial, and the Singapore Biennial. This is not a collection building strategy; works commissioned for DAS often travel to other international exhibitions after the event and will continue to belong to the artists. SAF does not recover production money or take commissions pertaining to the work it produces. The Foundation has been successful in providing a non-commercial platform for international institutions to consider art from Bangladesh in their curatorial research process, which has led to the inclusion of work by Bangladeshi artists and architects in international exhibitions. Munem Wasif, Ayesha Sultana, and Rana Begum have recently showcased their work in Korea at the 11th Gwangju Biennale–the Biennale’s first inclusion of Bangladeshi artists. Architect Kashef Chowdhury’s work in the 2015 Venice Architecture Biennale was the Biennale’s first inclusion of a Bangladeshi architect, which speaks to the rising role of Bangladeshi architecture on the international scene. Munem Wasif participated in fifth edition of the Singapore Biennale after its curator reached out to SAF for information about Bangladeshi emerging artists. SAF supported Naeem Mohaiemen’s solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 2014, leading to the artist’s inclusion in documenta14. In 2017, Kunsthalle Zürich included two Bangladeshi artists from the Samdani Art Award (Samsul Alam Helal and Raqiful Shuvo) in the group exhibition Speak, Lokal, curated by DAS 2016 guest curator Daniel Baumann. Raqiful Shuvo and Farzana Ahmed Urmi recently participated in the 11th Shanghai Biennale with the support of SAF. There has been unprecedented mobility for emerging Bangladeshi artists in recent years, which SAF is proud to have supported and will continue to do so through its various initiatives. The Samdani Art Foundation has a great number of projects including the Samdani Seminars, the Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum, the Samdani Art Award, the Samdani Architecture Award, the Dhaka Art Summit, and the recently launched DAS Research Fellows programme. SAF also supports a great number of global events and the participation of artists from Bangladesh in international exhibitions. For further information about our projects, please visit the dedicated section on our website here. What is the Samdani Art Award? The bi-annual Samdani Art Award, organised in partnership with the Delfina Foundation, has created an internationally recognised platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi artists to an international audience at the bi-annual Dhaka Art Summit. Inviting applications through an open call, Bangladeshi artists between the ages of 20–40 are eligible to apply. Applications are then shortlisted by an invited jury of international artists and curators who chose ten finalists to receive one-on-one sessions with an invited guest curator. The winner will receive an all-expenses paid, six-week residency at the Delfina Foundation in London. Each short-listed artist will be given an international curator as a mentor as part of the Biennials’ Associate Artists programme and at least two of the short-listed artists will be commissioned for the upcoming Liverpool Biennial. Many past short-listed artists have since shown their work at international exhibitions and institutions including; 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016), curated by_Vienna (2016), 11th Shanghai Biennale (2016), 4a Centre for Contemporary Asian Art (2017), and Kunsthalle Zürich (2017). For further information about the Samdani Art Award, please visit the dedicated section on our website here. Who is behind the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF)? Nadia Samdani is the President of the Samdani Art Foundation, which she co-founded with her husband Rajeeb Samdani in 2011. SAF is led by Diana Campbell, its Artistic Director, an International Advisory Committee, and a local organising committee, chaired by Farooq Sobhan, President and CEO of the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute (BEI), an independent research institute in Bangladesh. What is the source of these private funds? Rajeeb Samdani is the Chairman of Golden Harvest. Golden Harvest is a diversified Bangladeshi conglomerate with over 5,000 employees, involved in numerous business sectors: food, real estate, information, technology, agro, infrastructure development, dairy, aviation, insurance, commodity, and logistics. Rajeeb Samdani is also the Secretary of the General of the Bangladesh Human Rights Foundation, which is one of the largest Human Rights organisations in Bangladesh. Mr. Samdani is also the Founder of the Taher Ahmed Chowdhury Charitable Hospital in the city of Sylhet. The Samdani family financially supports both of these initiatives as part of their corporate social responsibility efforts. Is there a tax exemption from the sources invested in the Samdani Art foundation (SAF)? Due to local regulations, there is no tax benefit for any of the funds invested in the Samdani Art Foundation or any of its projects. Does