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

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. Emily Dolan Director of Operations and External Affairs Emily Dolan is the Director of Operations and External Affairs. She originally trained as a visual artist and since 2002 has worked in art institutions, including five years at The Fine Art Society, her primary focus being contemporary art. Since 2012 she has taken on production orientated roles in non-profit organisations and has coordinated exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London, The 55th Venice Biennale, Garage Centre of Contemporary Art and Culture, Moscow, and the Chalet Society, Paris. Eve Lemesle PRODUCER Eve Lemesle is an arts producer based between Europe and South-Asia. She started the arts management agency called ‘What About Art’ in Mumbai in 2010. She has produced many exhibitions and consulted internationally for the Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums, Shanghai Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit, Kochi Biennale, the Asia Now art fair at La Monnaie de Paris, Soho House collection amongst others. She is currently a consultant with Reliance for the upcoming JIO World Centre in Mumbai. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Public Art at the University of Shanghai. Eve has been installing some of the most prestigious private and corporate art collections in South-Asia. Tasmia Nehreen Ahmed Manager of Communications Shabnam Lilani Curatorial Assistant and Assistant to Artistic Director Nivriti Roddam Curatorial Assistant and Institutional Relations Liaison Rezaul Kabir Kochi Architect and Project Manager for Architecture in Bangladesh Safiqul Islam Assistant Project Manager for Architecture in Bangladesh Asifur Rahman Assistant Project Manager for Architecture in Bangladesh DAS 2016 Team Amara Antilla Daniel Baumann Katya Garcia Antón Guest Curators Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan GOETHE INSTITUT BANGLADESH Judith Mirschberger ALLIANCE FRANCAISE DE DHAKA, BANGLADESH Bruno Plasse BRITISH COUNCIL- BANGLADESH Eeshita Azad BANGLADESH SHILPAKALA ACADEMY Liaquat Ali Lucky Rashed Maqsood BARRISTER Anita Gazi DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

ALL PROJECTS DOCUWALK KASSEL, GERMANY | JUNE - SEPTEMBER 2012 Mahbubur Rahman and Tayeba Begum Lipi visited Documenta 13 which was supported by Samdani Art Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS The Sunwise Turn Curated by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa The Sunwise Turn took Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point and meditated upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industrial, modern and region. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writings in the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the symposium sought to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western modernism. Bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy, the workshop is conceived as a series of propositions linking Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. The Sunwise Turn was a critical circumambulation around the philosopher, curator and historian. It picked up the phrase from an oft-overlooked bookshop, which became the centre of anarchist political thought in New York City just after the first World War, a place that Coomaraswamy not only came to be closely associated with, but evoked as “the storm of the world-flow”. Following are the papers presented at the symposium: Still Reading Coomaraswamy by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Date: 9 February 2018, 10.20am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The Sunwise Turn took Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point and meditated upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industrial, modern and region. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writings in the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the introductory remarks sought to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western modernism. One methodological approach that this paper sought to engage with was that of an “alternative geography” that Coomaraswamy puts forwards in A History of Indian and Indonesian Art, where he seeks to understand cultural production in Asia not through the tried lenses of 'influence' and 'borrowing' but through the steady proliferation of 'cognates', i.e. the study of connections and lateral links between different sites. This paper also tracked some of the critical secondary literature that has emerged on Coomarswamy in the last three decades from the Indian subcontinent where much of his work remains canonised and contested from beyond the subcontinent, especially the United States of America where newer lines of inquiry are emerging on his thoughts and impact as a curator of Asian art. Overall, the remarks offered thoughts about the rationale in bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy and how The Sunwise Turn linked Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. Shabbir Hussain Mustafa curated SEA STATE featuring artist Charles Lim Yi Yong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. He is Senior Curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where he currently heads the curatorial team overseeing Between Declarations and Dreams, a long-term exhibition that surveys art about the region from the 19th century to present day. From 2013-2015, he was lead curator of Siapa Nama Kamu? (in Malay, What is Your Name?), the Gallery’s other long-term exhibition that focuses on art in Singapore from the late 19th century onwards. He was formerly Curator (South-Southeast Asia) at the National University of Singapore Museum (NUS Museum), from 2007-2013, where his approach centred on deploying archival texts as ploys in engaging different modes of thinking and writing. It was at NUS Museum that he initiated the critically acclaimed accumulative platforms Camping and Tramping through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011) and co-conceived the experimental space prep room | things that may or may not happen (2012-ongoing). Mustafa writes often and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, Singapore Section. In 2017, he was curator in residence at the DAAD in Berlin and is currently developing two multimodal projects on the philosopher-curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and the artist-poet Latiff Mohidin. The Figure of the Artisan in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art by Iftikhar Dadi Date: 9 February 2018, 11.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ananda Coomaraswamy resided in Ceylon between 1902-1907. Based on this experience, his first major book, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art was self-published with great care in a luxurious limited edition in 1908. It contained a great amount of original research carefully detailing technical and cultural information, which remains valuable today as an indispensable guide to traditional crafts of Kandy. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art engages with the problem of translating the legacy of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement into the colonial context. This paper argued that the book is caught between a historical recreation of 'mediaeval' Kandy, and an anthropological and historical description of craft processes. Coomaraswamy’s paradoxical account is the result of a necessary 'mistranslation' of the 'mediaeval,' as carried over from industrial Britain into a colonial site. The consequences of this maneuver are both textually and photographically incorporated into Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, in which the artisanal figure oscillates between a dying anthropological specimen on the one hand, and an already deceased and thus a spectral figure on the other. Iftikhar Dadi is an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of History of Art. He is the author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) and the edited monograph Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). Dadi has co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). Curatorial projects include Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space at Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2012) & Nasher Museum, Duke University (2013-14); and Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001-2002). Dadi serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals Archives of Asian Art; Bio-Scope: South Asian Screen Studies; and on the board Art Journal during 2007-2011. He is an advisor to the Hong Kong based organization Asia Art Archive, and director of The Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. As an artist, Iftikhar Dadi has collaborated with Elizabeth Dadi for twenty years. Their practice investigates popular media’s construction of memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization, and the productive capacities of urban informalities. Their work has been widely exhibited internationally, including the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia; Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Miami Art Museum; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Dhaka Art Summit; and the Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo. Coomaraswamy to Ambedkar: Tracing the Vanished Horizons of the ‘Vernacular in the Contemporary' by Nancy Adajania Date: 9 February 2018, 