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

ALL PROJECTS A beast, a god, and a line Curated by Cosmin Costinas A beast, a god, and a line was woven by connections and circulations of ideas across a geography with Bengal at its core. This geography - arbitrary as any mapping - is commonly called the Asia-Pacific, but it could also be defined by several other definitions, which this exhibition explored and untangled. The issues summoned aimed to mark the current historical moment. Perhaps the most visible among these is the development and spread of politicised religion and its structures: Salafi Islam across several countries, extremist Buddhism in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand, Hindu ethno-fascism in India, and revivalist Christianity among many indigenous communities in the Philippines, to name just a few examples in the region. In close connection to politicised religion is the rising tide of populism and nationalism across continents. These are all intimately connected to a generalised loss of confidence in the ideals and certainties of Western liberal democracy, and to rising alternatives and challenges to the liberal consensus, often based on various attempts to create parallel narratives to Western modernity. Western hegemony was also challenged from a fundamentally different premise, that of unfinished processes of decolonisation and resurgent Indigenous identities, which were reflected both in the subject matter and in the aesthetic choices of several exhibited artists. Throughout the exhibition, artists investigated traces of colonial domination, as well as the different ramifications of that hegemony today, when cultural and environmental genocides continue to unravel landscapes, communities, and worlds. These broad stories circulate across South and Southeast Asia on routes going back several historical eras, the first being the early Austronesian world that has woven a maritime universe surpassed in scale only by European colonialism, from the Pacific to Madagascar, with Taiwan as its origin and Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines at its core – which was taken as the speculative and approximate geographical perimeter of this exhibition. These historical journeys also served as an introduction to a major political reality that defines many contexts today and is often manipulated by the rising nationalist discourses: the contemporary waves of migration and refugee crises. This exhibition questioned how we should negotiate common ground in the context of the overall political and ideological fragmentation discussed above. How can an aesthetic basis for the language of contemporary art be maintained if the ideological bases of contemporary art are questioned? How can positions that claim disparate and conflicting genealogies sit together in a shared exhibition space? One tenuous leading line across the different aspects of this exhibition were textiles. A material and language common to different cultural spaces, textiles also have a firmly routed history in art, being possible sites for parallel processes of historiography. Moreover, textiles hold a different position in negotiating relationships with places and contexts, in ways that the individual agency of artists escapes. While this exhibition included artists and practices of various historical, cultural, and geographical contexts, it was not based on an ethos of discovering or introducing artists from presumably marginalised regions, but worked within the premise of an already fragmentary and decentralised art world. Ampannee Satoh (b. 1983 in Pattani; lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand) Lost Motherland (2016) Pigment print on paper Courtesy of the artist The work addresses the recent history of forced migrations of Muslims, from Myanmar and Syria to the artist’s native Pattani, a Muslim majority region in Southern Thailand, where an insurgency has been taken place for more than a decade. Satoh attempts to capture the sense of displacement and alienation that accompanies exile, imbuing her photographs with a feeling of loss. The figures in her photographs seem gathered to mourn a collective pain, standing as mute witnesses to tragedy. Anand Patwardhan (b.1950 in Mumbai, India; lives and works in Mumbai) We Are Not Your Monkeys (1997) Video Courtesy of the artist This music video was jointly composed by the filmmaker along with renowned poets Daya Pawar and poet-singer Sambhaji Bhagat, giving a Dalit/indigenous perspective to the Hindu epic Ramayana. After German indologists in the 19th century created the myth of an Aryan invasion of the Indian sub-continent by a superior race and hailed the Vedic (Brahminical) period as representing a Golden Era in Indian history, many upper caste Indians felt proud to be considered the racial equivalent of the white man. At the same time those who questioned both race and caste began looking at what may have existed in the region before the Aryans supposedly arrived. The Ramayana itself, composed in the ancient Brahminic period in praise of Lord Rama, depicts characters who reveal traces of a pre-Aryan culture that was subjugated. The song and the film We Are Not Your Monkeys is a subaltern reading of history that uses poetic license (like the Ramayana did) to turn the Ramayana epic on its head. Anida Yoeu Ali (b.1974 in Battambang, lives and works in Phnom Penh, Cambodia) From right to left: Secret Lagoon (2014) Coconut Road (2012) Campus Dining (2012) Roll Call (2014) Sun-dried Landing #1 (2014) On the River (2013) From the Buddhist Bug Series Digital c-print Courtesy of the artist The work is an ongoing project encompassing performance and photography, mapping interfaith relations between the Muslim minority to which the artist belongs and the Buddhist majority in her native Cambodia, against the background of the rise of Buddhist fundamentalism in Southeast Asia. Ali devises a seemingly magical creature (alluding to the religious myths of Islam, Buddhism, as well as the traditional animistic beliefs of the region) that occupies spaces of community gatherings, such as canteens and sites of prayer, rendering these ordinary activities surreal. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970 in Bangkok, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand) Chai Siris (b. 1983 in Bangkok, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand) Dilbar (2013) Single-Channel Video Installation, suspended glass pane Courtesy of the artist and the Sharjah Art Foundation Commissioned by the Sharjah Art Foundation The work is an affectionate portrait of Dilbar, a Bangladeshi construction worker in the UAE, whose name means 'full of hearts’. Throughout the work he is seen to be asleep, while the viewer is mesmerised by the pace of the video and its light spilling over the edges of the screen. His sleeping is a gentle yet clear act of defiance to the logic of workers exploitation. There are over two million Bangladeshi workers currently living in the Gulf countries. Apichatpong Weerasethakul (b. 1970 in Bangkok, lives and works in Chiang Mai, Thailand) Photophobia 1-4 (2013) Photo etching and Chine-collé Courtesy of the artist The work is based on photographs documenting scenes of violence taken during the Takbai Incident in Thailand’s restive South in 2004. Around 1,500 demonstrators had gathered before the local police station to protest the detention of six men, only to be brutally repressed, resulting in 85 deaths. The photographs reveal the violence with which the Thai government has been handling insurgents and civilians alike in its Muslim-majority southern provinces. Art Labor Collective Thao-Nguyen Phan (b. 1987 in Ho Chih Minh City, lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam) Truong Cong Tung (b.1986 in Dak Lak, lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam) Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran (b.1987 in Berlin, lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City) In collaboration with Rocham Djeh, Rolan Loh, Siu Lon, Rahlan Aleo, Kpuih Gloh and Rocham Jeh Jrai Dew Sculpture Garden (2016-ongoing) Wood sculptures, mural Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, Para Site and Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie. Art Labor Collective works within different communities, bringing in practitioners from diverse disciplines such as medicine, film-making, education, to bring to questions ideas of labour and social practice. The Jrai Dew Sculpture Garden is part of an ongoing series of sculptural presentations realized in collaboration with the Jrai Dew community of the highlands of central Vietnam, where Art Labor collective member Cong Tung hails from. The project takes inspiration from Jrai spiritual beliefs of the transfiguration of the human after death. In the Jrai philosophy, humans go through many cycles of existence, where the final stage is to transform into dew (ia ngôm in Jrai language) evaporating into the environment – the state of non-being –signaling the beginning particles of new existence. Charles Lim (b. 1973 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) Stealing the Trapeze (2016) Video installation, books Courtesy of the artist With support of National Arts Council Singapore Catamarans were seldom constructed in the temperate West before the 19th century, but they were in wide use as early as the 5th century CE in what is today Southern India. The word ‘catamaran’ is derived from the Tamil language (from kattu ‘to tie’ and maram ‘wood, tree’). In England, one of the earliest mentions of the ‘catamaran’ is made by the 17th century adventurer Willian Dampier who encountered this peculiar manner of relating to water when he reached south-eastern India during this first circumnavigation of the globe. The outrigger and catamaran was prevalent from equatorial South to Southeast Asia (including the artist’s native Singapore) and well into the Pacific as a design solution to stabilise and allow for narrow hull shapes which drew shall drafts. They were the primary vehicles that made the first migrations of Austronesian people to the islands of the Pacific possible. Today, the catamaran is raced in the America’s Cup. The artist, a former Olympic sailor, recounts how in his studies years he came across the autobiographical accounts by one Peter Scott about the circumstances surrounding the invention of the sailing trapeze. Scott claims that he and his fellow sailors invented the trapeze in 1938 along the Thames River in England. Peter Scott was the son of Robert Falcon Scott (the explorer who perished in the Antarctic) and sculpture Kathleen Scott. In his last letter to his wife, Robert Scott is said to have written, “make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than the game”. Cian Dayrit (b. 1989 in Manila, lives and works in Manila, Philippines) Feudal Fields (2018) Mixed media and embroidery on canvas Courtesy of the artist Mapa de la Isla de Buglas (2017) Mixed media and embroidery on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Tin-aw Art Gallery Taking as the point of departure the 2004 Hacienda Luisita Massacre, when protesting farmers and workers of the sugar estate were killed by agents of the Cojuangco family, these tapestry maps look into the role of sugar production in the country’s colonial past up to the neocolonial and neoliberal present as well as the country’s part in the global market as producers of raw material and consumer of excess goods including culture and education. Addressing feudalism and landlessness by pointing out ownership via imperialist interests and bureaucrat capitalist landlords within the format of a fabric map which functioned historically as nomadic murals brought to one colonized state to another by warrior-kings. Daniel Boyd (b. 1982 in Cairns, Queensland, lives and works in Sydney, Australia) WTEIA2 (2017) Oil, archival glue on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney WTEIA2 (2017) Oil, archival glue on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney WTEIA3 (2017) Oil, oil pastel, archival glue on linen Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney These paintings reference the stick-charts of the Marshall Islands, which were used by indigenous communities to navigate the sea by mapping the positions of islands as well as patterns of swell and disturbance in the water. These charts were not taken aboard during voyages, but rather memorized in advance by the sailors. Boyd, who is of Australian indigenous heritage, as well as a descendant of a Vanuatu slave forcibly taken to Australia, alludes through these paintings to the many modes of navigating land and sea that existed in the Pacific region. These forms of navigational knowledge were erased by colonialism, and replaced with the unidirectional model of the map, used primarily as an instrument of control. Dilara Begum Jolly (b. 1960 in Chittagong, lives and works in Chittagong, Bangladesh) The War that Never Went Away (2016-2017) Pierced photographs Courtesy of the artist The work revisits traumatic histories of the Bangladesh War of Liberation in 1971. The artist pierces holes in photographs of the Physical Training College of Dhaka, which was used as a site of torture of Bangladeshi freedom fighters by the Pakistani army during the conflict. Through this work, she traces histories of trauma, examining what she terms the haunting of history in the present. Garima Gupta (b. 1985 in New Delhi, lives and works in Bengaluru, India) Cabinets of Curiosity (2017) Home 02 (2017) Lesser Bird of Paradise in a Vitrine (2017) Hunting Implements from Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea (2017) Twelve-wired Bird of Paradise (2017) Hunting Implements from Arfak Mountains, West Papua (2017) Home 01 (2017) Kombayorong Dance (2017) Two Studies of a Broken Mountain (2017) Magnificent Riflebird (2017) Giclee print on cotton paper Courtesy of the artist and Tarq, Mumbai Jakarta Markets (2017) Red Bird of Paradise (2017) Lesser Bird of Paradise (2017) Chinese Taro (2017) Giclee print on cotton paper Courtesy of the artist and Tarq, Mumbai Hamas? (2017) Charcoal on Manjar-Pat cotton cloth Courtesy of the artist and Tarq, Mumbai The work is an ongoing journalistic and archival research in the island of New Guinea,examining the wildlife trade in Southeast Asia and its effects on the communities and ecology of the island. The core focus of this body of work is the Bird of Paradise, an avian species endemic to New Guinea with a long history as the embodiment of the exotic in European colonial imagination. The research casts light on the socio-economic history of the erstwhile trade which spanned from New Guinea to Europe and traces its effect on the contemporary state of wildlife trafficking in Southeast Asia. Idas Losin (b. 1976, in Taiwan; lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan) Traveler (2014) Rano Raraku (2014) Moai (2014) Island (2014) Ku (2017) Oil on canvas Courtesy of the artist The artist’s background, belonging to the Truku and Atayal aboriginal people of Taiwan is an an important aspect of her work. The Austronesian community originated among the Aboriginal people in Taiwan, from which this language family extended through sea migrations over the past millennia, reaching as far away places as Easter Island, Hawaii, New Zealand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Madagascar where related languages are still spoken, making this migration the most extensive expansion of a linguistic group outside Western colonialism. The artist’s work is part of an effort to reconnect with her roots and contribute to a shaping of contemporary Taiwanese indigenous identity, after several waves of colonialism and cultural oppression, when one of the most significant aspects of Taiwanese history, being the original homeland of hundreds of millions of people spread across a third of the world’s surface, was ignored. She decided to travel to the furthest points of the Austronesian speaking world and paint her impressions, in a subversion of the position of the European explorer. Presented here are paintings she did in Easter Island and Hawaii. Ines Doujak (b. 1959 in Austria, lives and works between London, UK and Vienna, Austria) Loomshuttles, Warpaths (2010-2018) Mixed media Courtesy of the artist This project was produced in cooperation with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art. The work started life as a collection of 48 Andean textiles, tools, and accessories, and developed as an eccentric archive. Its world, in which textile culture reached exceptional levels of sophistication and significance, was battered and distorted by the European invasions of the early 16th century. It survived, but the impact of those invasions remain as dirty footprints in the production and trade of the ’globalized’ world. The archive traces workers' fights against exploitation through time and geographies, and looks at how types of cloth, dyes, and colour are tied up with the history of colonialisms, revealing both their beauty and their ugly. To stay grounded, the modern figure of the Investigator travelled the Andean region, and in the belief that items of the collection can talk, posters have been created in response to them, inviting people, both close and far away from the Andes, to communicate with them. Fires: The War Against the Poor (2012-2013) Mixed media Courtesy of the artist This project was produced in cooperation with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art. The silkscreen printed cloth is a fresco from the global war against the poor, who are often locked in with overloaded electricity circuits, living under threat of death and horrible injury by fire while fulfilling skin-tight clothing contracts. It directly refers to several incidents of the past years, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, which have brought little improvement to working conditions. Jakrawal Nilthamrong (b. 1977 in Lopburi, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand) Zero Gravity (2013) Single channel video Courtesy of the artist The film journeys in the borderland between Thailand and Burma, and the borderland between fiction and truth, past and present. Set in Ratchaburi, not far from Bangkok, it follows a man on a journey into the history of that place. Ratchaburi Hospital was the site of a 2000 incident, when the hospital was occupied and staff taken hostage by the Karen Christian militia "God's Army" from neighboring Burma, lead by two 12-year old twins, Johnny and Luther Htoo. Jamdani Jamdani is one of the fifinest textiles of Bengal, produced in the region of Dhaka for centuries, and was originally known as Dhakai (a name still common for the fabric in India). The historic production of Jamdani was patronized by imperial warrants of the Mughal emperors, under which the Persian term Jamdani came to be in popular use, since it was the court language. Under British colonialism, the Bengali jamdani, and the similar, albeit fifiner, muslin industries rapidly declined due to colonial import policies favoring industrially manufactured textiles from Britain. In more recent years, the production of jamdani has witnessed a revival in Bangladesh, using traditional techniques and often natural dyes. However, muslin, one of the most coveted fabrics in Europe in the 19th century, widely depicted in the academic portraiture of the time, was decimated by British economic policy to the point of biological extinction of the cotton subspecies used for making muslin. Jamdani is the closest version that remains of the famed muslin. The traditional art of weaving jamdani has been declared by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Jimmy Ong (b. 1964 in Singapore; lives and works in Singapore and Vermont, USA) Seamstress Rafflffleses #7 – Mr. Florent (2016) Cotton and Dacron stuffiffing Courtesy of the artist and FOST Gallery Test Batik #1 , Printed Test Batik #2 , Test Batik #3 and Printed Batik #4 Textile Courtesy of the artist and FOST Gallery Sketches for Fallen Tiger Batik motifs Watercolour on paper Courtesy of the artist and FOST Gallery The work refers to the figure of Thomas Stamford Raffles, one of the most infamous British colonial figures in South East Asia, who nevertheless remain largely revered in Singapore. His crimes are well remembered in Indonesia, which has suffered from Raffles' invasion of Java in 1812. He is also the author of "The History of Java", containing the chapter "Ethics of Javan", from which the artist quotes: "A caterpillar has its poison in its head, a scorpion in its tail and a snake in its teeth, but it is unknown in what part of the body the poison of man is concealed: a bad man is therefore considered poisonous in his whole-frame.” The textiles shown here replicate the batik technique of cloth painting, a technique which has become associated with Java and has reflected in its development the many layers of colonialism and occupation of the island in the last centuries. Jiun-Yang Li (b. 1967 in Taitung, lives and works in Taichung, Taiwan) Get the Sword (2006) The Magical Performance (2009) Forcing Me to Leave (2000) The Immortal Kid (2014) The Golden Immortals (2014) The Stinky-Headed Kid (1996) Black and White Impermanence - The Deities of the Two Paths (2005) Ink on paper Courtesy of the artist Fairy-Fairy-Fairy 35 (2011) Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist The Immortal White Ape of the Snow Mountain (2016) The Yin and Yang Swordsmith God (1995-2017) The Knight of Black Flowers (1998-2017) Wood, fabric Courtesy of the artist The Playground of Childhood Dreams (2008) Wood Courtesy of the artist The selection of works is representative for the artist’s distinct practice, engaging with traditional Taiwanese art forms, diverse religious representations and vernacular culture on the island. The son of a movie posters painter, Li has himself worked on movie posters, temple painting, calligraphy, Taiwanese glove puppets, as well as multimedia installations. Hailing from Southern Taiwan, where a distinctive cultural environment, influenced by Taiwanese indigenous people and Hoklo (descendants of the first Chinese migrants on the island, speaking the Minnan variety of Chinese languages), is the basis for promoting a Taiwanese identity distinct from the Chinese Nationalist idea that sees Taiwan as part of the Chinese cultural world. Joël Andrianomearisoa (b. 1977 in Antananarivo, Madagascar, lives and works between Antananarivo, Madagascar and Paris, France) Duration: continuous loop (2016) Remember Iarivo (2016) Yesterday. Repeat (2016) Your eyes tell me stories of Paris (2016) Where have you been? (2016) Do you remember? (2016) Repeat. (2016) Last Year in Antananarivo, 2016 Inkjet print on Hahnemühle paper Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid Last Year in Antananarivo takes as its point of departure a series of photographs of a ball held by the French colonials in 1900 in Antananarivo. In the images, Malagasy aristocrats are dressed in elaborate costumes reflecting the colonialists’ idea of a ‘civilised’ people. The work points to the ambivalent position of colonized elites in the process of imperialism, oscillating between complicity and resistance. The colonial ball was used by the imperialists to register their dominance over the bodies of the colonized elites, rendering the Empire as spectacle, another notable example being the infamous Delhi Durbar of 1911, staged while the Bengal Famine ravaged populations elsewhere in the country. When the day belongs to the night I, II and III (2016) Textiles Courtesy of the artist and Sabrina Amrani Gallery, Madrid The triptych is part of the artist’s practice of reinterpreting and recomposing fabrics into abstract and seductive compositions, which nevertheless bare the traces of their making and the stories of their makers and traders. The works presented here combine remains of cloth purchased in a market in the artist’s native Madagascar and of saris from Jodhpur in India's Rajasthan. The artist is interested in connections between people, places, and objects, in flows that often avoid the normative paths. While his native Madagascar has ancient connections to Asia, as the westernmost point of Austronesian expansion, Malagasy language being a close relative of languages spoken in Borneo, more recent connections between the island and India are evoked in this work. Gujarati traders, once a leading group of merchants throughout the ports of the Indian Ocean have settled in Madagascar since the 19th century and 70,000 descendants of African slaves and mercenaries, the Siddis, still live in India. Joydeb Roaja (b. 1973 in Khagrachori, lives and works in Chittagong, Bangladesh) Searching My Roots (2017) Pen and ink on paper Courtesy of the artist The series draws from the artist’s performance practice, and the beliefs of his native Tripura community in Chittagong Hill Tracts, to inquire into the possibilities of the survival of indigenous knowledge systems in the face of violent modernities. The artist, referencing painful memories of growing up in a region that has seen many conflicts, moves like an uprooted tree, walking through a landscape devoid of any markers of place, speaking to a sense of dislocated identity. Limbs become branches and sprout leaves, drawing from the traditional spiritual practices of the indigenous group to which he belongs, where the forest plays a central role in acts of becoming. Lantian Xie (b. 1988 in the UAE , lives and works in Dubai, United Arab Emirates) Taxidermy Peacock (2014) Taxidermy Peacock Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise, Dubai Peacock Tiles (2016) Mahjong Tiles Courtesy of the Jameel Art Centre Collection of mahjong tiles, each from a different set. Each set is made up of 144 tiles, among which is one Bamboo #1 tile, or ‘peacock tile’, often featuring a depiction of a peacock, or sometimes a sparrow, crane, or other bird. Meridian (2014) Two 1950s lithographs by John Fabreau from 1920s drawings by Danial G. Elliot Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise, Dubai The work is based on 1950s lithographs by John Fabreau from 1920s drawings by Daniel G. Elliot. The hallways of Le Meridien Hotel in Garhoud, Dubai are filled with depictions of thirty six different pheasants, among which is this same Golden Pheasant. Dubai’s rise as a shining metropolis at the crossroads of the global neoliberal era’s new trade routes continues the old cycle of metropolitan cultural capital accumulation seen throughout history. Lavanya Mani (b. 1977 in Hyderabad, India, lives and works in Vadodara, India) Travellers Tales – Blueprints (2014) Natural dye, pigment paint, applique and cyanotype on cotton fabric Courtesy of the artist and Chemould Prescott Road This series of paintings on cotton cloth evoke the sails of ships and remind of the complex role that textiles and dyes played in the history of colonialism in South Asia. They are realised using the kalamkari technique of cloth painting, the popularity of which, under the name of chintz, in 17th century Europe was such that French and English governments outlawed it to protect local mills. Inserted into the paintings are the texts of letters written by Western travellers to India who attempted to decode kalamkari and other techniques in order to replicate them back in Europe. Also used in these works is cyanotype, an early photographic medium which, when applied on cloth and exposed to light, produces blue colour, evocative of both the ocean and indigo - a dye that was a coveted commodity in the Indian Ocean trade and later colonial extraction from India - the origin of indigo’s name in Europe from ancient Greek times. Malala Andrialavidrazana (b. 1971 in Madagascar, lives and works in Paris, France) Figures 1816, Der Südliche Gestirnte Himmel vs Planiglob der Antipoden (2015) Figures 1862, Le Monde – Principales Découvertes (2015) Figures 1899, Weltverkehrs und Kolonialbesitzen (2016) Figures Figures 1889, Planisferio (2015) Figures 1817, Eslam or the Countries which have professed the Faith of Mohamet (2016) Figures 1838, Atlas Elémentaire (2015) Figures 1853, Kolonien in Afrika und in der Süd-See (2016) Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Cotton Rag Courtesy of the artist The artist creates complex collages of 19th century European maps, products of the Age of Western Imperialism and fragments of banknotes from around the world, illustrating the vision of whatever ideology those countries nurture on the ideal society, its citizens, and their struggles. Maps themselves are hardly accurate representations of places but rather the product of hegemonic ideas about the world, drawn to control and posses. These stunning compositions become a reflection of the myths and illusions, as well as the upheavals, clashes, and transformations of the world in the age of colonialism and its aftermath. Manish Nai (b. 1980 in Gujarat, lives and works in Mumbai, India) Untitled (2017) Synthetic indigo-dyed burlap Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte The artist references the material histories of indigo in the subcontinent, tied to colonialism and the institution of debt-based slavery. British colonialists wrecked social and ecological havoc on the population of Bengal by forcing farmers to cultivate indigo instead of the food crops they required for their survival, and charged huge rates of interests to farmers on loans for indigo farming. This eventually lead to the Indigo Revolt of 1859, where indentured indigo farmers from Burdhwan, Birbhum, and Jessore rose up against the ruling colonial and land-owning classes, before being brutally suppressed, as chronicled in Dinabandhu Mitra’s play Nil Darpan, published in Dhaka the same year. Nai’s work layers these histories of