the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) plan to expand outside Dhaka? The Samdani Art Foundation has offices based in Dhaka and Mumbai, which facilitate its work across South Asia. SAF does not currently plan to open any international offices or exhibition spaces, but it is developing a permanent art centre in Sylhet, Bangladesh–a forty-minute flight from Dhaka. The majority of SAF’s funds are spent on activities in Bangladesh in order to support the local art scene. SAF engages with institutions outside the region by supporting curatorial research and exhibition-making in Bangladesh. Such an example is SAF’s Artistic Director Diana Campbell’s current work with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago to lend many artworks from the SAF collection for the exhibition MANY TONGUES: Art, Language, and Revolution in the Middle East and South Asia, curated by Omar Kholeif, set to open in November 2018. This will be the largest showing of work by Bangladeshi and South Asian modern and contemporary artists in the United States. What is the arts centre in Sylhet? Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park is currently under development with plans to open in 2021. Srihatta is being designed by Aga Khan prize winning Bangladeshi architect Kashef Mahboob Chowhdury. It will be located in a 100+ acre outdoor site in Sylhet, Bangladesh with a 5,000 square foot indoor exhibition space to house works from the Samdani Collection. Srihatta will also include ten rooms to be used as residency spaces for local and international artists and curators to contemplate art and nature. SAF will also commission new works for Srihatta by South Asian and international artists. This space will aim to improve the existing public art infrastructure in the country, as well as increase accessibility to contemporary art, reaching a wider Bangladeshi audience. The first realised project on this site was Rokeya – an interactive sculpture created by leading Polish artist Paweł Althamer in collaboration with the local community, completed in early 2017. For further information about the development of Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, please visit the dedicated section on our website here. Why Sylhet? Located in northeast Bangladesh, surrounded by rain forests, hills, rivers, and valleys, Sylhet is one of the leading tourist destinations in the country. As the Samdani Art Foundation seeks to promote international artistic exchange between Bangladesh and the rest of the world, Sylhet has proven to be an easily accessible international Bangladeshi city–an ideal location for Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Sylhet is also the hometown of the Samdani family. What initiatives will Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park promote? Once open, Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park will house part of the Samdani Art Foundation’s permanent collection and have exhibitions dedicated to contemporary art from Bangladesh and South Asia, as well as to international artists. It will also have a performance programme and a vast outdoor area for sculpture and architectural pavilions. As part of an international exchange initiative, Srihatta will host the Samdani Seminars, which currently take place in Dhaka. Srihatta will also have an international residency program. Visiting the space, as with all SAF’s programmes, will be free. What are the Samdani seminars? The Samdani Seminars are a free lecture and workshop programme, which facilitate engagement between international arts professionals and local communities across Bangladesh through participatory artworks, lectures, and workshops, to engage a broader audience with the arts. The Seminars complement the syllabi of Bangladesh’s leading educational institutions by covering the mediums and subjects not currently included, accessible to those of all ages, to encourage an inclusive dialogue around art. Curated by the Samdani Art Foundation’s Artistic Director Diana Campbell, the first annual Samdani Seminars began in 2015 and focused on exploring the possibilities of the body and the space it occupies. The premise was for artists to consider the body as the primary tool of expression, a tool that also allows the engagement with traditional arts such as painting, sculpture, and photography. The 2017 Samdani Seminars focused on sound and listening as tools for art-making. The Seminars also consider Arte Util, institution-building, and organisational strategies for local artist-led initiatives and collectives. For further information about the Samdani Seminars, please visit the dedicated section on our website here. Who takes part in the seminars? Twelve leading international artists and curators from eight countries participated as visiting faculty in the previous series of Seminars in 2015. They worked alongside individuals from theatre, music, dance, and architecture backgrounds which ensured the programme facilitated collaborations across creative disciplines. Half of the Seminars were open to the public and enjoyed by