11.40am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper traversed a genealogy of perspectives that bear strongly on the categories of the 'folk', 'tribal', 'rural', 'national' and 'modern', which have shaped our discourse around what constitutes the contemporary in postcolonial Indian cultural production. Certain tropes, figures, sites and themes recur in this discourse: the village, regarded variously as the site of native and pre-modern authenticity, pre-industrial backwardness or cultural wholeness; the figure of the artisan, variously conceived as an organic bearer of holistic cultural values, a poor relation to the metropolitan and academy-trained artist, or as a scripturally sanctioned producer of culturally significant icons; the 'folk' as the pre-national repository of collective consciousness that assured its members of identity and belonging in a locale; the 'tribal', either stigmatised as a rustic figure without access to cultural capital, championed as a subaltern victim deserving of developmental assistance, or idealised as a cultural subject rooted in the specificities of a local environment. Above all, it is 'authenticity' that persists as an anxiety in this discourse. As such, it becomes the ground of claims exerted by numerous forces, including the Hindu right wing, aggressive modernisers, resurrectionists of the crafts, and progressively oriented thinkers who wish to invest contemporary artists emerging from these backgrounds with agency. This paper revisited a series of debates staged across the 20th century in India, and which involved such participants as the cultural historians E B Havell and A K Coomaraswamy, the anthropologists G S Ghurye and Verrier Elwin, and the political thinkers M K Gandhi and B R Ambedkar. In doing so, it demonstrated that the debate over the 'vernacular in the contemporary' is both about an aesthetic self-assertion and a choice of artistic form, as well as a demand for the redistribution of social equity and the securing of participatory citizenship for India's subaltern communities. Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (Guild Art Gallery, 2016), goes beyond the mandate of a conventional artist monograph to map the larger histories of the Leftist and feminist movements in India. She recently edited the transdisciplinary anthology Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge (Raza Foundation, 2017). She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale in 2012, and has curated many exhibitions including: ‘No Parsi is an Island; A Curatorial Re-reading Across 150 Years’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, 2016); ‘Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video’, Jewish Museum, New York (2015); and the hybrid exhibition-publication project ‘Sacred/Scared’ at Latitude 28/ TAKE on Art magazine, New Delhi (2014). Adajania taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2013/2014). She is the juror for Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015 - 2017). Locating Art in the Colonial Milieu by Swati Chattopadhyay Date: 9 February 2018, 12.20pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy A.K. Coomaraswamy remarked that nothing of artistic value had been produced in 19th century India, and that modern Indian architecture was “at its very lowest ebb.” Overcoming this degraded condition necessitated learning the forgotten 'art of living.' Where was this lost art of living to be found? In the art schools, in the village community, in colonial cities, or among the educated classes? In this paper, Chattopadhyay looked at the ethical implication of location/space in the work of Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose that engaged with and critiqued Coomaraswamy’s vision of cultural regeneration in everyday life. Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005), Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012), the co-editor (with Jeremy White) of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Taylor and Francis, 2014). She is currently completing two book projects: Geography of Small Spaces, and co-edited volume (with Jeremy White), Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Routledge, 2017). She received a 2015-16 Guggenheim Fellowship for her research project, “Nature’s Infrastructure: British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880.” She is a former Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. A.K. Coomaraswamy and Japan – A Tentative Overview by Shigemi Inaga Date: 9 February 2018, 1.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper gave an overview appreciation of A. K. Coomaraswamy in Japan. Kakuzo Okakura (also known as Tenshin Okakura), author of The Book of Tea (1906), might have had a chance to see Coomaraswamy in London. Okakura’s attempt at constructing Asian Art History as an idea has been accomplished by Coomaraswamy as curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. British rule of India may find a parallel in Japan’s colonial rule over Korea. In this context, Muneyoshi Yanagi, founder of the Popular Crafts Movement in Japan, is worth comparing with Coomaraswamy. Yanagi’s medievalism, inspired from his Korean experience, may shed new light on Coomaraswamy’s view of arts and crafts. Both Yanagi and Coomaraswamy have shown affinity with William Morris, though their encounter did not bring any fruitful outcome to the posterity. And yet, the friendship between Takumi Asagawa and Gurcharan Singh in their pursuit of ceramics in Korea and India cannot be overlooked. The merging of Oriental religious experience and aesthetics is another common feature between Yanagi and Coomaraswamy. Just like Coomaraswamy’s relation with Rene Guenon and Mircha Eliade, Yanagi was closely related to D.T. Suzuki. As an epilogue, and in token of Coomaraswamy’s legacy, this paper touched upon Fuku Akino, a Japanese woman painter who took special interest in decorations made by women in Kacchi, Gujarat. Shigemi Inaga is Professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto, Japan. He was formerly Dean of the School of Cultural and Social Studies, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai). He grew up in the city of Hiroshima and obtained a Ph.D. at l’Université Paris VII in 1988. Thereafter he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts (1988-1990), later he served as Associate Professor at Mie University (1990-1997), before being appointed to his current position in 1997. His main publications include La Crépuscule de la peinture, Lutte posthume d’Édouard Manet (1997), The Orient of the Painting, from Orientalism to Japonisme (1999), The Painting on the Edge, Studies in Trans-national Asian Modernities (2013). Academic proceedings he has edited include Crossing Cultural Borders (1999), Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts in the 21st Century (2005), Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking (2010). Shigemi Inaga is also co-editor of Vocabulaire de la spatialité japonaise (2013) and recipient of the Suntory Academic Award, Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, Ringa Award for the Promotion of Art Studies (all in 1997) as well as the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Prize (2001). Banished to America - The Anarchist Turn by Alan Antliff Date: 9 February 2018, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In early 1917 Ananda Coomaraswamy arrived in New York from Britain under trying circumstances. Agitation for India’s independence from colonial rule, coupled with his outspoken opposition to Indian involvement in the British war effort, had led the authorities to regard him as a dangerous subversive, better expelled than tolerated. Upon arrival, however, he found a ready audience for his views among New York’s anarchists. Plunging into that milieu, Coomaraswamy would contribute a series of articles to the anarchist Modern School journal and codify his own variation of anarchism for an American audience in The Dance of Siva (1918). Coomarawamy’s involvement in, and impact o,n the movement in America was multifaceted; his concept of 'idealistic individualism' influenced the arts; his calls for 'post-industrial' social transformation resonated with critics of capitalism; his 'cosmopolitan' interpretation of Frederick Nietzsche’s philosophy captured the imagination of theorists; and his anti-colonial condemnation of World War One struck a strong chord among revolutionaries. This paper explored this pivotal moment in Coomarswamy’s career through a rich network of activists, artists, cultural centers and publications. Allan Antliff is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Victoria, Canada. He has authored Joseph Beuys (2014); Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the fall of the Berlin Wall (2007); Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001), and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004). Allan has published on a wide range of topics, including radical pedagogy, post-structuralism, and aesthetics. Currently he serves as art editor for the UK-based journal Anarchist Studies and co-edits the interdisciplinary journal Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. His writings have been translated into numerous languages and he is recognised as one the foremost authorities on the history of anarchism and the arts. Stella Bloch, Navigating a Radical Life of Art and Dance, East and West by Kim Croswell Date: 9 February 2018, 3.