labour, anti-imperialist struggle, and the materiality of culture in his sculptural installation. Ming Wong (b. 1971 in Singapore, lives and works in Berlin, Germany) Bloody Mary's - Song of the South Seas (2018) Mixed media installation, single channel video Courtesy of the artist The work is part of the artist’s practice of using fragments from and references to popular culture and cinema, often impersonating in his works different characters from original films, irrespective of gender or racial background. "Bali Ha'i" is a show tune from the 1949 musical South Pacific, made into a 1958 movie by the same title from which the artist extracted the footage. The name refers to a mystical island, an exotic paradise, visible on the horizon but not reachable, and was originally inspired by the sight of Ambae island from neighboring Espiritu Santo in Vanuatu, where author James Michener was stationed in World War II. The matriarch of Bali Ha’i, Bloody Mary, sings her mysterious song "Bali Ha’i", with its haunting orchestral accompaniment, as an enticement to the American troops. The scene, as well as the entire film, exemplifies the construction of the exotic - often woven together with sexual desire - crucial instruments in the process of Western colonialism. Bloody Mary, a caricatural non-specific Pacific Island character, was played in the original film by the pioneering African-American actress Juanita Hall, who appears in this work intermittently with Ming Wong’s impersonation of her. Moelyono (b. 1957 in Tulungagung, lives and works in Tulungagung, East Java, Indonesia) Benang Benang (diptych) (2016) Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Ark Galerie Noken Noken (2016) Noken bag Courtesy of the artist and Ark Galerie The artist, known for his pioneering social practice, has been working in West Papua, Indonesia for more than a decade, in social activities mainly based on education, engaging with communities of women in the region’s villages. From them, he studied the history and philosophy of Noken (the traditional woven bag of Papua), and how it became an important part in the narrative of women's struggles in Papua, within a complex social and political situation. Moelyono realized his works through collaborations and meetings with Papuan communities on their native island as well as the ones settled in Java, facing a distinct set of issues as migrants, often subjected to discrimination. He does not see his works as illustrations of the "Noken" or the struggles of the people of Papua. They are a way to tell the story of encounter, learning, friendship, and movements with his communities in Papua. Mrinalini Mukherjee (b. 1949 in Bombay, d. 2015 in New Delhi, India) Kamal (1985) Hemp Courtesy of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Presented here with additional support from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Mrinalini Mukherjee’s sculptural work references traditional idol-making practices of Bengal, whose sensuous iconicity she alludes to. Mukherjee began working with knotted hemp while studying under the artist KG Subramanyam who organized the Fine Arts Fair of the Faculty of Fine Arts, Baroda, which focused on revisiting and learning from traditional art practices, during which time she made small toys and other works with hemp. She continued her dialogue with the material, expanding it to the monumental scale we see here. Kamal (Lotus) presents a form that seems to be at once a deity and a carnivorous plant, referencing the complex relationship between the sacred and the forest in the religious practices of South Asia. Munem Wasif (b.1983 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Machine Matters (2017) Single channel video Courtesy of the artist and Project88, Mumbai Assistant Cinematographer: Ferdous Ahmad & Joe Paul Cyriac Sound Design: Saddul Islam Production: Kauser Haider The artist maps shifting histories of labour in the production of jute in Bengal, through the colonial, post-colonial, and neoliberal periods. Wasif’s film focuses on now-defunct machines of a jute mill in Bangladesh, speaking to the country’s transformation from a producer of textiles to a site of assembly of cheap, mainly polyester, garments as part of a globalized, out-sourced supply chain. The proverbial ‘silencing of the looms of Bengal’ by the British, who devastated the textile manufacturing during the Raj to the point of biological extinction of the muslin producing cotton sub-species, echoes in Wasif’s film, which speaks to the subtle insidious violence of an unfulfilled modernity. Nabil Ahmed (b. 1978 in Dhaka; lives and works in London, UK) INTERPRET (2018) Installation Courtesy of the artist Commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21)–Academy. Nguyen Trinh Thi (b. 1973; lives and works in Hanoi, Vietnam) Letters from Panduranga (2015) Single channel video Courtesy of the artist The essay film is an experimentation between documentary and fiction portraying a Cham community in Vietnam, living on the most southern and last surviving territory of Champa, an ancient kingdom dating back nearly two thousand years and conquered by Vietnam in 1832. The film, made in the form of a letter exchange between two filmmakers, was triggered by the Vietnamese government’s plans to build Vietnam’s first two nuclear power plants in Ninh Thuan, right at the spiritual heart of the Cham people, threatening the survival of this ancient matriarchal Hindu culture. Public discussions regarding the project have been largely absent in Vietnam due to strict government controls over public speech and media, and local communities have also been excluded from consultations. The film also alludes to the legacy of colonialism and war, including the United States’ destructive and deliberate bombing of cultural heritage during the Vietnam War and the perspectives of ethnography and of artifacts from colonial exhibitions and art collections. Nontawat Numbenchapol (b. 1983 in Bangkok, lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand) Mr. Shadow (2016-2018) Inkjet print on paper Courtesy of the artist Assisted by Korn and Chan; post-produced by Nutcha Pajareya In the middle of a mountain range at the border between Shan State in Myanmar and Northern Thailand, in the buffer zone where many Shan refugees live, a motorcycle moves along the steep and winding path. The dust from the red dirt road kicks up behind the motorcycle, ridden by a young man in an all green army suit. The warm sunshine illuminates the dusk and the breeze blows gently as the young man parks his motorcycle at a spot from which he can see the terrain below the mountains. They stretch to infinity, toward the horizon tinged with the vibrant hues of the setting sun. The young man slowly removes his hat, but there is no head underneath, nothing, not a face. He then removes his shirt but his body is transparent. The clothes come off piece by piece until his body completely disappears. All that remains are the mountains and the setting sun as they welcome the darkness of the night. Norberto Rolodan (b. 1953 in Bacolod, lives and works in Manila, Philippines) Himagsikan (2018) Tapestry/banner with embroideries, old Catholic vestment (humeral veil), and metal amulets and chains Courtesy of the artist and Silverlens Gallery Kalayaan (2018) Tapestry/banner with embroideries, old Catholic vestment (humeral veil), and metal amulets and chains Courtesy of the artist and Silverlens Gallery Erehes (2017) Old Catholic vestment (cape) with embroideries and soft amulets Courtesy of the artist and Silverlens Gallery This series of pseudo-religious banners revisits the Philippine Revolution against Spain. The uprising began in 1896 after Spanish authorities discovered the Katipunan, the underground organisation that served as catalyst of the independence revolutionary movement. As an underground organisation, it made use of different strategies to expand its influence and gain support from the people. Among these was operating behind the infrastructure of the Catholic church that was under the Spanish hierarchy. By practicing as Christian converts and becoming part of the laity, Filipinos aided the insurrection unsuspected. Himagsikan (revolution) and Kalayaan (independence) are banners that made use of parts of Catholic ceremonial vestments re-embroidered and re-embellished with symbols of the uprising. They mimic and subvert the pompous display of colonial power. Signifying made-up churches like Iglesia de la Revolution, and Iglesia de la Independencia, the banners are likened to battle flags rallying resistance against Spain. Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966 in Honolulu, Hawaii, lives and works in New York, USA) Incarnator (2018) Video and installation Courtesy of the artist Supported by Bellas Artes Projects, Philippines Encarnador (Incarnator) is the old Spanish term for the carver of Santos, or devotional images of the Catholic saints that is particularly revered in the former Spanish colony of the Philippines, which also has a pre-colonial and still surviving tradition of sacred wooden figures. Encarnador particularly refers to the craftsperson specializing in the final step of Santo production in which the image is finished with a skin of paint, turning carved wood into human flesh. The video hones in on a particular workshop of wood carvers from the town of Paete, the centuries-old center of Santo production in the Philippines. The repetitive gestures of the carvers at work are explored visually in relation to the surrounding landscape, where the rice-planting season is underway. Timeworn traditions of manual labor are recast as a metaphor for the production and consumption of images in today’s global marketplace. Justin Bieber is treated as a modern day incarnation of the Santo Nino or Infant Jesus, embodying the complex relationship between innocence and complicity, the sacred and profane in the perverse spaces and temporalities of global capitalism. Praneet Soi (b. 1971 in Kolkata, lives and works between Amsterdam and Kolkata) Footpaths: Srinagar 2018 (2018) 9 hand-painted papier-mache tiles, 16 images on paper, looped video, 4 tables, LCD screen Courtesy of the artist Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, Para Site and Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie. The work, resulted from a collaboration between the artist and the workshop of craftsman Fayaz Jan in Srinagar is part of Soi's ongoing process of engagement with craftsmen in the troubled Indian state of Kashmir and of researching the recent political situation there. The 9 interlocking papier-mache tiles are drawn with floral details whose forms are reminiscent of the many cultural influences that have layered in Kashmir over the centuries. The craft of papier mache that Kashmir is renowned for was itself introduced to the region by the Sufifi preacher Saha Hamdani in the 13th century. The tiles are accompanied by research materials, sketches, and drafts produced by the artist within this project, including a study of the tomb of the mother of Ghiyas-ud-Din Zain-ul-Abidin, built in 1430 CE. Its unique architecture points to the many connections and exchanges between South and Central Asia which often crossed through Kashmir. A large optical diagram related to the phenomena of anamorphoses reflects Soi’s intention to personalise the depiction of political uncertainty – a process that is underlined within the video that is part of the installation. Raja Umbu (lives and works in Kampung Uma Bara, Sumba) Skirt with Kadu motif (2010) Textile Raja Umbu, a traditional weaver and member of the royal (raja) family of Uma Bara village on Sumba island in Indonesia weaves an ancestral story of migration to Sumba, a collective foundational myth that continues to be reconstructed on the island amid rapid cultural change. The languages of Sumba, as well as the majority of languages in Indonesia, including Bahasa Indonesia, belong to the Austronesian language family. Her native eastern part of Sumba is known for its unique dyeing and ikat techniques. Rashid Choudhury (b. 1932 in Faridpur, British India; d. in 1986, in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Untitled (1980) Untitled (Allah Hu) (1981) Untitled (year unknown) Tapestry Courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation Rashid Choudhury began working with tapestries after his return to Bangladesh in 1964 following studies in Paris. The works here were made quite late in his career, after he had established the first single loom tapestry factory in Chittagong. Choudhury referenced folk narratives from Bengal in his works, drawing equally from Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic sources. Many of his tapestries began as watercolours or paintings, growing into woven forms. While he references Islamic calligraphy in this work, we see none of the geometric abstraction typically associated with it; instead Chaudhury creates a vibrant image that seems to reference ecstatic Sufi and Fakiri forms of devotion. Sarat Mala Chakma (b. 1932 in Rangamati, Bangladesh; lives and works in Bangladesh) Sarat Mala Chakma is a master weaver belonging to the Chakma community who was awarded the Master Craftspersons Lifetime Award in 2016. Presented here is the textile which won her the National Award in 1998, which uses traditional motifs from the repertoire of Chakma textile culture, upon which she innovates to produce this magnificent work. Additionally, other textiles from the Chittagong Hill Tracts are presented, courtesy of Rani Yan Yan. They include the black Pinon-Haadi, which is part of the traditional attire of the Chakma community, woven on a handloom known as bein, and the red and white head band from the Tanchangya community. Traditional textiles from the Chittagong Hill Tracts have many points in common in terms of materials, dyes, techniques, and motifs with textiles produced in a broad contiguous mountain area spreading to Myanmar, India, South-West China, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam, revealing the many cultural connections that have existed before and in parallel to the modern nation-states. Sawangwongse Yawnghwe (b. 1971 in Shan State, lives and works between Berlin, Germany; Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Chiang Mai, Thailand) Rohingya Boat Portrait (2015) Oil on paper Courtesy the artist Supported by Canada Art Council There Were Light Bulbs So We Could See Them (2012) Oil on paper Courtesy of the artist They Were Buried In The Mud Anther The Bridge (2012) Oil on paper Courtesy the artist He Was Also Shot In The Head (2012) Oil on paper Courtesy the artist Untitled (2015) Oil on silk Courtesy the artist Supported by Canada Art Council The artist, descendent of a prominent family leading the struggle for the rights of the Shan people in Eastern Myanmar, is committed to expose the hidden and repressed histories of violence and oppression in his country. He critiques dominant Bamar-centric artistic and historical narratives by presenting a personal, counter-historiography, often in solidarity with other oppressed or excluded communities in Myanmar. The works in this exhibition include portraits of Rohingya as well as a mass grave of bodies, based on eye-witness accounts of Rohingya refugees. The works resonate with the poem "The Earth Is Closing on Us", by Mahmoud Darwish: The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we tear off our limbs to pass through. The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and live again. I wish the earth was our mother So she’d be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our dreams to carry as mirrors. We saw the faces of those to be killed by the last of us in the last defense of the soul. We cried over their children’s feast. We saw the faces of those who’ll throw our children Out of the windows of the last space. Our star will hang up in mirrors. Where should we go after the last frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky? Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air? We will write our names with scarlet steam. We will cut off the head of the song to be finished by our flesh. We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree. Sheela Gowda (b. 1957 in Bhadravati, Karnataka, lives and works in Bangalore, India) Of Becoming (2018) Installation Courtesy of the artist Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, Para Site and Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie. The newly created work inscribes in the artist’s long standing explorations into the field of materiality and space, offering nuanced and vibrant means of understanding the world. She is interested in the power that objects and forms carry in capturing aspects of reality, with its social and cultural narratives, that are otherwise unseen by and unspeakable through other languages of representation and analysis. Materials for Gowda can be at the same time complex metaphors and ends in themselves, forgetful of their many cultural and spiritual investments attributed by human practice, but charged with a potential spiritual tension of their own. Her vocabulary is constantly discovered and invented in the things that surround her and that she respells into her works, like the gamcha, the ubiquitous towel cloth in Bangladesh and throughout South Asia, which form the basis of this work. Sheelasha Rajbhandari (b. 1988 in Kathmandu, lives and works in Kathmandu, Nepal) My Great-Great-Grandmother’s Shawl (2017) Photographs, recreated hand-printed muslin ‘Damber Kumari’ shawl, counterfeit and original clothing tags The artist traces socio-political changes in her native Nepal through changes in cultures of clothing in her family. She references her maternal great- great- grandmother’s traditional Damber Kumari shawl, which contained pieces of fabric from Nepal and Varanasi, and imitated textiles from Dhaka. Adding to these layered histories, she embroiders real and counterfeited brand tags from cheap mass-produced clothes from India and China, juxtaposing these with images of her grandmother wearing the shawl. Rajbhandari raises questions of authenticity and copying that go into the production of culturally significant items, producing an artifact for the contemporary moment, where diverse textile cultures are being flattened out by mass-production. Simon Soon (b.1985; lives and works in Kuala Lumpur) King Kalakaua's Hawaiian Travels (2018) Wood Courtesy of the artist In collaboration with RJ Camacho, Antonia Aguilar, Lauro Penamante, Arnold Flores, Joseph de Ramos Supported by Bellas Artes Projects, Philippines Melayu Pono’i In 1881, the last King of Hawai’i, Kalakaua, embarked on a round the world trip to encourage the importation of contract labor for plantations and brought the small island nation to the attention of world leaders. King Kalakaua was also fired by the concept of the Malay race and its political future, or in the words of the U.S. Consul 'inflamed by the idea of gathering all the cognate races of the Islands of the Pacific into a great Polynesian Confederacy’. This series of four carved panels capture four incidents across the Asia Pacific rim.They recount episodes of diplomatic exchanges premised on political recognition and imagined kinship loosely based on William Armstrong's Around the World with a King (1904). These episodes follow the travel of King Kalakaua to San Francisco, Japan, Siam and Johore. The creation of the reliefs was also a relay of sorts, from idea to conception. The idea was a long standing interest of writer Simon Soon, who provided research details and mood boards. These materials were then passed on to illustrator RJ Camacho, who decided to base his design on Filipino modernist painter Carlos ‘Botong’ Francisco’s theatrical tableaux that elevates the folkinto national consciousness. Finally, the carving is executed by Ka Celing, a master woodcarver from Paeta, Laguna. Besides being adept at carving religious statuary, Paeta craftsmen had also produced one of the most iconic diorama of Filipino history at the Ayala Museum. By collaborating with a Filipino illustrator and craftsman, the relief panels take poetic license in connecting the political ambition of King Kalakaua to the fifirst political uprising in Asia, the Philippine revolution.In this instance the stylistic reference to both an art and craft history connected to nation-building is deliberate. One might speculate if Filipino novelist and patriot Jose Rizal’s imagined community of Malay races owes part of its imagination to King Kalakaua’s desire to establish Pan-Polynerian confederacy? Panel 1 During his time in San Francisco, King Kalakaua was feted to a lavish Chinese banquet in Hang Fen Lou restaurant,San Francisco. The banquet was hosted by the Consul-General of China in recognition of Kalakaua's kind treatment of Chinese workers in Hawai'i. Panel 2 While in Japan, Kalakaua visited a Shinto temple of Shiba. In a moment of tranquility, he drew the Japanese Emperor aside and suggested, ‘Not only are Japanese Emperors descended from the Sun Goddess, so are the Hawai'ian kings.’ Panel 3 When it was time to depart Siam, King Kalakaua and his party were driven to the landing. They were then seated in the royal barge, with the stately movements of its twenty-four oars, that carried them to a steamer called ‘Bangkok’. Kneeling Buddhist monks were invited yo give a blessing to the ship and all aboard her as the ship set sail for Singapore. Panel 4 In Johore, the setting is a reception hall of the Istana. The valet of King Kalakaua is made to wear the ceremonial feathered cloak. The Sultan of Johore and the King of Hawai’i greeted each other warmly. For they recognised each other as 'long lost brothers'. To commemorate the renewal of kinship, King Kalakaua received a green and gold Koran. Simryn Gill (b. 1959 in Singapore, lives and works between, Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia) Pressing In (2016) Relief prints on butterflfly paper Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Pressing In (2016) Relief prints on ledger paper Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Pressing In (2016) Relief prints on ledger paper Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Sweet Chariot (2015) Silver Gelatin Print Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary The artist creates a series of prints using collected lumber washed up from the sea at Port Dickson, Malaysia. Weathered and degraded by exposure to the sea and the sun, they bear traces of their origins, as parts of oars, or ships, and of their journey, becoming part of the ecosystem of the waves, encrusted with organisms and microbes that eat away at it. Gill presses these pieces of found wood onto a collection of papers, including wage records, star charts, accounting ledgers and reference books sourced in junk shops, markets, and online. In doing so, she entangles the drift of these pieces of wood which trace the rise and fall of markets, human and celestial movements to create images of histories adrift. Su Yu-Hsien (b. 1982 in Tainan, lives and works in Tainan, Taiwan) Hua-Shan-Qiang (2013) Colour video with sound; Giclee prints Courtesy of the artist and TKG+ In collaboration with Rajiuddin Choudhury (b. 1963 in Dinajpur, lives and works in Dinajpur) Beast (2018) Paper mask Courtesy of the artist Taloi Havini (b. 1981 in Arawa, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, lives and works in Sydney) Kapkaps (Pendants) from the Mysterious Isles of Melanesia (2015) Porcelain, copper and gold lustre Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Baker Art Dealer The artist references in this work histories of colonialism, and the use of museological display within it. Consisting of four kapkaps, hand-carved, shallow relief porcelain disks, with gold lustre and copper glazes, it mimics the customary clamshell and tortoise shell inlay. Kapkaps were articles of signifificant cultural and sacred value in the Hakö practices of Bougainville island in which Havini was raised in, and were obtained by force or by trade across the Moananui by colonists, and locked away in glass cabinets such as the one seen here in museums in Europe. She challenges the inaccessibility of these spaces and objects to the very people they were wrested from and honors the generations of ecological and cultural trauma whose trace they now bear. Than Sok (b. 1984 in Takeo, Cambodia; lives and works in Phnom Penh) Srie Bun (2016) Installation of five clerical garments (cotton, chemical dye), five garment hooks Courtesy of the artist and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum Five Buddhist clerical garments hang on the wall at the same height. The different colors belong to two sects within Cambodia’s Theravada Buddhist system and signify ranks within each sect: three orange colors of Maha Nikaya and darker maroon and ochre colors of Thammayut. The Buddhist monk, wearing robes, is believed to delineate a merit field comparable to the fertile rice field, where seeds are sown for reaping. The word veal srie in the Khmer language means rice field, and bun refers to merit making, which the artist notes is increasingly synonymous with monetary and this-world offerings. The robe’s rectilinear form and seams imitate those of the rice field: paddies framed by dikes. In Srie Bun, the artist has carefully cut away measured fields of fabric, revealing deliberate holes. His gesture questions the robe’s symbolic power atop mortal male bodies, and if peace can be advanced when hierarchical notions of sect and rank remain at the moral core of society. Thao-Nguyen Phan (born 1987 in Ho Chih Minh City; lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City) Man Looking Towards Darkness (2014) Curtain made from Indigo dyed jute fabric, silk, hand embroidery, framed Courtesy of the artist The work engages with the history of jute cultivation and manufacture in Vietnam. During the Japanese occupation of Vietnam from 1940-1945, the Dai Nam jute factory was built and industrial plantation campaigns to “uproot rice, grow jute” were implemented, resulting in the horrific famine of 1945 that killed 2 million Vietnamese. The artist presents an indigo dyeing jute curtain woven by Tay women using traditional methods. Next to it lies a photograph of three stones under an ancient banyan tree, which were used to detach jute fiber for factory use. Today, these stones lie undisturbed under the tree, carrying within them the painful material histories of occupation and forced labour. Untitled (Heads) (2013) Dried shredded jute (hemp) fifiber and jute stalks, bronze, thread Courtesy of the artist The work locates the jute plant as both the cause and witness of a tragic event, when Vietnamese farmers were forced to grow jute instead of rice during the Japanese occupation of then French Indochina from 1940-1945, which lead to large scale famine and the death of 2 million Vietnamese. The form of the sculpture is inspired by the Ma Mot tree, a totemic tree constructed by Tai minorities in Northern Vietnam for religious purposes where objects such as animal bones and amulets are hung, representing a dead or evil spirit. The artist reincarnates the jute plant as a Ma Mot tree, hanging on its drooping branches portraits of farmers whom she interviewed during the course of her research, in an attempt to create a ritual yet individualized space of healing from painful histories. Voyages de Rhodes N No. 1, No. 36, No. 38, No. 103 and No. 116 (2014-17) Watercolour on found book Courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation Voyages de Rhodes No. 9, No. 30, No. 34, No. 35, No. 40, No. 42 , No. 76, No. 124 (2014-17) Watercolour on found book Courtesy of the artist and the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Saigon Thảo Nguyên Phan poetically traces the origin and adoption of the Vietnamese Romanized script called chu quoc ngu through the work of the French Jesuit missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes who wrote the first trilingual Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum in 1651. Phan uses Rhodes’ travelogue Rhodes of Vietnam: The Travels and Missions of Father Alexandre de Rhodes in China and Other Kingdoms of the Orient (originally published in 1966) as the canvas for her watercolours. Drawing occasionally from episodes in the story, Phan uses the surface of the text to speculate on cultural hybridities, which bears traces of layers of violence and subjugation. The imposition of a writing system affects cultural violence, rendering knowledge inaccessible to many: having nowhere to go, stories burst out of limbs like trees. Trevor Yeung (b. 1988 in Guangdong Province, China, lives and works in Hong Kong) Acanthus Medallion (Bangladesh) (2018) Plaster, Pigment, Metal, Cotton, Porcelain Courtesy of the artist White Tower (Ceiling Medallion) (2018) Plaster Ceiling Medallion, Wood, Cotton Fabric, Silicone, Epoxy, Work Table Courtesy of the artist Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, Para Site and Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej w Warszawie The works are part of an ongoing research on acanthus, a relatively obscure plant in its living form that is nevertheless the source of one of the most prominent motifs used in art and architecture throughout different geographies and eras, including the Greco-Roman, Classical Islamic, Greco- Buddhist, and Mughal worlds, as well as in contemporary vernacular decorations across the globe. The plant is not native to South Asia, but the ornament referring to its leaf entered the region in several distinct waves. The Victorian era style plaster used, among others, in ceiling medallions, is still commonly used - often adapted and combined with other aesthetic references - in interior decorations in