audiences of over 300 art enthusiasts and students. The other half of the 2015 Seminars were closed-door discussions, each with a group of around 16 participants, selected by the visiting faculty and artists from a strong applicant pool. The current 2017-18 Seminar programme,featured Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Haroon Mirza, Asim Waqif, Pawel Althamer, Susan Philipsz, Tarek Atoui, Sebastian Cichocki, Nick Aikens, Council, and Open School East. Many of the ideas and movements introduced in these sessions fed into the Dhaka Art Summit 2018’s Education Pavilion. Why Dhaka and Bangladesh? Besides being the current home of Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, Bangladesh and Dhaka, in particular, have a vibrant art scene still in need of support to flourish on both a local and international stage. By producing the Dhaka Art Summit and funding international events to encourage cultural exchange, the Samdani Art Foundation provides an opportunity for leading figures of the international art world not only to engage with South Asian art, but also to become familiar with the Bangladeshi art scene. Furthermore, it is important for SAF to provide opportunities for the local community to engage with regional and international art. Bangladesh does not have a dedicated contemporary art museum, making SAF’s collection an important bridge for Bangladeshi art enthusiasts and students to experience first-hand examples of international modern and contemporary art. What is the Samdani Architecture Award? The inaugural Samdani Architecture Award was launched in 2017, and was open to all third and fourth year architecture students from Bangladesh to propose a design for DAS 2018’s Education Pavilion. Creating much needed opportunities for young architects, the first prize winning entry was realised and animated with the Education Pavilion programme, during the Dhaka Art Summit 2018. For further information about the Samdani Architecture Award, please visit the dedicated section on our website here. What is the Samdani Artist-led Initiatives Forum? The Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum recognises the importance of Bangladesh’s independently established and self-funded art initiatives and collectives. Supporting these initiatives’ ongoing efforts, the Forum will help each to continue to work locally while building their profile internationally through SAF’s network. For further information about the Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum, please visit the dedicated section on our website here. How does the Samdani Art Foundation sustain itself financially? The Samdani Art Foundation is privately funded by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani.

ALL PROJECTS Art Mediation Programme 2018 As part of our commitment to creating new strategies to open up our programme to a diverse audience, the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 launched a new Art Mediation programme, led by Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury. With the generous support of Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, and in collaboration with the Hochschule Luzern, this programme was designed to engage and expose a network of local creatives and students to new methodologies of mediation, who in turn helped the local audience navigate and access the exhibitions and programmes. Aware that the space of contemporary art was, for many members of DAS’s extremely diverse audience, quite daunting, we set out to create a series of new strategies to open up our programme. These strategies strengthened our commitment to accommodate many forms of thinking and provided space for them to flourish – to create a space where different audiences were encouraged to engage with artworks on their own terms. Creating an effective mediation programme was central to this agenda and crucial in achieving DAS’s goals in the South Asia region. This edition of DAS aimed to become completely bilingual, with all printed material presented in both Bangla and English, fostering ease of access for our Bangladeshi audience, which included the Exhibition Guide. Also included in the Guide were a series of ‘Mediation Pages’ that suggested particular tools which visitors could use to help them navigate DAS’s exhibitions. These tools were developed over the course of workshops at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Cochin), the Hochschule Luzern (Lucerne), and in Dhaka, through dialogues between DAS’s curatorial staff, Dr. Rachel Mader and Lena Eriksson of the Hochschule Luzern, and DAS 2018’s team of 25 Art Mediators. This dedicated team of Mediators was stationed throughout the Summit’s exhibition spaces, easily identifiable by their ASK ME ABOUT THE ART t-shirts. Trained through intensive workshops, they engaged the public in conversations around the artworks, and ran tours each day for both DAS’s general audiences and visiting school groups. You cam read a post from MoMA's education department referencing our Art Mediation and other educational initiatives here .