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Stella Bloch was an artist, dancer, and writer whose emergence on the New York art scene unfolded during tumultuous and exciting times during the later years of World War One. A self-taught artist and performer, Bloch initially drew her inspiration from the revolutionary dancer Isadora Duncan, but also sought out other performers to capture on the page. In 1917, she was attending a recital of the performing duo Roshanara and Ratan Devi where she met Ananda Coomaraswamy. That evening she showed him some of her drawings, which would mark a significant turning point in her life. Coomaraswamy soon became her mentor and her lover. Shortly after meeting Coomaraswamy Bloch made her acquaintanceship with Isadora Duncan’s six proteges, began practicing with them, and drew further studies of the dance from observation and from memory. In 1920, Coomaraswamy invited Bloch to join him on a museum purchasing trip to Japan, China, India, and Indonesia. There, Bloch was inspired by the performance traditions of Java and Bali, where she had an opportunity to closely study the art forms. Upon her return home to New York, she embarked on a new direction as a dancer, now performing in the manner of the Javanese dances she saw while on her journeys. This presentation of Stella Bloch offered an overview of Bloch’s art and dance, as well as an analysis of two texts by Bloch: “Intuitions” published in the Modern School Journal in 1919, and Dancing and the Drama, East and West, a booklet in which Bloch concluded Eastern dances to be superior to those in the West, for their value as cultural traditions rather than as ‘mere’ entertainment. Kim Croswell is an artist and writer currently living in Victoria, Canada. She has a history as a welded steel sculptor and a street puppetista. Her M.A. thesis, The Politics of Dance: Stella Bloch and the Ideal Drama, East and West, analyzed tensions between 'tradition' and 'modernity' in art and dance-drama by comparing the social-political function of the arts in South Asia with Euro-American dance practices. Currently, she is completing a Ph.D. in Leadership, Adult Education, and Community Studies at the University of Victoria, where she is investigating the value of educating for social change utilizing arts-based research practices. Ananda Coomaraswamy and Traditionalism by Mark Sedgwick Date: 9 February 2018, 4.20pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy As well as introducing the West to Asian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy also helped introduce the West to Asian religion, not as something remote and distinct from Western religion, but as an instance of that core religious truth that is "the common inheritance of all mankind." Coomaraswamy came to understand common, core religious truth in terms of what the Franco-Egyptian philosopher and metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) called “tradition,” itself a form of the “perennial philosophy” hat had interested Western thinkers and esotericists since the Renaissance. Coomaraswamy in turn changed the understandings of Guénon and of other “Traditionalists,” both by adding a certain academic rigor to their work and by convincing them to accept Buddhism as a valid expression of tradition, along Hindu Vedantism, Islamic Sufism, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. This paper placed Guénon’s Traditionalism within its wider context and examined both Traditionalism’s impact on Coomaraswamy and Coomaraswamy’s impact on Traditionalism. This included an abiding emphasis not only on Buddhism but also on traditional arts, reflected for example in the activities of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, founded in 2004 by Great Britain’s Prince of Wales. Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Before moving to Denmark, he studied at the universities of Oxford and Bergen and taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He works on cultural and religious transfer between the Muslim world, the West, and global transnationalism. His Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century was first published in 2004, and his Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age was published in 2016. He also works on contemporary politics. Transformation of Art in Nature by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath Tagore by Samit Das Date: 10 February 2018, 10.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Many years ago, I was surprised at how two bearded Brahmin scholars, namely Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath Tagore, exchanged thoughts on art, nature and time. Since then, my curiosity has evolved towards the philosophies of these two great scholars. I studied at Santiniketan, the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore, where I tried to grasp his ideas about nature and education. Coomaraswamy entered my life much later. My paper explored the idea and philosophy of art and nature in the context of the pre-independence period. I inquired how the ‘modern’ came to be negotiated between these two figures while trying to unpack the historical context as discussed and perceived by Tagore and Coomaraswamy, as I feel their thoughts are relevant today. Coomaraswamy suggested that culture is a living heritage, not something that belongs in a museum. Coomaraswamy’s profound grasp of the twin ideals of harmony and truth in Indian art helped him understand the evolution of Indian culture as a crossing of spiritual tendencies. Yet, he knew very well that the fusion of religious and aesthetic experiences was not exclusively Indian. This resulted in a dialogue between the spiritual traditions of the East and the West. Indeed, Coomaraswamy did not reject Western culture, what he opposed was modern secularism and anti-traditionalism. On the other hand, Rabindranath could see himself as an integral part of nature and could dissolve his innermost self in the elements – earth, water, air. In this state, he no longer perceived the earth merely as earth, or something apart from himself. The flow of water merged with the stream of joy in his soul, and he wrote: “If I be the earth, if I be water If I be a twig, if I be fruits or flowers If I travelled the world and beyond with this One Life There would no cause for care Wherever I go I would find the infinite self in the embrace of the boundless.” Neither of these thinkers believed that art and nature belonged in a museum but attempted to associate the aesthetic closely with everyday life, in which nature too plays an integral part. My presentation also looked at the thoughts of Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita and the way they resonated with art, because without their journey, Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath would not be complete. Samit Das was born in 1970 in Jamshedpur, India and specializes in painting, photography, interactive art works and artist’s books, often creating multi-sensory environments through art and architectural installations. He studied fine arts at Santiniketan Kala Bhavan and thereafter at Camberwell College of Arts. Samit has deep interest in archival and documentation tactics, often in search of newer visual vocabularies. Samit has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at TARQ and Clark House Initiative. One of his key projects has been to document the Tagore House Museum in Kolkata (1999-2001) and develop resonances with Tagore's concept of space in relation to Swami Vivekananda and Nandalal Bose. This resulted in the book Architecture of Santiniketan: Tagore’s Concepts of Space (2013). In 2016, he received the Prohelvetia Grant to research at The Material Archives in Sitterwerk. Most recently, he was awarded the Pernod Ricard Fellowship to work on post-independence Indian artists with Parisian links. Titled ‘Punashcha Parry’, the exhibition was held at Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2017). 'Who is this Coomaraswamy? Durai Singam's Life Work and the Impossibility of Not Writing' by Simon Soon Date: 10 February 2018, 11.20am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In what ways can the intellectual horizon of the diaspora be triangulated? How do they demonstrate a global connection that is not strictly formed by a movement from East to West? Can this multi-centre story complicate our commonplace understanding of what kind of 'worlding' did historiographical projects produce outside of the academia? This paper considers the life work of Ceylonese Malaysian Durai Raja Singam, who corresponded briefly with the esteemed scholar of Indian art history and curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Ananda K. Cooramaswamy, in the late 1940s. Durai Raja Singam later became one of the most obsessive biographical compiler of Coorasmaswamy’s life and work. Towards this end, he had self-published some of the most idiosyncratic yet valuable books, often filled with memorabilia, photos, excerpts, newspaper clippings, graphs and charts that aimed at preserving for posterity the profile of Cooramaswamy as one of the most renown scholars on Indian art and spirituality, alongside recognition of Coomaraswamy's greatness as a scholar-saint for the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. In this paper I considered Durai Raja Singam’s building of an archive and self-publishing initiatives in relation to the spiritual use of print technology. Though premised on a language of devotion, the life work ultimately attempts to construct an intellectual memory through the use of allegory. In this sense, these publications circulate a form of intellectual, cultural and moral resistance amongst the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora in a time of civil war as ethnic tensions between the Tamil and the Sinhalese communities were heightened following the independence of Sri Lanka. Simon Soon is a researcher and Senior Lecturer in the Visual Art Department of the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya. He completed a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Sydney under an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. His thesis ‘What is Left of Art?’ investigates the spatial-visual cultures at the intersection between left-leaning politicized art movements and the emergent modern publics of Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines from 1950s–1970s. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in the art, urban histories, history of photography and art historiography. He has written on various topics related to 20th century art across Asia and occasionally curates exhibitions, most recently Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond. He is also co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Art Vol. 4. From 2015–16, he is a participant in the Power Institute’s “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” funded by Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. He is also an editorial member of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and a team member at the Malaysia Design Archive, a repository on visual cultures from late 19th century to the present day. Crafting the Nation from Boston and Baroda by Priya Maholay-Jaradi Date: 10 February 2018, 12.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The crafts’ discourse serviced a complex web of imperialist, nationalist and capitalist agendas between the metropole, colony and indirectly-ruled British India from the 1820s to the first half of the twentieth century. The nationalist ideologue within A.K. Coomaraswamy’s writings on Indian art in general and The Indian Craftsman (1909) in particular, furthered two aims: one was to educate the colonial state on the different standards of Indian art; the second was to champion the cause of the disadvantaged artisan by furthering a protectionist discourse to preserve caste-based guild systems and their contexts of production in what was viewed as a coherent, timeless Asian tradition against the aesthetically failed experiments of a rapidly industrialising Britain. For all its emphasis on timelessness, authenticity and anti-industrialism, equally national-minded crusaders such as Maharaja Sayajirao III of Baroda steered the cause of the craftsman with a reformist slant. This paper problematised Coomaraswamy’s writings by juxtaposing Baroda’s pragmatic experiments which yielded an alternative paradigm of traditional crafts, technology and capital. Close archival reading of Baroda State’s polytechnics, workshops and loans to international exhibitions and firms, not only points to a modernising narrative of the crafts but also illuminates Baroda’s participation in a global system of production and taste-making. By underlining a series of ironies and paradoxes, this paper highlighted how protectionism and reform actually co-opted each other in the space of exhibition and publications. Quite contrary to the “Boston-based giant’s” idyllic picture of the craftsman as pre-modern, provincial Baroda demonstrated the craftsman’s readiness to unhinge caste-based categories and participate in new systems of technical education, workshop-style production and metropolitan capital and technologies. Despite their seemingly conflictual strains, in the end, both ideologues, theorised and displayed alternative standards of assessment of Indian (art), craft and design and its adaptive leverage to groom the uneducated European view. Priya Maholay-Jaradi is currently Convenor for Art History Minor, a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore and the National Gallery Singapore. She earned an MA in art history from School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001); a PhD from the National University of Singapore (2012) and a post-doctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2013). Former Curator at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, she has co-curated Portrait of a Community (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2002), Beauty in Asia (Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, 2007), Tautology of Memory (NUS Museum, Singapore, 2012). Jaradi has authored Parsi Portraits from the Studio of Raja Ravi Varma, Mumbai: KR Cama Oriental Institute (2011); Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, Mumbai: Marg Foundation (2015); Fashioning a National Art, Oxford University Press (2016). Panel Discussions: Histories Panel Discussion led by Allan Antliff with panelists Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Nancy Adajania, Swati Chattopadhyay and Shigemi Inaga Date: 9 February 2018, 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Panel Discussion led by Swati Chattopadhyay with panelists Samit Das, Simon Soon, and Priya Maholay Jaradi. Date: 10 February 2018, 12.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Cosmopolitanism, Panel Discussion led by Shigemi Inaga with panelists Allan Antliff, Kim Croswell, and Mark Sedgwick Date: 10 February 2018, 12.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy

ALL PROJECTS Volcano Extravaganza | Total Anastrophes Curated by Milovan Farronato With Runa Islam as Artistic Leader Within the frame of the Fiorucci Art Trust (whose stated aim is to ‘collect’ or promote art experiences), Total Anastrophes reimagined the 8th edition of the annual Volcano Extravaganza in Dhaka. Instead of engaging with Stromboli’s landscape and the talisman of its active volcano, the programme transformed the inside of the Shilpakala Academy’s Auditorium into the inner echo chamber of an active volcano. Performative interventions evoked themes of isolation and distance; memory and mysticism; cosmic energy and the violence of nature; improvisation and theatre. On the occasion of its 8th edition, the Volcano Extravaganza — the annual festival of contemporary arts conceived and produced by London-based non-profit institution, the Fiorucci Art Trust — erupted away from its volcanic centre in Stromboli. Taking the empirical and ephemeral experiences collected on the island, the Fiorucci Art Trust migrated the knowledge, the collaborations, the artists, the talks, the volcanic activities: the mind as a volcano and the emotional body with Total Anastrophes. The Artistic Leader was Bangladeshi-born, London-based artist Runa Islam, while the festival was curated, as per tradition, by Milovan Farronato. The participants included Cecilia Bengolea, Alex Cecchetti, Patrizio Di Massimo, Haroon Mirza, Tobias Putrih, Osman Yousefzada (OSMAN)- all figures belonging to the astral orbit of the Trust. After DAS 2018, the Volcano Extravaganza will move back to Stromboli, completing its own anastrophe in July 2018. Total Anastrophes is a figure of speech, a form of poetic license to indicate that something has been taken and moved away, in order to emphasise something else. An alteration of the typical order which might look like a mistake, a transmutation gone wrong: yet anastrophes have the gift to metamorphose a regular sentence into a re-energised version of itself, opening space for chaos, and creation. Away from Iddu (him), as the locals call the volcano of Stromboli, the intention of Fiorucci Art Trust was to create a collective experience. To orchestrate an adequate environment to celebrate self-reflection, remembrance, personal and collective latent memories, as the Trust gazed into its history, and to the many collaborations which have helped characterise it. The auditorium was turned into a theatre inside of a volcano, into an echo-chamber pervaded by sounds and moans, magmatic hertz, vibrations: frequencies of a harmonious language inside a unique cradle for performances, where voices were born from inscrutable sources and latent memories evoked. Visitors were greeted by slowed movements, reverberations and distorted sounds. The echo chamber was inhabited by mobile architectural structures conceived by Tobias Putrih in dialogue with visual imagery and motifs by Runa Islam, acting simultaneously as diaphragms and screens, altering the space to dissolve the border between spectatorship and performers. Moreover, the same drapes of fabrics and textiles hanging from the mobiles became subjects for OSMAN to perform tailoring cutouts and create new designs on the spot, together with local seamstresses, as in a workshop. Re-contextualising both earlier and new performances from their bodies of work, live interventions by Alex Cecchetti and Patrizio Di Massimo were the voice of the echo-chamber. Cecilia Bengolea also drew from her own production history, to trigger and improvise movements and action in the space, through old and new choreographies. Haroon Mirza orchestrated a soundscape for the auditorium: an environment where a distorted sonority synchronised with a visual choreography of LEDs danced in conjunction with his own footage of Stromboli. Audiovisual contributions by Alec Curtis, Anna Boughighian, Roberto Cuoghi, Joana Escoval, Chiara Fumai, Liliana Moro, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Mathilde Rosier, among others, alternatively intervened in the landscape.