Bangladesh, in a complicated relationship with its colonial past. The work references these hybrid medallions, and adds a white porcelain cast of an actual acanthus leaf on the decorative leaves which carry in their shapes the many historical and cultural layers of interpreting this motif. Supported by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Hong Kong Arts Development Council fully supports freedom of artistic expression. The views and opinions expressed in this project do not represent the stand of the Council. Truong Cong Tung (b.1986,Dak Lak, Vietnam; lives and works in Ho Chih Minh City, Vietnam) Blind Map (2013) Canvas, eaten by termites Courtesy of the artist and the Factory Contemporary Arts Centre, Saigon Truong Cong Tung engages with the traditional spiritual practices of Vietnam, some of which are also influenced by Buddhism, to investigate modes of being with non-humans, including plants, insects, and spirits, which emerge within these traditions. In Blind Map, he invites a colony of Termites occupy a length of canvas, and present to us the traces of their vigorous activity. Through this process, a transfiguration takes place where the artist becomes termite, and the termite becomes a painter, creating a space of indistinction of identity across species. Tuguldur Yondonjamts (b. 1977 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, lives and works between Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and New York, USA) Smuggled landscape #09 , #10 and #13 (2015) Charcoal on paper Courtesy of the artist Antipode Suit #4 (2017) Textile Courtesy of the artist and Richard Taittinger Gallery Inspired by his training in Buddhist thangka painting, the drawings embody the Buddhist idea of maya—or modes of shifting perspectives. The painstakingly drawn territory is created using a technique of shading that forms illusions of snow-covered mountains and deep valleys. On closer inspection, they reveal semblances of many images at once, faces of monsters, animals or possible mythological figures and, above all, immense, uninhabitable, and seemingly dangerous frozen expanses. These abstractions illustrate the Mongolian struggle after the end of communism in 1990, retrieving repressed shamanistic practices and mythological history. In addition, fossils and mummies found embedded in the Mongolian permafrost have reignited links to the vast steppes of Eurasia and older histories of migratory and temporary dominance over their trade routes. More recently, the unlikely discovery by scientists of the remains of an alligator in the frozen Altai Mountains bordering Mongolia have greatly impacted the artist’s imagination. Yajnopaveeta Thread The yajnopaveeta or janeu is a white thread worn exclusively by the Brahmin caste in Hinduism, always from the left shoulder to waist. It is a sacred object conferred through specific ceremonies and it has become the recognisable marker of the upper caste in traditional Hindu society. Cast remains a leading factor in the stratification of society in India and cast related violence has increased in recent years. Zamthingla Ruivah (b. 1966 in Manipur, lives and works in Imphal, Manipur) Luingamla Kashan (1990 - ongoing) Textile Courtesy of the artist Mazui Kashan Textile Courtesy of the artist Phor-Re Textile Courtesy of the artist Zamthingla Ruivah created the Luingamla Kashan in memory of Ms. Luingamla of Ngainga village who was shot dead while resisting rape by two officers of the Indian army on 24 January 1986. Using motifs from the weaving traditions of the Tangkhul, she wove a kashan (a traditional garment) that pays tribute to Luingamla, and the spirit of a community ravaged by state violence. Nagaland has been under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act since 1958, when Naga separatist groups attempted to secede from India; since then it has been abused by security personnel to shield themselves from prosecution for crimes committed against the populace. Today, many members of the Tangkhul community wear the Luingamla Kashan as a symbol of solidarity.

ALL PROJECTS Akāliko and Jatiwangi Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Akāliko means ‘timelessness’ in Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, reflecting the group’s belief that musical forms have always been present in everyday life in society. The promotion of electronic and experimental music is at the heart of Akāliko’s activities and they collaborate with artists and professionals who make digital and sound art. Born out of Dhaka’s electronica scene, the group was originally established in 2012 as an independent music production label set up to address the need for a common platform to promote the work of ‘bedroom’ music producers. They collaborate with like-minded performance artists, writers, choreographers/dancers, communication specialists, psychologists, and, most recently, sound artists, while at the same time maintaining their label. Their compositions are streamed online and can be experienced in this listening station. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, has been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes more complex our relationship to the earth and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. A listening station within the exhibition connects visitors with the sounds this collective creates that emerge from the ground of Indonesia. Through a mini-residency catalysed through DAS, Akaliko and Jatiwangi have explored parallels between the clay-based visual cultures as well as sonic qualities of Indonesia and Bangladesh. Looking out the window into the garden outside, visitors can see collaborative instruments created in Bangladesh which will be activated through several jam sessions on the closing 3 days of DAS from 4–8pm. Jatiwangi’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by the Indonesian Embassy of Bangladesh. Image by Noor Photoface

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

ALL PROJECTS Performance Workshop by Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore and Jana Prepeluh Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 2 - 6 April 2015 The 2nd phase of Spring session of Samdani Seminars 2015 started with closed door performance conducted by leading Indian performance artist Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore along with Slovenian artist Jana Prepeluh. 15 Bangladeshi artists were selected for the 5 days’ workshop that ran from 2nd till 6th April. The workshop worked as incubator for the emerging artists which would eventually lead to further performance workshop at the Heritage Hotel, Nikhil Chopra’s residency programme in Goa. On 8th open house performances were arranged as a final output of the workshop all day long.

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

ALL PROJECTS Choreographies of the Impossible, 35ª Bienal de São Paulo 6 September- 10 December 2023, Sao Paulo, Brazil Ellen Gallagher’s work Watery Ecstatic (RA 18h 35m 37.73s D37° 22’ 31.12’), 2017 from the collection of Samdani Art Foundation was a part of the 35th edition of the Sao Paulo Biennial , 2023.

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

ALL PROJECTS Critical Writing Ensembles- Sovereign Words Curated by Katya García-Antón 2-10 February 2018 | Dhaka Art Summit The Office of Contemporary Art Norway returned to the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 with ‘Sovereign Words. Facing the Tempest of a Globalised Art History’: a platform of panel discussions, lecture performances, group debates and readings during DAS 2018. ‘Sovereign Words’ is a new iteration of the ‘Critical Writing Ensembles’, committed to the strengthening of critical writing within and across communities of the world. This edition was focused on writing by peers from Indigenous communities around the world contesting the Western canon. ‘Sovereign Words’ was conceived by OCA, and organised in partnership with DAS, Artspace Sydney and the Australia Council for the Arts. Keynote Lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Date: 9 February 2018, 6.00 – 7.15pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Dr Spivak’s presentation addressed the precarious situation of the Rohingya people in relation to Indigeneity in the world today, with a special emphasis on the languages of the Bengal region. Rohingya are stateless people who are Indigenous to nowhere, and who speak a different language from Bengali; Spivak connected their current situation to the history of the region. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the world’s foremost literary theorists. She is a University Professor at Colombia University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak is best known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and for her translation of, and introduction to, Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). In 2012, Spivak was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy as a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in the face of the globalised world. In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India. She has published a number of articles and books, including Readings (The University of Chicago Press, 2014); An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation (Harvard University Press, 2012); Other Asias (Blackwell Publishing, 2008); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999); The Post-Colonial Critic – Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (Routledge, 1990); and In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Routledge, 1987). She will be the 2018 recipient of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from the Modern Language Association of America. She has received eleven honourary doctorates and the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France. Presentations: Máret Ánne Sara Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In the afterword to her debut book Ilmmiid gaskkas (In Between Worlds), Máret Ánne Sara writes “People say they don’t believe in such things anymore. Still, they don’t dare to deny it either.” Ilmmiid gaskkas explores Sami beliefs vis-à-vis contemporary reality through the voices of teenagers and their experience of Sami worlds. In her presentation, Sara read sections of her book that speak about the traditions of Sámi storytelling, the use of this philosophy in modern literature and in a political settings. She also made use of her artwork to showcase how she addresses the same topics through different artistic forms and approaches. Máret Ánne Sara is an artist whose work deals with political and social issues affecting the Indigenous Sámi people and their reindeer-herding communities. Sara has created posters, CD/LP covers, scene visuals and fabric prints for numerous Sámi artists, designers and institutions and has exhibited in the field of visual arts since 2003. Furthermore, she is an editor, journalist and published novelist. Her first book Ilmmiid gaskkas (In Between Worlds, 2013), was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Children’s and Young People’s Literature Prize in 2014. She is one of the founding members of the Dáiddadállu / Artists’ Collective Kautokeino. Sara’s ongoing project Pile o’Sápmi was showcased, amongst others, as part of the documenta 14 exhibition at the Neue Neue Galerie, Kassel 2017. Djon Mundine Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The exhibition To Strike – To Leave My Mark (2017–18), celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative through the work of its ten founding members: Michael Riley, Bronwyn Bancroft, Arone Meeks, Euphemia Bostock, Fiona Foley, Brenda L. Croft, Jeffrey Samuels, Tracey Moffatt, Avril Quaill and Fern Martins. The exhibition's curator, Djon Mundine, explained; “The group is interesting from several angles in that the group was across all genders, ages, and training –all had, or were attending, Western art courses or art schools, most members were women (7/10), almost half were refugees from Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s Queensland (4/10), the other half were from New South Wales (NSW), most weren’t teenagers anymore, and the two ‘gay’ men members had been ‘out’, proud and well known nearly all their lives. I really, first met several of this group who were in the Koori Art 84 exhibition at Sydney’s Artspace in 1984. I was living and working as an Art and Craft Advisor in central Arnhem Land then and had just curated an exhibition of the Art Gallery of NSW’s bark painting collection in 1983. Following the Koori Art 84 show, several artists started to correspond with me and wanted to visit. They were travelling to the Tiwi Islands as part of their Western style art courses to be exposed to ‘real’ Aboriginal art. About half of the ten visited and worked and formed relationships with Ramingining or Maningrida communities.” A number of the original ten members moved on to great achievements in terms of global art world recognition, as much as they left their mark in establishing the co-operative that has influenced and provided openings for so many Aboriginal artists: Tracey Moffatt presented a solo exhibition within the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. In this presentation, Mundine honoured both her and the rest of the ten for their struggle and triumph. Djon Mundine, OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia), is a curator, writer, artist and activist. He has held prominent curatorial positions in many national and international institutions, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. In 1993 he received the OAM for service to the promotion and development of Aboriginal arts, crafts and culture. Between 2005 and 2006 he was Research Professor at The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka. He is a member of the Bandjalung people of northern New South Wales, and currently an independent curator of contemporary Indigenous art. Léuli Eshraghi Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In Léuli Eshraghi’s words, “This piece reflected my many journeys in recent years connected with relations across the coasts and inland mountains rimming the Great Ocean. A third of our planet’s surface, home to millions of Indigenous and migrant beings, including plants, fish, animals, birds, spirits and humans: this is a continent rendered invisible in dominating Euro-American military and economic endeavours." Eshraghi aimed to approach diasporic yearning for homelands / waters / intergenerational trauma and mourning for repeated genocides / epistemicides / ecocides / linguicides, alongside the development of contemporary Indigenous sovereignties as part of responsible belonging, caring and visiting. This presentation brought sensual lessons and languages to the fore in understanding how curating / artmaking / writing by Indigenous peoples of the Great Ocean are practices of leadership through service, and healing through cleansing. Léuli Māzyār Luna’i Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, German, Chinese ancestries) is an uninvited guest in unceded Kulin Nation territory, and a PhD candidate at Monash University Art Design Architecture (MADA). Hailing from the Sāmoan villages of āpia, Leulumoega, Si’umu, and Salelologa, his work centres on ceremonial-political renewal, languages, embodied futures, and diasporic and local indigeneities. He has undertaken residencies at Para Site, Hong Kong; the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; the University of British Columbia, Okanagan; and the Tautai Pacific Arts Trust, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland in English). He serves on the board of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires Autochtones; the editorial advisories for Broadsheet, Tardanyangga (Adelaide in English) and un Magazine in Narrm (Melbourne in English); and the Pacific Advisory Group for the Melbourne Museum. Megan Cope Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation of Cope's artistic practice, focused on the transition from mapping practices to her most recent sculptural work. Looking into mapping practices as colonial tools, and mining industries which both alter Indigenous landscapes and their economic, relational and ecological systems, she discussed the impact of Australia’s colonial settlers on the artist’s traditional Quandamooka country and offered a snapshot of an industry that has relied heavily on both Aboriginal aqua-cultural systems and labour in the region. This presentation explored the role that contemporary art has in the promotion of Indigenous culture and provided legal documents to challenge the notion of the hegemonic state. Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island in Southeast Queensland. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings explore the myths and methods of colonisation. Her diverse practice also investigates issues relating to identity, the environment, and mapping practices. Most recently Cope’s large scale sculptural installations have been curated into three major national survey exhibitions: The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2017); Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia Parkes (2017); and Sovereignty at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne (2016). Her work has been exhibited widely, in exhibitions at Next Wave Festival Screen Space, Melbourne (2014); Incinerator Gallery, Sydney (2013); My Country: I Still Call Australia Home, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2013); Para Site, Hong Kong (2013); Tony Albert Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand (2010); and the ARC Biennial, Brisbane (2009). In 2014 she was selected for the Victorian Aboriginal Art Award, in 2011 she won the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, and in 2009 was a finalist for the Clayton Utz Travelling Scholarship and won the Sunshine Coast Art Prize. Her work is present in many national public art collections, including: Australian Parliament House, Canberra; Mater Hospital, Brisbane; Gold Coast University Hospital, Gold Coast; Redlands Art Gallery, Redlands; and the NEWflames Anne Gamble Myer Collection, Brisbane. Santosh Tripura Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Indigenous people’s survival and existence are associated with the lands where they have lived since time immemorial. The importance of lands is the very survival of Indigenous cultures and their articulated ideas of communal stewardship over land, as well as their deeply felt spiritual and emotional nexus with the Earth and its fruits. Hence the claiming of land rights means ensuring the security of land ownership which guarantees the economic viability and development of such communities. Land is the central issue when discussing Indigenous peoples’ empowerment as it is the basis for the enjoyment of their cultural rights and ensures their basic rights while respecting their distinct identity. The Indigenous notion of the ownership and management of land is based on the customary laws which are considered more or less a collective property. This presentation offered a brief glimpse into the status of Indigenous peoples’ land rights in Bangladesh. Sontosh Bikash Tripura is a scholar and researcher, working in the field of development studies. He studied Anthropology for his BSS Hons and MSS degrees at the Dhaka University. He also received a M.Phil. in Indigenous Studies from UiT (Arctic University of Norway), Tromsø, under the Norad fellowship programme. His M.Phil. thesis is titled Blaming Jhum, Denying Jhumia: Challenges of the shifting cultivators land rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Between August 2009 and February 2017 he worked for UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). Belonging to the Tripura Indigenous community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, his research interests explore Indigenous peoples’ rights, land rights and development. Irene Snarby Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy For many Sámi people, duodji (commonly translated as Sámi handicraft, the word was used extensively to define the community’s creative activities) is one of the strongest indicators of Sámi identity. Their relationship with their traditions signify deep collective values and norms. Intangible knowledge is an important part of both the process and the experience of duodji. Consequently, Sámi traditions and the practice of duodji are subject to varying degrees of knowledge and understanding. Iver Jåks stressed the importance of duodji as not being exclusively associated with memories, keepsakes and the past, and was concerned with giving his art relevant content as contemporary art. In this presentation, Snarby elaborated on how a deep and specific notion of duodji and ancient Sámi thinking incorporated with avant-garde art practices informs Iver Jåks’s three-dimensional works. Through his practice, which was closely associated with a broad, holistic understanding of duodji, he gave a voice to Sámi methods, traditions and experiences in an arena that had previously rejected Sámi art as ethnology rather than art. Irene Snarby is a Doctoral Research Fellow in Art History at SARP: The Sámi Art Research Project at UiT (Arctic University of Norway), where she is carrying out research into the works of the artist Iver Jåks for her PhD thesis. Snarby has worked as a curator within the Art Department of Riddo Duottar Museat (Sámi Museums of Western Finnmark) in Kárášjohka (Karasjok in Norwegian) and has been a member of the Sámi Parliament’s Art Acquisitions Committee for Contemporary Art. For the last 20-years, she has written essays, given lectures and been an editor for several publications of Sámi art. Snarby has also been an advisor on important art projects such as the International Indigenous Art exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, and There is no, at the Sámi Art Museum at Northern Norwegian Art Museum. Daniel Browning Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Decolonisation is at least intellectually and aesthetically possible, even though the power structures of colonialism persist. However, colonialism transmutes; it shifts and rebalances, forever finding a way to maintain its power and hegemony. Post-colonial thinking, the process of re-imagination, is evident in public artworks in Australia and the impetus to challenge historical amnesia is being driven at a superficial level by arts funding bodies, with philanthropic money from urban development sectors and such resources. This presentation attempted to outline the ways in which public memory is being challenged to rethink the colonial meta-narratives: that of discovery, the terra nullius and White Australia. Daniel Browning is an Aboriginal journalist, radio broadcaster, documentary maker, sound artist and writer. Currently, he produces and presents Awaye!, the Indigenous art and culture programme on ABC RN, a specialist radio network of Australia’s national broadcaster. Awaye! surveys contemporary Indigenous cultural practice across the arts spectrum. A visual arts graduate, Daniel is also a widely-published freelance arts writer. He is a former guest co-editor of Artlink Indigenous, a publication produced regularly since 1990 by Artlink Magazine, a quarterly Australian contemporary arts journal. He is the curator of Blak Box, an immersive sound installation in the newly-redeveloped precinct on the western foreshore of Sydney Harbour. He studied English and Art History at the University of Queensland before graduating with a degree in visual arts from the Queensland University of Technology. Daniel is a descendant of the Bundjalung and Kullilli peoples of far Northern New South Wales and Southwestern Queensland. Santosh Kumar Das Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy From a personal perspective, Santosh Kumar Das’s presentation gave insight into his practice: “I focused mainly on the freedom that being a speaker of the folk or Indigenous language of Madhubani has given me as an artist and as a human being. It is like when an idea comes to me, in the mind it has a certain language, a certain form. I watch it for some time carefully and realise it is in the language or form which I have known so intimately all my life. It is always in the folk language (read visually as ‘form’) of my place. At times, the source of the idea may be quite diverse and strange. Maybe a film poster or maybe the figure of a bridge seen from a distance. But ultimately as it begins to solidify, it starts to take on the form of Madhubani. It is like a mother tongue; speaking in it comes more naturally to a child. We don't think much while speaking in our mother tongues. We feel and express. There is no strain and risk. It is the same for me as painting in the style of Madhubani. It is the language of my thought. And the form itself has been a rewarding experience for me. All these years, I have just tried to be honest to the medium, i.e., that of the lines drawn with a pen nib on paper.” Santosh Kumar Das is an artist from a village in the Madhubani region. His work draws inspiration from the traditional folk language of Madhubani, using various iconological figures and symbols, and creating a unique artistic language. Kumar Das has a BA Fine Arts in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. During the 1980s he conducted a research project on folksongs of Mithila, together with the ethnomusicologist Naomi Owen from the USA, and assisted Dr. Raymond Lee Owens on a film about Mithila painters. In 2017 Tara Books published Kumar Das’ Black: An Artist’s Tribute, a memoir of his growth into art and a tribute to his personal muses that transformed him into an artist. Between 2003 – 2008 he served as the First Director of the Mithila Art Institute in Madhubani. In 2005 he travelled around several universities in the USA where he gave a number of artist talks. His work has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and is included in the collections of the Oberlin College and Conservatory, Oberlin, and the Ethnic Arts Foundation, Berkeley, among others. Kimberley Moulton Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In this presentation, Kimberley Moulton looked at the past seven years of her research into ancestral belongings in international and national collections. Through imagery, journal entries and critical engagement with the history of collecting and institutions, in Moulton’s own words this presentation “highlighted the personal effect working within these spaces has had on me as a Yorta Yorta woman and looked at how the intersection of First Peoples’ contemporary art practice and cultural material work can decentre the white paradigm.” This presentation also reflected on the legacy of Captain James Cook’s maiden voyage to trace the path of Venus and the mission of Terra Australis 250 years ago, which resulted in the very first cultural objects to be stolen from Australia. Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta-Yorta woman with a curatorial and writing practice which has engaged with many museums and contemporary art spaces. She is Senior Curator of South Eastern Aboriginal Collections for Museums Victoria at Melbourne Museum, focusing on the intersection of contemporary First Peoples art and cultural material in museums. Prior to this, Moulton was Project Officer and Curator at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum between 2009 and 2015, and Assistant Curator for First Peoples exhibition at Melbourne Museum in 2013. Alongside her institutional curatorial roles, she has independently curated: where the water moves, where it rests: the art of Djambawa Marawili, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Charlottesville (2015); State of The Nation, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick (2016); A Call From The West: The Continuing Legacy of Mr William Cooper, Footscray Community Arts Centre (2016). She was also co-curator for Artbank Sydney Social Day 2016, RECENTRE: sisters, City Of Melbourne Gallery (2017); and co-curator with Liz Nowell of Next Matriarch, ACE Open Adelaide and TARNANTHI Festival (2017). Kimberley is an alumna of the National Gallery of Australia’s Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Programme 2010, British Council ACCELERATE programme (2013), National Gallery of Australia International Curatorial Fellow at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Collection (2015), and a Victorian Curatorial Representative for the First Nations Exchange Programme at the Venice Biennale and First Nations Exchange Canada (2017). Kimberley’s current project is lead curator on Mandela: My Life at Melbourne Museum and guest curator of the Gertrude Contemporary, Octopus, exhibition (2018). Hannah Donnelly Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Hannah Donnelly asked: “How would our art histories be archived in Indigenous Futures?” This presentation explored future tense methodologies used to interview artists about the imagined collective representation of their work. Hannah Donnelly (Wiradjuri) is a writer and artist. Renowned for her ‘cli-fi’, she works with text, sound and installation exploring Indigenous futures and responses to climate trauma. Hannah is the creator of Sovereign Trax, a record label promoting First Nations music through energising decolonisation conversations and community in music. She is currently working as an associate producer at Next Wave, a biennial festival based in Melbourne, Australia, which promotes and showcases the work of young and emerging artists. Donnelly recently held the solo exhibition Long Water, at the Yirramboi Festival, Arts House, North Melbourne (2017). Her recent group exhibitions include: The Future Leaks