ALL PROJECTS Collective Movements Curated by Diana Campbell We have been witnessing movements of people of all ages from Chile, to Lebanon, India, Hong Kong and beyond, all voicing a desire for forms of agency in the context of persistent repressive colonial and authoritarian structures. DAS was formed through the collective building of a grassroots transnational civil space where culture can be shared beyond the limits of the nation state. Together with artists who create situations, build relations, and organise events and institutions, we aim to create a strong sense of community rooted in Dhaka. The word body can also be read as individuals who come together as a group. Like antibodies, individuals within any body need to maintain the ability to disagree with the group and contribute to the dynamic evolution of the fragments, situations, and personalities that make it up. A powerful aspect of groups is that they are dynamic and fluid; they can come together, break up into two or more groups, move when they need to, and dissolve when their work is done, reforming if/when they are needed again. Damián Ortega b. 1967, Mexico City; lives and works in Mexico City Sisters; Hermanas, 2019–2020 Bricks, Corn, Squash, Chiles, Beans Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, kurimanzutto, White Cube, and Samdani Art Foundation. Realised with additional support from kurimanzutto and White Cube. A portion of the corn was grown and donated by Shakhawat Hossain In an empty, uninhabited lot covered by wild weeds and grass, a big conical figure is raised. It is made of red bricks and could be described either as a stupa, or a pre-Colombian pyramid. It is a sculptural silo, containing an offering with a sample of one of the native corn species of Mexico, a single seed. Seeds can be deposited on any land, and with some luck and under the right conditions, they multiply in a micro-explosion of fertility. Limits of private property are tested when rituals, knowledge and products are taken from one place to another. A ‘milpa’ is a piece of land that grows from using ancient Mesoamerican agricultural practices that are necessary to produce products to meet the basic needs of a family. A milpa contains a diverse ecosystem that produces corn, beans, squash and chile working in solidarity. This ecosystem is, to a certain point, what has fed us, and one of the most valuable gifts that Damian Ortega wishes to share from Mexico. Ortega uses sculpture, installation, performance, film, and photography to arrive at events of deconstruction, both material and conceptual. In his work, the familiar is altered and re-purposed, leading the viewer to inspect the unexpected interdependence of the components involved. Ortega highlights the complex social, political, and economic contexts that are embodied in every-day objects. Fernando Palma Rodríguez b. 1957, San Pedro Atocpan; lives and works in San Pedro Atocpan ‘Language programmes us’, shares Fernando Palma, indicating that it is possible to be a different person in different languages. Palma is an expert in programming; he has a background as an electrical engineer and he is interested in the transmission of systems, knowledge, and electricity. Part of Palma’s work is preserving the Nahua language, a group of languages related to the Aztec people, settled mainly in the central part of Mexico. ‘It is through indigenous languages that we begin to see a different relationship between people and their environment, their art and culture’, writes Palma. For example, the word for artist in Nahua language is derived from the word for the number five – because the artist is the fifth point connecting the four points on a compass: North, South, East, West. This definition does not contain the triangular axes of fame, power or money. The artist had a formative experience in Bangladesh visiting the Chakma community during a residency at Britto Art Trust in 2003, understanding that the condition of his community in Mexico was linked to that of indigenous people on the other side of the world. He returns to Bangladesh to catalyse transmission of indigenous knowledges of language and ecology through workshops related to his body of work creating Nahua inspired pictograms (found in The Collective Body). Palma makes robotic sculptures that perform narrative choreographies, addressing issues faced by Mexican indigenous communities, such as that in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta in Mexico. These include human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises. He runs Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture as well as Libroclub Fernando Benitez In Cualli Ohtli, a book club active for over twenty years with Nahua reading groups for children, and Maspor Nosotros AC, an organisation constituted in order to prevent, mitigate and compensate for the environmental and social impact caused by industrial and consumer waste. Olafur Eliasson b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin Your Uncertain Shadow (Black and White) , 2010 HMI lamps, glass, aluminium, transformers Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Several spotlights project light on a white wall, however these lights only become perceptible when visitors enter and move across the space, blocking the light source and filling the void of the room with the presence of their shadows. The moving shadows of visitors create a sort of choreography and stretch and contract in tones ranging from grey to black, varying based on the movements of bodies in the space. Differences in race, religion, age, and class are flattened in this work as details used to identify individuals are reduced to moving outlines, and we become more aware of the present moment and the patterns we can build by engaging with people around us. Olafur Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world. Eliasson’s works span sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and climate change. Taloi Havini b. 1981, Arawa; Lives and works in Sydney. Reclamation , 2019–2020 Installation, mixed media Co-Curated by Diana Campbell, Alexie Glass-Kantor, and Michelle Newton. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace, Sydney for DAS 2020 with support from the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Realised with additional support from the Australian High Commission of Bangladesh Reclamation is a new work by Taloi Havini created in collaboration with her Hakö clan members. The artist draws from recent historical movements of conflict as well as acts of resilience and self-determination experienced within the social fabric of her inherited matrilineal birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Reclamation is a site-specific assemblage of natural materials, harvested from the artist’s own matrilineal Hakö clan land. Here, Havini traces the significance of impermanence in traditional Hakö architecture. Individual panels have been shaped, cut and lashed within an arched form to reference formal Indigenous knowledges and map-making, echoing temporal spaces created for ritual and exchange to assert aspace for collective agency. Reclamation speaks to notions of lineage and navigation. Underlying the ephemeral installation of cane and earth are questions about the ways in which we relate within temporal spaces; how borders are defined and claimed as well as the value of impermanence and embodied knowledge over fixed historical understandings. Havini weaves together the tensions of precarity and resilience, vulnerability and activism to create a space of encounter and transmission. Havini speaks through geographic and cultural specificity of situations with global implications, working at a time when communities across the globe find themselves at the tipping point of environmental and social change. Havini works with photography, sculpture, immersive video and mixed-media installations. She considers the resonance of space, ceremony, and how material culture can be defined and translated through contemporary practice. Vasantha Yogananthan b. 1985, Grenoble; lives and works in Paris The artist Vasantha Yogananthan photographed SECMOL’s moving Ice Stupa project in Ladakh . Yogananthan's work straddles fiction and documentary, and this project shows how an imagined idea for a utopian future can come into being through creativity and institution building. Yogananthan’s photographic approach has been developed over the last 10 years whilst working on the major independent projects Piémanson (2009–2013) and A Myth of Two Souls (2013–2020) which have been published, exhibited and awarded internationally. Yogananthan is deeply attached to analogue photography for its slow – almost philosophical – process. His interest in painting led him to work around the genres of portrait, still life and landscape. SECMOL/Ice Stupa The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) engages scientists and engineers with young people growing up in Ladakh (a highly border-contested mountainous zone of northern India bordering China), especially those from rural or disadvantaged backgrounds. SECMOL equips young Ladakhis with the knowledge, skills, perspective, and confidence to choose and build a sustainable future in a high desert, which is increasingly lacking in water. Temperatures in the Indian Himalayas are rising as a result of climate change, causing snow from glaciers to melt faster, negatively affecting local communities that rely on springtime meltwater for agriculture. Resulting from two years of experiments at SECMOL, ‘Ice Stupa’ is a local solution to a local problem. ‘Ice Stupa’ is an artificial glacier created by piping a winter mountain stream down below the frost line, and then cascading it out of a vertical spout in the desert plateau. When gushing water encounters freezing ambient temperatures, it transforms into a conical ice formation with minimal surface area exposed to direct sunlight. The artificial glacier lasts late into the spring, allowing communities extended access to water for irrigation, as opposed to normal ice, which melts much faster. This is a local solution at a human scale. These photographs were taken by the artist Vasantha Yogananthan in 2019 for the New Yorker. SECMOL’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS JOG and ruangrupa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Jog Art Space is based in Chattogram, in south eastern Bangladesh. Unlike Dhaka, Chattogram has no commercial galleries and no network of contemporary art collectors, leaving artists to find alternative ways to sustain themselves. Jog Art Space provides the local visual arts community with mentoring support, exhibition opportunities, platforms for exchange and discussion, and access to international artistic exchange programmes. Some members of the group are teachers at the Institute of Fine Arts and see themselves as a bridge to experimental ways of working outside the confines of the academy, thus the name Jog, which translates as ‘connect.’ They advocate taking art out of the gallery, and into public spaces, which they refer to as ‘the emancipation of art.’ Since its establishment in Jakarta in 2000, ruangrupa has founded a video art festival, an online newspaper, music festivals, a library, a radio station, and an art school, among numerous other projects. ruangrupa also create installation works and other devices to investigate how the population of a city of more than 10 million people and lacking in infrastructure can appropriate the public space. ’Ruang‘ means ’space‘ in Sanskrit and Bahasa Indonesia, and ‘rupa’ means ’visual form‘. The collective includes artists, curators, architects, and writers, varying in number from 6 to 50 according to the project. Through programmes and interventions in urban space, ruangrupa exposes how knowledge is produced and shared through informal social situations — in line with their motto ‘Don’t make art, make friends’. Gerobak Cinema is a mobile rickshaw screening station created through a collaboration between Jog and ruangrupa, producing screening sessions in several spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy on 14 February, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment was collaboratively designed by artists, designers, IT technicians and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos or selected Bangladeshi films.

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the last five editions of the platform with a global team of collaborators. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, adding a scholarly element to the platform through collaborations with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, Cornell University, Harvard University, RAW Material Company, Gudskul, and many other formal and grassroots educational initiatives around the world. Pacific Islands and Bangladesh are at the forefront of climate change; Campbell’s maternal family is indigenous CHamoru from the island of Guam, and her heritage inspires her curatorial practice and the development of DAS as a platform to amplify indigenous practices both in South Asia and internationally. In addition to her exhibition making and writing practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home and community-based residency program at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Campbell’s practice specializes in building networks. She is part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged initiatives, and leading the international development of EDI Global Forum, a global network of art education departments as an initiative of the Campania Region of Italy developed by the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples that is convening over 150 global institutions to address needed change in art education. She is currently curating the 2023 edition of DesertX in the Coachella Valley opening in March 2023, linking the climatic challenges of droughts and floods across California and Bangladesh. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. DAS 2014 Team Guest Curators Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

ALL PROJECTS তন্দ্রা /TONDRA OPEN CALL FOR LOGO DESIGN Submission closed OPEN CALL FOR LOGO DESIGN তন্দ্রা / TONDRA Samdani Art Foundation invites young artists and graphic designers to submit logo proposals for TONDRA/ তন্দ্রা . We are looking for a static logo (in both English and Bangla) along with a short animation/GIF version of the logo . The moving version does not have to be final at the submission stage — a rough or simple animation is completely fine. The animation/GIF will primarily be used for social media storytelling , while the static logo will be used across digital, print, and exhibition contexts . The design should reflect the poetic, emotional, and dream-like world of TONDRA —a liminal space where reality and imagination blur, where longing, nostalgia, transformation, and new futures coexist. Your logo may be: Graffiti-inspired Cartoon/comic style Minimal Experimental Hand-drawn, illustrated, or digitally designed Or any creative visual language that captures the spirit of TONDRA We strongly encourage submissions that creatively respond to the Tondra text and express how you interpret its themes. Find the Tondra text below: Tondra text .pdf Download PDF • 113KB Prize The selected artist/designer will: Receive BDT 30,000 See their design used across TONDRA ’s platforms and possibly at the next Dhaka Art Summit The winning artist/designer must be willing to: Work with the Samdani Art Foundation team to refine the logo Develop/adjust the GIF or short animation for social media and other platforms Additional financial support may be provided to the winner through mutual conversation SUBMISSION GUIDELINES Who can apply Young artists, students, new designers, emerging creatives Age limit — 20 to 40 years old Must be Bangladeshi and based in Bangladesh What to submit Logo in English (PNG preferred) Logo in Bangla (PNG preferred) GIF / short animation (a rough version is acceptable for submission) A short explanation (150–300 words) describing: What inspired your design How your logo connects to the ideas of TONDRA Meaning behind colours, shapes, symbols, metaphors, etc. Full name + Phone number + Email + (optional) Portfolio link Technical Requirements PNG format (transparent background preferred) GIF (under 10 seconds) File size: max 10MB total No AI-generated submissions No copying or modifying existing copyrighted work Important Notes The winning designer must be open to edits, refinements, and changes to both the static logo and the animated version in conversation with the SAF team. Final design must function across print, digital, and exhibition formats. DEADLINE Please submit by 23 :00 on 16 December, 2025 SUBMISSION FORM Click here to fill up the submission form. For any query please write to apply@samdani.com.bd

ALL PROJECTS Risquons-Tout Wiels, 19 Sept 2020 – 1 Jan 2021 Shezad Dawood's research about Bangladeshi modern architecture through the archives and history of Muzharul Islam took a new form at Wiels, expanding upon his Samdani Art Foundation supported co-commissions with the Bagri Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary at Frieze LIVE London 2019 (with Timothy Taylor Gallery) and Dhaka Art Summit 2020.