ALL PROJECTS Illustrated Lectures | Imagery, Ideas, Personae, And Sites Across South Asia Curated by Beth Citron And Diana Campbell Betancourt Artists Lucy Raven, The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun), Matti Braun, and Amie Siegel presented illustrated lectures concerning the contemporary circulation of traditional and modernist imagery, ideas, personae, and sites across South Asia. Specifically, and respectively, these included sculptural reliefs at Ellora, Rabindranath Tagore’s art school at Santiniketan, the vision of physicist Vikram Sarabhai, and the global circulation of modernist furniture from Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Building on their individual presentations, the artists gathered with curators Beth Citron and Diana Campbell Betancourt in the Education Pavilion on February 4th for a critical discussion of the form of the ‘illustrated lecture’ or ‘lecture performance.’ As an artistic discipline that has often seemed to blur boundaries among art, research, and discourse, the workshop examined different approaches to the lecture performance, as well as the limits of this form and the language used to circumscribe it. Taking historical examples of lecture performances by Chris Burden, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, and Joseph Beuys into consideration, one question this workshop hoped to answer was how the ‘lecture performance’ differs from other types of live works and talks delivered by artists today. This form has been defined rather loosely globally, and comparatively been less studied and practiced in South Asia. This programme sought to address both the global, and local implications of this form. THE OTOLITH GROUP NOTES TOWARDS A FILM ON SANTINIKETAN “Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening cosmos.”Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928 Since 2012, The Otolith Group have been developing a work that engages with what Gayatri Spivak calls the ‘aesthetic education’ of Visva Bharati University, Shantineketan. This lecture performance presented scenes from the aesthetic sociality engendered in, and by, Kala Bhavana at Visva Bharati. The Otolith Group’s encounters with the pedagogy of ‘tree schooling’ developed by Tagore at Visva Bharati opens onto an engagement with improvisational practices of desegregation and dealienation. The encounters with these practices subtend the ongoing implications of Tagore’s aesthetico-political ecology of nature into a rethinking of the shape of learning in the future of the present. Such a rethinking feeds into an improvisation in and with cinema. What emerges from these experiments with aesthetic education are a series of scenes from a Neo-Tagorean cinema. A cinema conceived as a practice of image making that is shaped by the multiple frames and links of network realism and the geography of the hyperlocal. MATTI BRAUN VIKRAM SARABHAI This illustrated lecture took its point of departure from the biography of Vikram Sarabhai (1919-1971), father of the Indian space programme. It showed how his work intersected major cultural developments in 20th century India and revealed interactions with international modernist figures including Le Corbusier, John Cage, and Henri Cartier-Bresson as they engaged with him and members of his influential family of patrons in their home city of Ahmedabad.This lecture was supported by the Goethe-Institut. AMIE SIEGEL BACKSTORY An associative talk on the speculative, imitative and extractive actions within design, art and auctions in connection to India— on Chandigarh and Le Corbusier, on Pierre Jeanneret, John Pawson and Donald Judd, on modernism, minimalism and marketing—how these iconographies, and the behaviours of design and art markets, both mask and disclose the flow of capital. This talk accompanied the artist’s film presentation in the exhibition Planetary Planning. LUCY RAVEN LOW RELIEF Low Relief connected research into bas-relief sculpture in both India and the United States to the illusion of depth created in stereoscopic 3D lms, and the globally-connected, labour-intensive processes of post-production involved.

ALL PROJECTS Performance Workshop Tour by Myriam Lefkowitz 20 - 21 March 2015 Myriam Lefkowitz continued her Walk, Hands, Eyes (Vilnius), a performance project she has been doing for more than seven years, but in the form of a workshop. The performance project is a perceptive experience, weaving a relation between walking, seeing, and touching, for one person at a time, lasting one hour, in a city. Over the course of two days in March of 2015, sixteen participant artists took this guided tour with Lefkowitz through Old Dhaka and University of Dhaka.

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

Visit Sylhet The Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy 14/3 Segunbagicha, Segun Bagicha Rd, Dhaka, Bangladesh The Dhaka Art Summit is free to the public, ticketless, and requires no registration to attend. Applying for a VISA The Bangladeshi Government provides a visa-on-arrival (VOA) service for citizens of the following countries: United States of America, Canada, New Zealand, Russian Federation, China (excluding Hong Kong passports), Japan, Singapore, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia (KSA), Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Malaysia, and all European countries If applying for a VOA, you will need to provide a photocopy of your passport, two passport-size photographs, a printed copy of your hotel reservation (including a full address and contact number), a copy of your return flight ticket, and a completed arrival card and visa application: copies can be obtained on arrival at Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport. The VOA fee is approximately $52 USD (other currencies are accepted) and must be paid in cash (debit and credit cards are NOT accepted). If you need to apply for a visa before you fly, please contact the nearest Bangladesh High Commission/Embassy. For more info, visit the Bangladesh Ministry of Foreign Affairs . Our VIP team is there to assist you with visa letters or any queries. Please contact our VIP team here: vip@dhakaartsummit.org The Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport is approximately 17km from the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and is served by numerous international and domestic airlines. Flight options from most international destinations are easily searchable through popular travel sites and travel search engines. Visit our DHAKA page to learn more about the city. Getting to Dhaka 01 The Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy is in Segun Bagicha, Dhaka. Suitable hotels can be found through popular travel sites and hotel search engines. Due to the heavy traffic situation in Dhaka, we recommend international visitors to stay closer to the venue. The InterContinental Dhaka is the official partner hotel of the Dhaka Art Summit. For more hotel options, download the recommended list Accommodation 02 The best way to move around on the streets of Dhaka is in a car. The best way to arrange a rental car is through your hotel concierge. In case, you decide to go and book a rental car by yourself here is what we recommend the followings: App-based ride share: Uber Pathao For pre-booking visit: RentalCarBD Sheba.xyz Bdcabs.com Getting around in Dhaka 03 The official currency in Bangladesh is the Taka: known as Bangladeshi Taka or BDT. The Taka is a restricted currency and you will only be able to obtain cash currency on your arrival in Bangladesh. Taking money out at an ATM is the quickest and easiest means of currency exchange, but don’t forget to tell your bank that you are travelling before you leave. There are also several money exchange available at the airport If you require further assistance, please email info@dhakaartsummit.org For press enquiries, please email press@dhakaartsummit.org or visit our press page Currency Exchange 04

Statement from the Artistic Director Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Welcome to the new web portal of the Samdani Art Foundation! We thank you for being here, as your visit speaks to a desire to connect with our work in Bangladesh, and a commitment to widen your worldview by including points of view that institutionalized knowledge historically belittled or omitted entirely. We see our role as being interlocutors in this ongoing process of learning unlearning and relearning; where we elevate histories of Bangladesh and other contexts from the global majority world (i.e. the world outside of Europe and North America) above the space relegated for footnotes (a nod to DAS 2018 participant Nancy Adajania). We call ourselves a research platform – which we build through the careful acts of collecting, producing, convening, mentoring, and sharing. We created this platform through a unique collaborative process linking the passion and dedication of collectors with the creativity of artists, architects, designers, curators, writers, historians and educators executed through the hard work of our team, our partners, and our volunteers, encouraged by the enthusiasm of our growing number of participants and visitors. We recognize that what is happening outside of the room is often the site of the most radical reimagining, where artists come together to create the conditions for great art to be made, and also activate tremendous social change in the world. At Samdani Art Foundation we are interested in art on the scale of life , far bigger than any exhibition in a gallery space can contain. Life in Dhaka pulses with a collaborative, hopeful, and can-do energy unlike anywhere else in the world; it is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, the front line of where we feel the impacts of the world’s climate catastrophe. Dhaka Art Summit 2018 speaker Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak hit upon that when commenting that “Unless this kind of wonderful effort [of Dhaka Art Summit] is supplemented by another kind of effort, we cannot achieve the impossible possibility of a socially just world.” Our work at Samdani Art Foundation seeks to blur those boundaries between what is in the room and what is outside of the room – seeking to make a freer and more porous atmosphere for dialogue, understanding that beauty can change the world. Beauty can be impact, and impact can be beauty. This portal is an entry point to our ongoing and evolving work fostering connections between artists and architects of the past, the present, and the future with the Bangladeshi public, and welcoming in sensitive collaborators and visitors from all over the world to learn how to connect differently with cultures and geographies that they might not yet be familiar yet. Tied to our desire to strengthen and re-establish links that colonialism tried to sever between humanity and nature, we work to cultivate, maintain, and grow relationships, and to build confidence that these relationships can create the conditions to change how the (art) world functions. This is why Dhaka Art Summit can best be described as a family reunion, where more and more members join in, and you can see how this familiar family friend named DAS grows up more and more each time you visit her, but retains her childlike wonder, curiosity, and joy. One of the best compliments we’ve ever received at Samdani Art Foundation is that “Dhaka Art Summit is where the art world goes and they turn into people – accessible human and vulnerable.” Dhaka Art Summit is also a place that launches many careers, partially because international CVs hold no meaning where most of our visitors are unfamiliar with traditional markers of prestige, making it possible to really talk about the work and the intentions of the artist in ways that are difficult to do on the international art circuit. As we grow, acknowledging the limitations of communicating in English, we work to build our work around concepts and words in Bangla, making them accessible to both Bangla and non-Bangla speaking audiences. We are working to step off of the institutionalized timelines of biennales and step closer into life’s rhythms – and long-term collaborative projects related to culture and agriculture that will soon be visible at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park – will give a glimpse into our stretched-out timelines of the future, inspired by projects in the previous bi-annual (but not ‘a biennial’) format Dhaka Art Summit such as Otobong Nkanga’s Landversation and Damian Ortega’s work Sisters, where we learned first-hand that nothing you can possibly try to do can make a cornfield grow in less than 90 days. We are drawn to acts of imagination informed by knowledge. Since day one, we have been planning for what does not exist yet -- trying to design a space where anyone from any background can come and have a profound encounter with art and culture, and imagine that they can play a part in building a more beautiful, socially, and environmentally just world. We would be delighted if you were to join us and our growing number of collaborators in this endeavor. Read more about the thinking behind Diana's vision: Forging Artistic Connections_Stories from the Dhaka Art Summit by Diana Campbell from the upcoming publication of Frame Contemporary Art Finland . Considering Dhaka Art Summit from a CHamoru Perspective by Diana Campbell from the book American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence . “It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way." https://www.routledge.com/our-products/open-access-books/publishing-oa-books/chapters

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 5 - Residence Time Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 5 - Residence Tim e Standing in the air on scaffolding, laying telecommunications cables while submerged under the sea, or manning call centres while suspended on a foreign time zone– the toiling bodies of the over 20 million migrant South Asian workers around the globe are mostly invisible, and yet instrumental in creating many of the world’s most picturesque cityscapes as well as to the simultaneous socioeconomic development of South Asia through the money they send home. Bangladeshis are moving beyond the countries geopolitically comprising South Asia, further west to the UAE, Qatar and Saudi Arabia and further east to Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore. These people are often treated as bodies without souls, having no culture of their own beyond their otherness. They are often written out of the narratives of the very nations they help to build, as reflected by the sparse South Asian cultural discourse in Southeast Asia. Works by Subas Tamang, Gan Chin Lee, Liu Xiaodong and Shahidul Alam attempt to humanise this issue through technique of portraiture. South Asian culture is present all over the world via complex relationships of labour, and this Bearing Point serves to reorient our thinking about South Asia away from land-bound definitions - no longer sufficient markers of where a culture lives. Even if you watch a Hollywood 3-D film such as Harry Potter, the film was post-produced via a global assembly line running from Los Angeles through Bombay and beyond, capitalizing on low labour costs and government subsidies to supply the painstaking work going into each frame of a film. These digital networks are beautifully captured in the work of Lucy Raven and Anoka Faruqee, and the diversity and complexity of these interwoven movements can be seen Nabil Rahman, Yasmin Jahan Nupur and Pratchaya Phinthong’s work.Overseas workers often inhabit a suspended condition of statelessness, literally going underground as in Charles Lim’s haunting video or being forced to cross unfamiliar black waters as in Andrew Ananda Voogel’s chronicle of the pain of indentured labour. Bangladesh has its own migrant labour situation now that over half a million Rohingya refugees have entered Bangladesh. Just as there are instances of Bangladeshi workers being trafficked or falsely enticed into exploitative labour contracts in Southeast Asia, there are also cases of Rohingyas being trafficked in Bangladesh as a cheap labour source as chronicled in Kamruzzaman Shahdin’s monumental quilt made from material traces of displacement.We build the world around us through our labour, and it is important to remember that the post-industrial economies in which many of us participate are built on the backs of cheap, often coerced, migrant labour in the Global South. Transnational flows of labour create new cultural economies, which need to respected and celebrated as having as much legitimacy as national narratives. Artists Andrew Ananda Voogel (b. 1983 in Los Angeles, lives and works in Taipei) Kalapani: The Jahaji’s Middle Passage (2014) Video installation Courtesy of the artist Andrew Ananda Voogel chronicles the legacies of longing from exile in his work, much of which explores the history of the Jahaji’s of Guyana. Through a new form of debt-bound slavery termed indenture, about 3.5 million South Asian workers (primarily from Bengal), including Voogel’s great-grandmother, were tricked, forced, or manipulated by the British before being loaded on boats and sent to Britain’s 19 colonies including Fiji, Mauritius, Ceylon, Trinidad, Guyana, Malaysia, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa between 1834 and the end of World War II. As our eyes adjust to the darkness of the room in Kalapani: The Jahaji’s Middle Passage (2014), we enter a state of uncertainty about the ground we stand on, thrust into the trauma of being separated from loved ones on alien lands across the “black waters.” Anoka Faruqee (b. 1972 in Ann Arbor, lives and works in New Haven) 2016P-08 (Wave), 2016 2017P-08 (Wave), 2017 2017P-10, 2017 2017P-27 (Circle), 2018 2017P-05, 2017 2017P-11, 2017 acrylic on linen on panel Courtesy of the artist and Koenig and Clinton. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew Anoka Faruqee’s hypnotic technicolour paintings create uncanny surfaces reminiscent of digital screens. The glitches and bruises break the illusion, speaking to the imperfect and unpredictable translations from the virtual to the physical, and the role of the human hand in this translation. In the context of Bangladesh, Faruqee’s patterns and motifs also call to mind the histories of the textile industry, where it is said the fear of superior craftsmanship lead British administrators to cut off the thumbs of weavers; today, this once venerated industry feeds a global cycle of cheap fast fashion and accelerated consumption. Faruqee creates delicate topologies in her hand-combed paintings, where the imperfection, or glitch, plays a crucial role in the formation of otherwise smooth-milled surfaces. Charles Lim Yi Yong (b. 1973 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) Sea State VI, Phase I, 2015 Single Channel HD digital video, 7 minutes, sound Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from National Arts Council Singapore and technology support of Sharjah Art Foundation Singapore continues to grow, both above and under the sea. The Jurong Rock Caverns are Southeast Asia’s first underground liquid hydrocarbon storage facility. Located at a depth of 130 metres beneath the Banyan Basin on Jurong Island, the Caverns provide infrastructural support to the petrochemical industry that operates on Singapore’s Jurong Island, a cluster of islets reclaimed into one major island and connected to the mainland in the 1980s. Opened in September 2014, Phase 1 of the caverns holds some 1.47 million cubic metres of oil storage tanks. This is about the size of 600 Olympic swimming pools. The volume of undersea rocks excavated from Phase 1 equals 1.8 million cubic metres, enough to fill 1,400 Olympic swimming pools. The SEA STATE, which exists as the frontier of a climatic and ecological complex, takes us to places that were until recently only a thing of oneiric theory. This place is occupied by submerged migrant workers from Bangladesh whose labour here contributes to the residual climactic effects plaguing their country back home. Gan Chin Lee (b. 1977 in Kuala Lumpur, lives and works in Kuala Lumpur) No Place for Diaspora, 2015 Oil on linen Private collection, Kuala Lumpur Post-Colonial Encounter, 2015 Oil on jute Private collection, Kuala Lumpur Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Gan Chin Lee’s paintings grapple with the changing urban landscapes of Malaysia, tracing demographic and cultural shifts that accompany the influx of international labour and capital. He examines the lives of diasporic South Asian communities, tracing their occupation of already-existing urban infrastructures and creating new spaces of cultural hybridity. The patterns evoked in these mesmerizing paintings also call to mind batik fabric techniques which carry histories from South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and also Africa, speaking to the wealth of existing cultural memory found in these hybrid spaces reactivated by the movement of labour. Labour and conditions of precarity, where the circumstances of citizenship often become murky, become the basis of the invention of new ways of living together. Kamruzzaman Shadhin (b. 1974 in Thakurgaon, lives and works in Dhaka) Haven is Elsewhere, 2017-2018 Used clothing, embroidery, video Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Produced by the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s work Haven is Elsewhere (2017-2018), the newest iteration of an ongoing community project, embodies the common quest of most migrants and refugees: the search for a “safe haven.” In Kamruzzaman's work, internally migrated people in Thakurgaon in Northwest Bangladesh, create a quilt from the used clothes of displaced people from Southern Bangladesh - the border demarcating South and Southeast Asia. Many of these clothes and narratives of displaced people were collected over a period of a year and a half by the artist from people who were illegally trafficked as forced labourers into Thailand and Malaysia, some of these were abandoned by the newly arrived Rohingya refugees who accepted new clothes given by local people in Bangladesh and NGOs. These are then sewn together by the internal migrant community in Thakurgaon and embellished with the traditional Bengali kantha embroidery techniques through a therapeutic ritual. These monumental quilts form a projection surface for video documentation that attempts to capture the stories of displacement through these once-used clothes. This quest for freedom often continues as the new migrants and refugees become targets for illegal trade and trafficking, continuing a cycle where the safe haven shifts its axis further and further out of reach. Liu Xiaodong (b. 1963 in Jincheng, lives and works in Beijing) Steel 8, 2016 Oil on canvas, diptych Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong Refugees 7, 2016 Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong Refugees 8, 2016 Oil on canvas Courtesy the artist and Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London/Hong Kong Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew Liu Xiaodong’s portraits of refugee and migrant workers from South Asia in Europe intervene in the narrative of what is often termed “the refugee crisis” – of the “non-Western Other” arriving in droves on the shores of “Fortress Europe”. He produces intimate encounters that disrupt the dehumanisation of these men, where often the only self-image allowed to them are stamp-sized photographs on identity documents that no longer hold validity in the countries where they have arrived. Secrecy often surrounds the sites where migrant labourers live and work. Chinese migrant workers are a growing force in Bangladesh with heavy Chinese investment in infrastructure projects. In 2016, Xiaodong created hopeful portraits of Bangladeshi workers at infamous ship-breaking yards in Chittagong, encountering difficulty in the process as his presence as a Chinese artist created a sense of heightened tension in the workplace in an industry fearful of being shut down. Lucy Raven (b. 1977 in Tucson, lives and works in New York City) Curtains, 2014 Anaglyph video installation, 5.1 sound, 50 min looped. Courtesy of the artist Technology supported by Sharjah Art Foundation In Hollywood, the incredibly labor-intensive process of creating visual effects for our 21st-century cinema is called “post-production.” But the industry still relies on 20th-century modes of industrial production: its global assembly lines run from Los Angeles through Bombay, Beijing, London, Vancouver and Toronto, capitalizing on cheap labor and government subsidies to supply the countless hours of painstaking work going into each frame of a film. Viewed with anaglyph 3D glasses, Lucy Raven’s video installation Curtains explores the digital creation of location and space insofar as they relate to contemporary movie-making. The work brings real-world geographies (and real workers) back into the computer-generated virtual spaces today’s moviegoers inhabit. Nabil Rahman (b. 1988 in Sylhet, lives and works in Dhaka) Old Bond Street, 2017 Found cigarette foils from Bangladesh Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist Richmond, 2017 Found cigarette foils from the Philippines Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Bellas Artes Projects. Photographer: Noor Photoface During a residency at Bellas Artes Projects in the Philippines in 2017, Nabil Rahman was surprised to learn that several of the artisans with whom he was collaborating spoke a few words of Bengali due to their time as migrant workers in Dubai, during which time they had Bangladeshi friends. The artist has woven together found cigarette foils from both countries into two sculptural forms reminiscent of emergency blankets. Cigarette foils are gleaming golden motifs that indicate the depth of colonial traces in Bangladesh and the Subcontinent, stamped with subtle symbols on their surfaces such as the Benson & Hedges (a British Tobacco company) logo. The patterns proliferate in terms of psychological preference to foreign branded products, even if the tobacco itself is grown locally. Nicotine is consumed during breaks- so whether working for foreign companies abroad or smoking foreign tobacco – there exists a problematic addictive cycle, manipulating human behavior rather than selling an actual product. Pratchaya Phinthong (1974 in Ubon Ratchathani, lives and works in Bangkok) Untitled (Jeans), 2016-2018 Jeans, performers Courtesy of the artist and gb agency Produced by the Bétonsalon, Paris for the exhibition Anywhere But Here (2016) In Untitled (Jeans), Pratchaya Phinthong questions ideas of value, localizing transnational flows of workers and capital by producing a participatory system of exchange. The artist borrowed pairs of jeans from two migrant Cambodian construction workers residing illegally in Thailand. They had purchased these jeans at the Bangkok weekend market, known for selling items stolen or cheaply bought from the stocks of clothing donated by charity organizations in the West to NGOs in Cambodia. Much of the clothing for sale had previously been intercepted by middlemen, who sell them to Western tourists and local workers alike for profit. These jeans purchased in Thailand were sent to Paris to be worn by the staff of the exhibition Anywhere But Here (2016) at the Bétonsalon, Paris, which originally commissioned the work this work was originally commissioned. In return, Phinthong used the production budget of that exhibition to buy bicycles for the workers back in Thailand, as they had requested. These jeans are now worn by DAS staff working as art mediators in Bearing Point 5. Jeans are a powerful symbol of the networks which we are forced to participate in everyday in a global economy, and carry the material history of denim’s association with industrial capitalism, including with Indigo in Bengal. The Levi’s jeans used in this work are themselves knock-offs, alluding to out-sourced assembly-lines, where garment workers in countries such as Thailand, Bangladesh and Mexico, work to produce cheap clothing which feeds the international demand for fast fashion. Bangladesh alone produces one of every seven pairs of Levi’s jeans, so it may be speculated that the jeans were originally produced here. Knock-offs feed a parallel economy of needs, where items such as Levi’s jeans are status symbols, despite being unaffordable to many who want them, particularly those from the very class that produces them. By introducing these knock-off jeans into the space of an exhibition, Phinthong raises the question of the value of copying, particularly in the context of contemporary art, where the idea of originals still holds considerable importance. Through this process-driven artwork, the artist brings to the surface the already-existing entanglement between two unregulated spaces of labour – of the migrant labourer and the cultural worker, both frequently working contract-to-contract jobs, with no fixed working hours – and the precarious conditions within which they operate. The work becomes a system through which both sides are able to imagine possibilities for their own parallel economies of exchange. Shahidul Alam (b. 1955 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka) The night before a migrant is about to depart, his family members pray for his safe return, 1988 A woman bids goodbye to her man, unsure of whether they will meet again, 1996 Workers and relatives wave at each other unaware that they are too small to be visible, 1996 Giclée prints on Hahnemühle Digital Fine Art Paper Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface Shahidul Alam chronicles the moment before the departure of Bangladeshi migrant workers, in the suspended state of Dhaka’s international airport. Migration is often a collective experience, where entire villages contribute to raising the funds necessary to pay the recruiting agencies, and extended family and friends accompany the to-be migrants to the airport. He unpacks the almost ritualized gestures that accompany this journey, in the moments before dislocation, as men are herded through the theatre of airport security, and these families reconfigure the in-between space of the airport to act as spaces of intimacy, of prayer, of hope. Subas Tamang (b. 1990 in Amardaha, lives and works in Kathmandu) I Want to Die in My Own House, 2017 Carved slate with metal armature Commissioned and produced with support from Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Noor Photoface Subas Tamang’s work I Want To Die In My Own House (2017) uses the traditional form of a slate roof – a motif of vernacular architecture formerly prominent in his native Nepal and elsewhere in South Asia – when immortalizing his parent’s labour and dreams by carving their image into stone. This is an autobiographical commentary on the dreams of thousands of family members in Nepal who move from small villages to bigger towns and cities or even abroad in the search of a better life. When people move, they usually rent a room as part of the struggle for survival. The continuous challenges of securing their daily needs and a decent livelihood for their families while nursing a hope to have a permanent roof above their heads, often traps such families in an unending cycle of struggle. The money that overseas Nepali workers send home keeps the country afloat, and the dreams of one day being homeowners help them to endure adversity. Yasmin Jahan Nupur (b. 1979 in Chittagong, lives and works in Dhaka) The Long Way Home, 2011 Fabric with embroidered maps Courtesy of the artist and Exhibit320. Photographer: Pablo Bartholomew and Noor Photoface Yasmin Jahan Nupur is inspired by multicultural connections forged across linguistic barriers in spaces created by the transnational flow of labour. Nupur spent six months immersed in the community of migrant workers in Mauritius, which was once of the destinations for debt-bound labourers during the British colonial period from 1833-1920 when about 3.5 million South Asians were transported to Africa, the Caribbean, and islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. In the miserable housing conditions Nupur encountered, occupied today mostly by Chinese and Bangladeshi migrant workers, the artist found that strong community bonds formed when people from different countries were forced to occupy a single small room , leaving them no choice but to find ways to survive together. In the suspended fabric sculpture The Long Way Home (2011), Nupur sewed and embroidered the routes of connections that forged this vast network of friendships.

ALL PROJECTS Fabric(ated) Fractures Concrete, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai Alserkal Avenue collaborated with the Samdani Art Foundation on Fabric(ated) Fractures, an exhibition at Concrete, Dubai in March 2019. Fabric(ated) Fractures provided a platform to amplify the voices of artists from Bangladesh and South and Southeast Asia, and built on the exhibition There Once was a Village Here held at Dhaka Art Summit 2018. Curated by Samdani Art Foundation Artistic Director Diana Campbell Betancourt, this exhibition also introduced new works from artists with a connection to Bangladesh. Fabric(ated) Fractures considers contexts that 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. Sensitive spaces are often razed, with their people forced to succumb to the state and submit to the domination of majority forces. However, the social fabric of these spaces often remains intact, a testament to human fortitude, even if its people are dislocated and their dwellings levelled. Regional lenses, including overarching headers such as ‘South Asia’ or ‘MENASA’ tend to filter out the many traces of difference found on a local level, and this exhibition aims to weave a more complex picture of the vibrant and diverse threads that comprise a yet-to-be crystalised identity in the wounded border areas related to Bangladesh; areas that cannot be defined with a single overarching regional framing device. Selected artists are: Ashfika Rahman Ayesha Jatoi Debasish Shom Gauri Gill and Rajesh Vangad Hitman Gurung Jakkai Siributr Joydeb Roaja Kamruzzaman Shadhin Kanak Chanpa Chakma Munem Wasif Pablo Bartholomew Rashid Choudhury Reetu Sattar Shilpa Gupta To know more about the exhibition, please download the catalogue from here .