Out, Liveworks, Sydney (2017); Future Eaters, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017); Feedback Loop, Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne (2017); and State of the Nation, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne (2016). Kabita Chakma Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation traced the emergence of Indigenous cinema in Bangladesh, particularly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), positing it into the framework of the global Indigenous cinema movement: known as the Fourth Cinema. Chakma linked CHT cinema with a wider discussion of representation of Indigenous subjects as ‘others’ in the mainstream media, and discussed critical questions raised against this representation by intellectuals of the Global North and the Global South, highlighting what might be considered sovereignty in relation to CHT’s Indigenous Cinema. Kabita Chakma comes from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. Chakma is the largest indigenous group in Bangladesh. She belongs to the clan of Raange goza, Bhudo guttthi on her maternal side and Borbo goza, Phoraa daagi on her paternal side. Kabita is a freelance researcher, architect, writer and occasional guest lecturer and teacher at the School of Design, part of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). She is a Coordinator of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Indigenous Jumma Association Australia (CHTIJAA), and a Community Adviser to BODHI (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight) Australia, a charity organisation. Kabita’s interests include the history, culture, art and architecture of disadvantaged communities, particularly Indigenous peoples of the CHT, Bangladesh, and environmental sustainability. Prashanta Tripura Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Is there, or should there be, something called ‘Indigenous art’? Or is ethnicity a necessary or sufficient criterion for a practitioner of art to be categorised as an ‘Indigenous artist’? Tripura explains: “I wanted to explore such questions by talking about how I have dealt with them personally, such as when I once found myself resisting being labelled as an ‘Indigenous poet’, though I have also written a lot in support of the contested category of ‘Indigenous peoples’ in Bangladesh.” In this context, this presentation focused on how Tripura came to be interested in, and started writing about the identities and struggles of the self-identified ‘Indigenous peoples’ of Bangladesh: “My personal account was meant to serve as a window to the larger questions that concern academics, artists and activists alike in the contemporary world, e.g. how can art and literature help the Indigenous peoples assert and establish their identities and rights?” Prashanta Tripura is an academic anthropologist who currently teaches part-time at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences at BRAC University, Dhaka. Previously he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, where he taught for ten years before switching over to the development sector, where he worked for over a decade. He received his academic training in the USA, majoring in anthropology at Brandeis University, Waltham, and went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his MA. He has contributed many articles – in both Bangla and English – that have been published in academic journals as well as magazines and dailies. A collection of his essays – in Bangla – titled Bohujatir Bangladesh (Bangladesh of Many Peoples) was published in 2015. He also expresses himself in Kokborok, his first language, which is spoken by the Tripuras, an Indigenous people of Bangladesh and India (he is from the Bangladesh side, but was born and brought up in the Khagrachari hill district of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region). He is also the principal author of a research monograph which has been published as a book in Bangla, titled Shifting Cultivation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Biung Ismahasan Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation explored the ethno-aesthetic nature of Taiwanese Indigenous performative arts and the works of Truku performance artist and activist Don Don Houmwm, Rukai sculptor Eleng Luluan, and Bunun curator Biung Ismahasan (Truku, Rukai and Bunun belong to three of Taiwan’s sixteen Indigenous groups). They are examined as a contribution to the discourse of Indigenous and cultural sovereignty. This presentation examined their performative approaches, practices and curatorial strategies relevant to Indigenous artistic practices, particularly those pertinent to cultural loss, recovery and activation. It firstly questioned how Houmwm performs Indigeneity, sorrow and solitude, exposing hybrid identities; then demonstrated how Luluan uses her Indigenous minimalist installations to explore multiple social discrepancies between intrinsic and extrinsic performativity amid material objects and soft sculptures; it finally showcased how Biung Ismahasan himself structures a performative encounter of Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art by curating an off-site and culturally resonant space. Biung Ismahasan is a curator and researcher, currently working on his PhD in Curating at the University of Essex’s Centre for Curatorial Studies. Belonging to the Bunun Nation of Taiwanese Indigenous groups, he is awarded PULIMA Art Award (the first national art award dedicated to Indigenous contemporary art), and exhibited at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Southern Taiwan. His research involves issues of contemporary Indigenous curatorial practice and aesthetics, focusing on the curation of Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art. His current research emphasises the issues of participation, performativity and the historiography of Indigenous curation and exhibition design. His most notable curatorial projects includes, Anti-Alcoholism: an Indigenous performative encounter 2014-2018, an international performance art exchange of Indigenous artists from Taiwan. David Garneau Session Date: 8 February 2018, 5.30pm - 7.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy ‘Indigenous’ is not just a term that attempts to corral thousands of local identities but one that announces a new way of being Native. Indigenous is a collective identity in formation that includes, but goes beyond, traditional identities. While it is the form through which local communities are mostly known, championed, and advanced, it can also be co-opted and distorted by dominant, non-Native cultures and discourses. How do Indigenous writers, thinkers, artists, curators, activists and other cultural workers negotiate the complex identity called Indigenous? In this presentation, David Garneau offered suggestions that have arisen from his own experience and recent projects. David Garneau (Métis) is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and critical writing. With Kathleen Ash Milby, he recently co-curated Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee: an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools, other forms of aggressive assimilation, and (re)conciliation, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina; and With Secrecy and Despatch with Tess Allas: an international exhibition about the massacres of Indigenous people and memorialisation, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney. Garneau has given numerous talks in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and throughout Canada. His work is part of a five-year SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) funded curatorial research project, ‘Creative Conciliation’, and he is working on a commissioned public art project in Edmonton, Alberta. His paintings can be found in numerous public and private collections. Ánde Somby Honouring National Sami Day Session Date: 8 February 2018, 5.30pm - 7.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ánde Somby is a writer, yoiker (yoik is the Sámi way of singing or chanting; and the musical modus of yoiks differs from what is commonly known in Euro-American music) and Associate Professor of Law at UiT (Arctic University of Norway) where he specialises in Indigenous rights law. Somby was born in 1958 in Buolbmat in the Deatnu (Tana in Norwegian) municipality on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. He is the former Chair of the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT and former leader of Sámiid Nuoraid Searvi (Sámi Youth Association in Kárášjohka, 1976–78). Somby has performed extensively as a yoiker since 1976, and has occasionally also lectured on the subject. His writings include: “How to recruit Samis to higher education and to research, items on an agenda of actions” (Sin neste som seg selv: Ole D. Mjøs 60 år 8. mars 1999, ed. by Arthur Arntzen, Jens-Ivar Nergård, and Øyvind Norderval, 1999) and “The Legal situation of The Nordic Indigenous Peoples” (paper presented at the 35th Nordic Jurist Assembly, 1999) and “Yoik and the Theory of Knowledge” (Kunnskap og utvikling, ed. by MagnusHaavelud, 1995).

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

ALL PROJECTS 'Introduction to Council'- A Presentation by Sandra Terdjman and Grégory Castéra The Samdani Residence, and Alliance Francaise De Dhaka, 21 - 22 March 2015 On 21st March 2015, Sandra Terdjman and Grégory Castéra presented Council to the Samdani Seminars participant artists in an informal gathering at Samdani Space, Golpo. On 22nd March, Introduction to Council was held at the Alliance Française de Dhaka. Council explores modes of composition through the arts, scholarly and scientific research, and civil society in order to propose new representations of social issues. The three schemes (inquiries, productions, fellows) bring together networks of concerned artists, researchers, citizens, and institutions.

ALL PROJECTS Displays Of Internationalism | Asia Interfacing with The World Through Exhibitions, 1947-1989 Curated by Amara Antilla and Diana Campbell The history of exhibitions has served an important role in art historical and curatorial research. Yet, even as the history of display has generated renewed scholarly interest, a critical reading of the trans-national function of exhibitions, which feature some of the most important non-Western presentations prior to 1989, has yet to be realised. How did exhibition practices create contact points between artists and thinkers from around the world? How were these transcultural networks indicative of larger political, social, and economic interests? How might exhibition histories in Asia expand our thinking about post-war global art histories? ‘Displays of Internationalism’ invited curators and scholars to examine seminal international or regional exhibitions; revisit major biennials and their role as important zones of exchange for artists, thinkers and cultural workers; and engage in self-reflective dialogues to investigate blind spots and methodological problems facing the field. Paper Presentation: Roots, Basics, Beginnings: The Textual and Curatorial Work of Raymundo Albano by Patrick Flores Session Date: 8 February 2018, 01.15 - 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Raymundo Albano was an artist and curator in Manila. His practice as a curator at the Cultural Center of the Philippines from 1970 to 1985 generated a level of density of both discourse and procedure. In his agenda, roots, basics, beginnings matter (taken from an eponymous exhibition in 1977), Albano constitutes the material through which the process or method takes place. Whatever may be inferred or alluded to, or implicated, emerges from lineage, rudiment, origin. Whether critique comes in to complicate, or relations intervene, the ‘intelligence’ of the material cannot be severed from the ‘integrity’ of the lifeworld from which it is generated and through which such lifeworld is reinvested. Some would call this ‘context,’ others would say it is ‘impulse’ or ‘urge.’ Whatever it is that may be brought to our attentiveness, as that which excites what we broadly reference as art, it should, in the imagination of Albano, stir up a world ‘suddenly turning visible,’ a condition quite akin to Michel Foucault’s ‘sudden vicinity of things.’ This paper introduces research on the relationship between Albano’s textual and curatorial work in the production of both situation and thinking. It dwells on the post-colonial mediation of the local and the international to complicate, or even exceed, the overdeterminations of the Western modern. Patrick Flores is a Professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines (which he chaired from 1997 to 2003), Curator of the Vargas Museum in Manila, and Adjunct Curator at the National Art Gallery, Singapore. Among his publications are: Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (NUS Museum Singapore, 2008); Remarkable Collection: Art, History, and the National Museum (National Art Gallery - National Museum of the Philippines, 2007); and Painting History: Revisions in Philippine Colonial Art (National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1998). As a curator he has co-organised, Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art (Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2000) and the Gwangju Biennale (2008). Flores was a grantee of the Asian Cultural Council in 2010, an advisor to the exhibition, The Global Contemporary: Art Worlds After 1989 at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe in 2011, and is a member of the Guggenheim Museum’s Asian Art Council. Between the High-Altitude View and The Detail: A Study of ‘Two Decades of American Painting’ by Nancy Adajania Session Date: 8 February 2018, 1.15 - 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Adajania’s paper considers the political circumstances of the Cold War and the global cultural circulations that surrounded the 1960s travelling exhibition, Two Decades of American Painting, organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, and supported by the Museum’s International Council. A US soft-power initiative, the exhibition toured the world—with support from the US State Department—during a period when the Vietnam War was underway, China’s nuclear ambitions had become clear, and the US-USSR confrontation was being played out in various theatres. Originally intended for presentation in Tokyo and New Delhi, its itinerary was expanded to include Melbourne and Sydney. Reflecting on the reception of Two Decades… in India (1967), Adajania explores how the exhibition challenged Indian artists and art critics to revisit and critically recast their debate, including many key contested themes: cultural identity and artistic autonomy; tradition and modernity; abstraction and counter-abstractionist strategies; the global turn; the creation of a universal canon; the establishment of a national ‘style;’ and canonical medium (modelled on Clement Greenberg’s ‘American-type painting’). Dwelling on the individual figures involved in the exhibition and its Indian reception, the paper engages with personal preoccupations and motivations, and the ground of their agency, as opposed to official scripts of cultural diplomacy or curatorial policy. 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) and was a juror for Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2015-2017). Revisiting Thai Reflections on American Experiences, Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art, Bangkok, 1986 by Gridthiya Gaweewong Session Date: 8 February 2018, 1.15 - 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Organised by renowned art historian Dr. Piriya Krairiksh at the Bhirasri Institute of Modern Art in Bangkok, Thai Reflections on American Experiences brought together the work of twenty-four artists executed before, during, and after their journeys to the United States. The exhibition, which was funded in part by the United States Information Service, sought to make a fair assessment of the impact that American experiences might have had on the development of Modern Art in Thailand. Although eight artists declined to participate, those who did included Damrong WongUpparat, Santi Isrowuthakul, Apinan Poshyananda, Kamol Phaosavasdi, and Chumpol Apisuk, using the exhibition as a platform to critically examine the hegemony of American art in the twilight of Cold War politics. In conjunction with the exhibition, a seminar was organised where issues of authenticity, appropriation and identity played out among local artists, art historians and critics. The debates continued in local media coverage, and through editorials written by various artists, provoked reaction in embodied discourses around national identity, representation and originality in 1980s. Gridthiya Gaweewong is currently Artistic Director of the Jim Thompson Art Center in Bangkok. Her curatorial projects have addressed the issues of social transformation confronting artists from Thailand and beyond, since the Cold War. In 1996 she founded the arts organisation, Project 304, to support contemporary artistic and cultural activities through art exhibitions and events. Gaweewong has curated exhibitions, and organised events internationally, including: Patani Semasa, MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum (2017); Unreal Asia, Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (2010); Saigon Open City, Vietnam (2007 - 2006), with Rirkrit Tiravanija; the Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (2007 - 1997), co-founded with Apichatpong Weerasethakul; Politics of Fun, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2005); and Under Construction: New Dimensions in Asian Art (Japan Foundation Asia Center and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2000). From The Dawn of The 1st Asian Art Show to the 3rd Asian Art Show at the Fukuoka Art Museum, 1979-89 by Rina Igarashi Session Date: 8 February 2018, 1.15 - 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy A milestone in the exhibition history of Asian art in Japan, the first Asian Art Show (AAS) was organised as the inauguration exhibition of the Fukuoka Art Museum (FAM) in 1979. Subsequent editions of the AAS were held almost every five years until the fourth show in 1994. Based on AASs accumulation of research on Asian Art, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum opened in 1999. AASs played a pivotal role in connecting Fukuoka with Asian modern and contemporary art up to now. Initially, the American Contemporary Art Show was planned as the inauguration exhibition of FAM but was later cancelled and the new idea on AAS was created. Behind the background of realising AAS, there were two key persons who have strong interests toward Asia: then mayor of Fukuoka city, Shinto Kazuma and then committee member of founding FAM, Koike Shinji. In her paper, Igarashi talks about how the first AAS was prepared in the 1970s, the practice and structure of the 1st - 3rd AASs, the connection between AAS and the policy of Fukuoka city, and how the practice of AASs in the 1980s demonstrates the shift of inter-Asia collaboration and the conflict of defining Asia-ness. Rina Igarashi is a curator at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Japan. She has worked on and curated a number of exhibitions at the FAAM, including Bengali Kantha, Embroidered Quilt: Its past and present (2001); Collecting India: Fascination with Indian Visual Culture in Contemporary Japan (2012); and Freedom in Blossom: Gangaw Village and Experimental Art in 1980s Burma (2012). She has also been the co-curator of 3rd (2005), 4th (2009) and 5th (2014) editions of the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale. She has been involved in research in Bangladeshi contemporary art and visual cultures since the late 1990s and has recently expanded her research to Myanmar. Group 1890, Surrounded by Infinity by Atreyee Gupta Session Date: 8 February 2018, 3.30 - 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper focuses on the Group 1890, a short-lived artists’ collective established in 1962 by Jagdish Swaminathan, Jeram Patel, Rajesh Mehra, Ambadas Khobragade, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Himmat Shah, Nagji Patel, Reddappa Naidu, Jyoti Bhatt, Eric Bowen, and Raghav Kaneria. The group heralded its presence with just one exhibition, the resonance of which the Mexican poet Octavio Paz described as akin to being ‘surrounded by infinity.’ The use of the word infinity was not purely rhetorical—back in Mexico, Paz had already established an intimate association with non-modern philosophy, and the vibrancy of matter. In India, the artist Jagdish Swaminathan spoke of the numinous image while Jeram Patel affirmed the primal energy of material. The synergy between the Group 1890 artists and Paz, then the Mexican ambassador to India, was significant. However, even as a second exhibition was planned in Mexico, it was never realised, and the group unofficially disbanded around 1969. Given the transitory nature of the enterprise, the Group 1890 has thus far appeared as a mere footnote in South Asia’s art historiography. This paper proposes revisiting the group, not just to unravel the intertwined histories of India and Mexico, but also to draw out a different imagination of globality from the perspective of the Global South. Atreyee Gupta is Assistant Professor, in University of California, Berkeley’s History of Art Department, and was previously the Jane Emison Assistant Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Her area of specialism focuses on global modernisms and contemporary art, with an emphasis on South and Southeast Asia and its diaspora. Her research and teaching interests cluster around visual and intellectual histories of 20th century art, including: the intersections between the Cold War; the Non-Aligned Movement; art after 1945; new media and experimental cinema; and the question of the global more broadly. Gupta’s essays have appeared in edited volumes, exhibition catalogues, and journals including: Art Journal, Yishu, and Third Text. Museums that Move: Itinerant Solidarity Exhibitions in the 1970s and the case of Japan's Apartheid Non, International Art Festival by Kristine Khouri Session Date: 8 February 2018, 3.30 - 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The 1970s were marked by a number of exhibitions-cum-museum initiatives organised in support of political causes. Culture trains, touring exhibitions, and moving libraries were common practice around the world in mid-20th century, moving information, artworks, and objects around a country to disseminate knowledge and culture—most often by governments—to sites where people wouldn’t necessarily have access to them. In the 1970s and 1980s, these initiatives took a more explicit political turn, exhibiting and touring artworks donated in support of a political causes, creating sites of solidarity where the public engaged with art in a different frame. International collections were built and toured as precursors and in anticipation of future museums, for example, against apartheid in South Africa, in support of Allende's government in Chile, for the people of Nicaragua, and in support of the Palestinian struggle. These alternative museum-making practices were only possible due to the hard work of individuals around the world: artists, writers, gallery owners, governments, and community organisers, among others. This paper addresses a number of case studies from Palestine, Chile and Nicaragua, with a primary focus on the Art Against/Contre Apartheid collection, and its remarkable two-year long tour in Japan from 1988-1990—the longest and most complex tour. Kristine Khouri is an independent researcher and writer whose interests focus on the history of arts circulation and infrastructure in the Arab world. Together with Rasha Salti, she is a co-founder of the History of Arab Modernities in the Visual Arts Study Group: a research platform focused around the social history of art in the Arab world. Their current focus includes the history of the International Art Exhibition in Solidarity with Palestine that opened in Beirut in 1978 and transformed into the exhibition, Past Disquiet: Narratives and Ghosts of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine,1978 at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2015) and later the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2016). She curated The Founding Years (1969 – 1973): A Selection of Works from the Sultan Gallery Archives at the Sultan Gallery, Kuwait (2012); and co-led a Digitising Archives Workshop with Sabih Ahmed (Asia Art Archive) in Kuwait as part of Art Dubai’s Global Art Forum (2015). Diasporic Cosmopolitanism, Making Worlds, Imagining Solidarity by Ming Tiampo Session Date: 8 February 2018, 3.30 - 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Histories of the Global South have a tendency to consider alternative histories that emerge out of South-South contacts and circumvent Western hegemonies. This paper argues that some of the most potent anti-colonial encounters that produced the notion of the Global South inevitably took place in the context of the colonial metropole. Using the history of the magazine Présence Africaine as a starting point to reimagine the metropolis as a site of ‘minor transnational encounter’ (Shih and Lionnet, 2005), this paper examines the role of Rasheed Araeen and the journal Third Text in worlding Asia and creating Afro-Asian solidarities, while retheorising the place of the metropolis in creating an imagined community of the Global South. Ming Tiampo is a Professor of Art History and the Director of the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Tiampo has published on Japanese modernism, war art in Japan, globalisation and art, multiculturalism in Canada, and the connections between Inuit and Japanese prints. Tiampo’s book Gutai: Decentering Modernism (University of Chicago Press, 2011) received an honourable mention for the Robert Motherwell Book award, and she later co-edited Art and War in Japan and its Empire: 1931-1960 (Brill Academic Press, 2013). In 2013, she was co-curator of the AICA award-winning Gutai: Splendid Playground, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Tiampo is a founding member of the Center for Transnational Cultural Analysis at Carleton University, serves on the advisory boards of the Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin, Tate Research Centre Asia, and on the editorial boards of the Archives of Asian Art, the Canadian Art Review (RACAR), and the Journal of Asian Diaspora Visual Culture and the Americas (ADVA). Temporal Exchanges: East and West Pakistan Exhibition Programmes, 1961-77’ by Saira Ansari Session Date: 8 February 2018, 3.30 - 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy From 1947 to 1971, Pakistani Modernist artist, patron and gallerist Zubeida Agha (1922-1997) ran the Rawalpindi Art Galleries: Pakistan’s first art gallery since its founding in 1947. Agha worked closely with artists across West and East Pakistan (current day Bangladesh) curating numerous exhibitions in Pakistan and on international platforms. This paper introduces the history of the Rawalpindi Art Galleries, it’s engagement with artists from Bangladesh, and the shared artistic activities between Pakistan and Bangladesh, especially when they were one nation (1947-1971). Examining the role of the gallery through a selection of its exhibitions, printed catalogues and other collected ephemera, this paper seeks to articulate the role of the State in the art world during the early years of Pakistan—when the lines between public and private programming were still blurry—while shedding light on this often-overlooked moment of shared history. Saira Ansari is a researcher and a writer with a focus in South Asian art history. She works in Publications and Research at the Sharjah Art Foundation and is a Contributing Editor for the South Asian literary journal Papercuts. Her curatorial projects include: The importance of staying quiet (Hong Kong, 2014). She was the recipient of the Lahore Biennale Foundation Research Fellowship (2016), granted in conjunction with Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong). Saira has contributed to various international publications including: Art Asia Pacific, The Rio Times, The State, Canvas, Harper’s Bazaar Art Arabia, Khaleej Times, Folio, ArtNow Pakistan, Herald Magazine; with essays in Rupak, Lala Rukh’s commission for Documenta 14, Grey Noise (UAE, 2017), Syntax Freezone: Anthology of Essays on Language and Accent, THE STATE and Maraya Art Centre (UAE, 2015) and Sohbet: Journal of Contemporary Arts and Culture, Vol. 2 (Pakistan, 2011), amongst others. Panel Discussions: Imaging Internationalism Moderated by Ming Tiampo (Department of Art History and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada) With Nancy Adajania (Independent scholar), Patrick Flores (Art Studies Department, University of the Philippines, Manila), Gridthiya Gaweewong (Jim Thompson Art Center, Bangkok), and Rina Igarashi (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum) Session Date: 8 February 2018, 1.15 - 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Displays of Internationalism - Asia and the Global South Moderated by Patrick Flores (Art Studies Department, University of the Philippines, Manila) With Atreyee Gupta (History of Art Department, University of California Berkeley), Ming Tiampo (Department of Art History and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada), Kristine Khouri (Independent scholar) and Saira Ansari (Sharjah Art Foundation). Session Date: 8 February 2018, 3.30 - 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy