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ALL PROJECTS Social Movements and Feminist Futures Curated by Diana Campbell What does an enfranchised future look like? Since the inception of the nation-state, not everyone has been considered a citizen with rights to protect. Throughout the world, the disenfranchised including peoples of colour, indigenous peoples, and people of diverse sexual and gender orientation, continue to fight for spaces to endure, imagining how and when their security, their representation in and of the world is recognised. The artists in this movement employ fantasy and poetry to imagine territories that emancipate them from the everyday violence of capitalism, patriarchy, and political/religious fundamentalism. These worlds might exist in outer space, on the ocean floor, at the poles of the planet, or they may emerge from hiding places between the lines that seemingly restrict and foreclose uncertain histories. Adriana Bustos b. 1965, Córdoba; lives and works in Buenos Aires Venus Planisphere 2 , 2019–2020 Acrylic, Graphite, and Silver Leaf on Canvas Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist Official Territory , 2019 Acrylic, Graphite, and Silver Leaf on Canvas Courtesy of the artist and Collection Sharjah Art Foundation Adriana Bustos’s Vision Machine project poses questions about what we see, how we see it, and how vision can reinforce or dismantle the narratives which underlie systems of oppression. Two large maps – representing polarised views yet identical in structure – depict the constellations as they appeared in the skies on day one of month one of the Christian era. The names of stars have been replaced by words and concepts which act as a guide to the drawings around them. One of the maps quotes historical images depicting acts of patriarchal violence. They are rendered in red, and when seen through a filter positioned in front of the work they fade away and our gaze is instead drawn to the images in the opposite map depicting known and unknown heroines as well as references to repressed practices and events associated with women. This commission for DAS extends the artist’s research into the feminist histories of South Asia. Bustos works with photography, video, performance, and drawing, addressing concepts drawn from anthropology, history, science, popular culture, fiction, biographical writings, and academic and intuitive knowledge. Her works act as arenas of intersecting methodological and representational systems that challenge global histories, specifically concerning Latin America. Bharti Kher b. 1969, London; lives and works in New Delhi Intermediaries , 2019–2020 Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Nature Morte. Realised with additional support from Nature Morte and Perrotin Bharti Kher’s Intermediaries series invites us to consider a transitional space in the present – somewhere between truth and reality. This notion of the go-between or medium fascinates Kher, often resulting in unlikely pairings becoming hybrids, often half-female forms such as these women in the process of becoming snakes in this newly commissioned project for DAS. Made by traditional idol makers, Kher’s painted mud and clay sculpture rises from the earth and will return to it through the natural process of entropy, speaking to the many layers of religions and cultures that have existed on the land that is now Bangladesh. Her work reminds us that there are multiple selves within us and that we are in a constant state of transformation. Kher’s way of working is radically heterogeneous, encompassing painting, sculpture, text, and installation. Central themes are the notion of the self as formed by multiple and interlocking relationships with human and animal bodies, places, and readymade objects. The body, a central element to her work, is one of the many tools she uses to transform metaphysical narratives into forms of hybridity. Chitra Ganesh b. 1975, Brooklyn, New York; lives and works in Brooklyn Sultana’s Dream , 2018 Portfolio of 27 Linocuts BFK Rives Tan Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Manuscript , 2018/2020 Bamboo, raw silk, video Projection developed with and animated by The Studio NYC Courtesy of the artist Totem , 2018/2020 Brick, bamboo, clay, mud, and straw Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation How we do , 2018/2020 Video, chalk, paint, jute structure Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Using printmaking, video, installation, and sculpture, Chitra Ganesh unpacks gender and power in a futurist imaginary inspired by the utopian, feminist, sci-fi novella Sultana’s Dream (1905) by Bengali author and social reformer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. In the words of the artist, the project ‘draws on Hossain’s vibrant imagery, translating a story written in verse into a visual grammar that connects with problems that shape 21st-century life: apocalyptic environmental disaster, the disturbing persistence of gender-based inequality, the power of the wealthy few against the economic struggles of the majority, and ongoing geopolitical conflicts that cause widespread death and suffering. These works comment on this fraught moment in world history, demonstrating the enduring relevance of feminist utopian imaginaries in offering an invaluable means of envisioning a more just world.’ Ganesh met with Bangladeshi artisans and architects as well as members of the broader queer and trans community of Dhaka in the process of creating this commission for DAS. Their open process of sharing know-how challenges received notions of how labour is gendered and organised within patriarchal structures. Ganesh works across media including drawing, installation, animation, and prints. Her work draws from and deconstructs historical and mythological texts to queer the future of the iconic female figure. Her pictorial language is inspired by surrealism, expressionism, and South Asian visual culture, such as Kalighat painting and ACK comics. Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher b. 1965, Eindhoven; lives and works in Rotterdam and New York. b. 1965, Providence, Rhode Island; lives and works in New York and Rotterdam Osedax , 2010 16 mm film projection, Hand-painted slide projection, Music: ‘Message From A Black Man’ by The Whatnauts, 1970 (A&I Records). Courtesy of the artists and Gagosian Gallery. Presented with the generous support of Gagosian Gallery and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh The collaborative film installation Osedax is named after a new species of bone-devouring worm discovered around the time this work was made. The discovery inspired Edgar Cleijne and Ellen Gallagher to draw parallels between science fiction and hard science protocols, focusing on transformation processes of physical matter where you think you see one thing, but it turns out to be completely different. The work is based on ‘whale fall,’ the scientific term for dead whales that have fallen to the ocean floor and are consumed by scavengers. The work relies on antique film technology (16 mm and synced slide projectors), but the artists also use modern 3D animation technology to draw into the film, weaving between watery passages and creating a portal into enchanting worlds populated with micro-organisms and submarine life forms and mythical stories of the African diaspora. Edgar Cleijne is a Dutch artist predominantly working in photography and film. Merging discordant threads of analogue and digital imaging and sound, Cleijne looks at the effects of the human-engendered climate emergency in the crossing points of culture and nature. Gallagher’s work comprises painting, film, cut and layered paper, and intricate combinations of the three. Through processes of accretion, erasure, extraction, and synthesis, she counters static representations of race and nation, traversing geographies and histories. The eclipse of the African body into American blackface minstrelsy informs Gallagher’s investigations into the violence embedded within the history of abstraction. Ellen Gallagher b. 1965, Providence, Rhode Island; lives and works in New York and Rotterdam Watery Ecstatic (RA 18h 35m 37.73s D37° 22’ 31.12’) , 2017 Cut Paper Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Ellen Gallagher’s Water Ecstatic series (2001 onwards) imagines life as fluid: from our early days as cells that develop into foetuses within amniotic sacs in our pregnant mothers to the imaginary underwater world of Drexciya. In this myth, created by a Detroit-based electronic band of the same name, children born from pregnant African slaves thrown overboard during their passage across the Atlantic Ocean have gills and webbed feet and are therefore able to thrive underwater without the need to come up for air in the oppressive racist world above. Drexciya’s world started out on the ocean floor and sailed into the cosmos when the group bought the naming rights to a Drexciya star, whose celestial address is referenced in the title of this work. Gallagher relates her labour-intensive cut-paper process on bright white paper to scrimshaw (illustrative carvings primarily made on whalebones and ivory). The intricate forms that she carves into paper of botanical and marine life growing from African masks conjure a utopian realm, adjacent to a horrific one, that can only exist in the realm of fantasy. Gallagher’s work comprises painting, film, cut and layered paper, and intricate combinations of the three. Through processes of accretion, erasure, extraction, and synthesis, she counters static representations of race and nation, traversing geographies and histories. The eclipse of the African body into American blackface minstrelsy informs Gallagher’s investigations into the violence embedded within the history of abstraction. Héctor Zamora b. 1974, Mexico City; lives and works in Lisbon Movimientos Emisores de Existencia (Existence-emitting Movements) , 2019–2020 Performative action with women and terracotta vessels, HD Video 5:25 min Courtesy of the artist and Labor Movimientos Emisores de Existencia (Existence-emitting Movements) is an action in which a group of women walk directly on an installation comprised of hundreds of raw clay vessels in different shapes and sizes inspired by traditional ceramic traditions of Bangladesh. Most cultures, including those of the artist’s native Mexico as well as Bangladesh, perpetuate the iconic image of a woman bearing a vessel on her head to transport water or food; a symbol of the hard domestic labour weighing down women in society. Héctor Zamora disrupts the order of things by placing the vessel not upon the women’s heads, but rather beneath their feet. By inverting the equation, what occurs is a shared space of liberation where women can turn the tide of patriarchy and recover pleasure in their lives. Zamora uses materials that resonate with the location of his chosen site, such as terracotta and bricks that allow him to question and engage with institutional structures. He often operates in dialogue with local communities, which allows him to produce ephemeral site-specific works that highlight social, political, and historical issues specific to their context. Himali Singh Soin b. 1987, New Delhi; lives and works between London and New Delhi we are opposite like that , 2018–2020 Two-channel video installation, 11:35 min Courtesy of the artist. With support from India Foundation for the Arts, Frieze London, Forma Arts and Media Ltd., and Channel 4 Random Acts we are opposite like that is a magic-realist tale from the high Arctic circle, told from the nonhuman perspective of an elder that has witnessed deep time: the ice. Shown in an installation format for the first time, Himali Singh Soin’s videos recount the 19th-century anxiety of an imminent ice age and illumine the hubris of the abandoned township of Ny London, where British extractionists mined marble that turned to dust when the permafrost evaporated. An alien figure, part-cyborg, part-vessel of ancient feminine knowledge, explores the blank, oblivious whiteness, foraging for decolonial possibilities in a landscape of receding glaciers. Inspired by field recordings, an original score for a string quartet creates an etheric soundscape coded with temperature variances and latitudes and longitudes from the field. ‘we are opposite like that’ beckons the ghosts hidden in landscapes and turns them into echoes, listening in on the resonances of potential futures. Soin works across text, performance, and moving image. She utilises metaphors from the natural environment to construct speculative cosmologies that reveal nonlinear entanglements between human and nonhuman life. Her poetic methodology seeks inspiration from the ancient Stoics and contemporary philosophy to explore alchemical ways of knowing and the loss inherent in language. Huma Bhabha b. 1962, Karachi; lives and works in Poughkeepsie Cowboys and Angels , 2018 Cork, styrofoam, acrylic paint, oil stick Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Untitled , 2014 Ink and collage on colour photograph Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Intense in their presence, Huma Bhabha’s works aggressively attract the viewer by layering visual textures from across the many landscapes (real and imagined) that she has inhabited, from rural New York to Karachi to cinemas projecting horror and science fiction movies. She found in her research that illustrators of sci-fi movies and comic books used African masks and imagery from other cultures to develop their characters. According to the artist, the issues that sci-fi deals with – such as the state of the world, the future, and the fate of human beings – closely parallel her own interests as she explores the global as local and globalisation as the new colonialism. She sees these themes as ‘eternal because as human beings we haven’t been able to get beyond them.’ Bhabha’s alien forms emerging from photographic paper, cork, and styrofoam suggest a world beyond our human limitations. Bhabha’s work addresses themes of colonialism, war, displacement, and memories of home. Using found materials such as styrofoam, clay, construction scraps, and cork, she creates haunting human figures that hover between abstraction and figuration, and include references to science fiction, horror films, tribal art, religious reliquary, and modernist sculpture. Marzia Farhana b. 1985, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Sovereignty to Nature , 2019–2020 Acrylic painting & collage on canvas, toys, magazine images, texts, installations with domestic materials, bricks, small engines, everyday objects, chair/tool, found footage, video on CRT monitor/3D projector Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation We live in a man-made world; the discrimination against women and nature on this planet is a part of the machinery behind its violent destruction. Marzia Farhana’s DAS commission Sovereignty to Nature addresses this discrimination from an eco-feminist perspective. Situating her subject matter in Bangladesh, a nation among the world’s most heavily affected by environmental destruction, with less than five per cent of its forest cover remaining, Farhana traces the current situation to the male invention of capitalism that subjugates nature to a rational economic calculus. Divided into three individual paintings signifying collapsed bodies in an apocalyptic world, elements such as machinery parts, toys, everyday ordinary materials, domestic materials and printed images tell the story of the destruction of nature and the consequential suffering of women and the planet. Farhana invites the viewer to call for a radical restructuring of human sovereignty, where all living and non-living inhabitants of our planet are included. Farhana works with several media including painting, installation, and video. Her practice is time-and-space based, facilitating collaborations, participation and reinforcing the possibility of co-authorship on works of art that reinvent empathy. Farhana has recently co-authored works with a government school in Bangladesh, as well as with local communities in Kochi. For her, art is an ‘act of resistance’ to overcome the violence committed by the domain of the hegemonic society. Nilima Sheikh b. 1945, New Delhi; lives and works in Baroda Beyond Loss , 2019–20 Casein tempera on canvas scroll Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Chemould Prescott Road. Realised with additional support from Chemould Prescott Road ‘Immediate trauma finds historic/mythic prototypes. Dire times call for apocalyptic vocabularies,’ reflects Nilima Sheikh on the tragedies long-plaguing Kashmir, the epicentre of the destruction left in the wake of the British partition of India and exacerbated by rising Indian nationalism. The work takes the form of a narrative scroll that immerses the viewer in its representation of mourning, loss, and absence. As in life, song, and performance, so too in painting we look for a form to express and release what can seem inexpressible. In many cultures of mourning, women participate in prime roles, however, there are times when mourning has to be conducted in silence, in solitude, in the incantations of memory. Sheikh has been visiting Kashmir since she was a young child and has made work about the plural history of the place since 2002. This new work signals the valour of the women of Kashmir, whose energies are necessary to metaphorically ignite the flame of the cooking pot to reignite home-life in the face of an oppressive world outside. Sheikh works with paper, painting, installation, and large-scale scrolls. Drawing from her extensive research on traditional Indian and Asian art forms, including mural paintings from China and screens and scrolls from Japan, her work reflects her decades-long advocacy for women’s rights. Sheikh’s mystical landscapes address themes such as displacement, longing, historical lineage, violence, and ideas of femininity. Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide) b. 1977, Busan; lives and works in Amsterdam and Brussels The Mother Mountain Institute , 2017–ongoing Installation, collection of stories, sound, drawings Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from Mondriaan Fonds and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh With special thanks: Mrs Sayrun; Dutch Foundation Shapla Community Voice mother: Mehreen Mahmud. Voice mountain: Moktadir Dewan. Words mountain written by: Sara Sejin Chang (Sara van der Heide); Agnieszka Polska, Kumgang Sunimthe head monk of the Seon Monastry of Mihwangsa, South Korea; Park, Jin Yeo, the woman who can see the future and the past, South Korea; Jeonhwan Cho;Dario Escobar, hermit Qadisha Valley, Lebanon; Nabil Rahman The Mother Mountain Institute aims to give a voice to mothers who have, often under duress, given their child up for adoption. Legacies of imperialism and colonialism can be read through the lens of transracial and transnational adoptions with the Global North. The interests of the birth mother are often overlooked with its many stakeholders. Women in precarious social and economic conditions can be faced with pressure from the state, the church, and/or criminal traffickers. In this work, two figures are evoked: the Mother and the Mountain, who both speak. A woman’s voice narrates the story, based upon an interview with a mother by the artist that took place in January 2020 in Bangladesh. Alternating, the mountain speaks. After separation, the respective desires of the mother and child to find one another again remain. Like celestial bodies pulled by gravity, they circle around each other. Besides the political, economic, cultural and historical context provided about the why, the how and the when, no sufficient answers are provided that can heal the inner wound of being separated from one’s child. The mountain is present here as a patient shelter and as a spiritual entity who might provide answers to impossible questions transcending rational thought, represented through sound and drawings made during the artist’s walks in hills and mountains known for their spiritual qualities in Poland, India, Bangladesh, Lebanon, and South Korea. www.mothermountaininstitute.org Sara Sejin Chang works with drawings, installations, performances, films, and interventions, examining patriarchal and Western imperialist ideas about linearity, gender, nation-state, spirituality, and world-making. In many of her works, Chang draws from her historiography and reflects paradoxically on these artistic processes and interventions as acts of historical repair, healing, and belonging. Saskia Pintelon b. 1945, Kortrijk; lives and works in Mirissa No News Good News , 2019 Collage on Newspaper Courtesy of the artist and Saskia Fernando Gallery No News Good News is an ongoing body of work where the artist Saskia Pintelon imagines a world where the text comprising the English, Flemish, and Sinhalese newspapers that she reads is rearranged to tell stories of more hopeful and equal futures. With a subtle sense of humour, these subversive works push back against patriarchy in the world which often defines what is newsworthy, proposing new rules to break rigid standards of beauty and definitions of success and happiness. They question reigning paradigms about a variety of subjects from old age, to romance, matrimony, gender, religion, addictions through association and juxtaposition. The strong visual quality of Pintelon’s newspapers forces us to stop and reflect, and through her imaginative editing process we are able to consider news that we overlook as a result of information overflow. Saskia Pintelon is at heart a figurative painter who periodically verges towards abstraction and text-based work. Inspired by local and universal issues, stories from the gut and the heart, politics and day-to-day concerns, her body of work interprets the collective human experience, environment and the cycle of life with intimate and personal preoccupations. She has spent nearly four decades working in Sri Lanka and her work reflects the hybridity of living between and across cultures. Taslima Akhter b. 1974, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Stitching Together: Garment Workers in Solidarity , 2017 With Bangladesh Garment Sromik Samhoti (Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity) Community Stitching Action on Cloth Made by families of Bangladeshi Garment Workers. Courtesy of the artist ‘A thousand stars twinkle on the sky, and I dream of Beauty by my side ,’ reads the translation of a traditional Kantha-stitched statement embroidered into Taslima Akhter’s moving ‘Memorial Quilts’. This is not an abstract dream, Beauty was the wife of Alam Matobor who disappeared in the deadly collapse of the garment factory Rana Plaza in 2013, one of the worst industrial accidents in history. Their daughter Farzana embroidered her father’s words on a handkerchief, and the stories of loss of 14 other families make up the details (which include messages, photographs, and belongings donated by surviving relatives) comprising this powerful collaborative reminder to ‘remember the dead and fight for the living.’ A counter-narrative to disaster, these quilts empower families to memorialise their loved ones and draw together a growing number of allies who demand the wage and safety conditions necessary to avoid history repeating itself. Akther is a documentary photographer and human rights activist, drawing attention to the issues faced by garment workers for over a decade. Her photographs address issues of gender, the environment, and social discrimination. Akther’s politics strongly influence her photography, which often captures the lives and struggles of those she rallies for. She is the chair of Bangladesh Garment Sromik Samhoti (Bangladesh Garment Workers Solidarity) founded in 2008. Vivian Caccuri b. 1986, São Paulo; lives and works in Rio de Janeiro A Soul Transplant , 2019 Drawing on paper A Sweet Encounter , 2019 Drawing on paper New Immunity , 2019 Drawing on paper Courtesy of the artist and A Gentil Carioca Ghost Clothes Aedes , 2019 Ghost Clothes , 2019 Installation made of embroidery on mosquito nets. Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and A Gentil Carioca The mosquito, a pivot of epidemics such as yellow fever, dengue fever, and Zika, has often been a propagator of anguish, fear, and urban and environmental crises in Vivian Caccuri’s native Brazil as well as in Bangladesh, which recently suffered the worst dengue epidemic in its history. Caccuri seeks a new environmental relationship with mosquitoes and proposes a futuristic moment when a new culture emerges in Brazil that has overcome its fear of mosquitoes – developing immunity and thriving in new symbiotic relationships with these insects in the wake of environmental destruction. Inspired by hallucinations typical of yellow fever, Caccuri’s new sculptural work melds the human body and the mosquito body into one. The protection of the skin spreads into space as if breaking the visible boundary between this membrane and the environment. Caccuri works with objects, installations, and performances in combination with sound. Complex experiments in sensory perception allow her to create situations that disorient everyday experience, addressing ecology, interspecies relationships, and the legacies of globalisation and colonial violence. Caccuri’s practice lingers between visual art, experimental music, and anthropology.

ALL PROJECTS Roots Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Roots Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Artists in Bangladesh have played a key role in building the institutions that support artistic production in the country, from founding formal institutions like art schools (such as Zainul Abedin with the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka and Rashid Choudhury with the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong) as well as informal art education outside of the capital (S.M. Sultan’s Shishu Swarga and Charupith). Dhaka based artist and educator Bishwajit Goswami’s exhibition examines the transfer of knowledge by art educators who have been critical in the building of Bangladesh’s art history. Roots Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Roots explores the transfer of knowledge by 61 art educators who have been critical in the building of Bangladesh’s art history through painting, sculpture, ceramics, craft, and other forms of art. They are represented not only through their art works but also related archival material that connects them across time and space. Zainul Abedin (1914–1976), Safiuddin Ahmed (1922–2012), Quamrul Hassan (1921–1988), and S. M. Sultan (1923–1994) were pioneer artists and educators who established fertile ground during the 1950s-60s that allowed artists from East Bengal (1947–1971) to transform from colonial subjects into artists who expressed their unique voices in a newly Independent Bangladesh. After Independence, the next generation of artists of the 1970s and 1980s were more focused on trying to relocate their artistic identities in a global context. Building on the foundations laid by Abedin, Ahmed, Hassan, and Sultan, the artists in this exhibition were crucial to the creation of the contemporary art ecology of Bangladesh. Their work in and outside of the studio and classroom has had a lasting influence on multiple generations of Bangladeshi artists. Their art and thoughts have had an influence on wider Bangladeshi society. Decolonial Awareness and Action There was a strong sense of decolonial awareness in the 1950s that pervaded the art scene of what was then East Pakistan. Several Muslim students and teachers from the Government School of Art in Calcutta opted to move to East Pakistan to develop their own distinct style after the 1947 partition of India – among these artists were Zainul Abedin, Safiuddin Ahmed and Quamrul Hassan. Zainul Abedin, for example, founded Dhaka’s art institute in a context that previously had no recent history of institutional or professional art. What this first generation of artists initiated was not only a stylistic shift, but a call for the rethinking of East Bengali cultural practice, in addition to identifying its lack of institutional representation. They founded institutions to allow this culture to flourish in the new context of East Pakistan, and later Bangladesh. Building from Scratch The first generation of teachers in what is now the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka made deliberate strides to cultivate a context for artistic expression outside of British or West Pakistani domination. The school was and continues to be an intellectual meeting point and its building designed by Muzharul Islam made it one of the first examples of modern architecture in East Pakistan, if not all of South Asia. These teachers were politically active and vocal against the injustices imposed on them by West Pakistani rulers. They participated in mass movement demonstrations as part of the Language Movement of 1952 leading up to the independence movements of 1969–1971, remained involved in the struggle for democracy of 1980s and later participated in the anti-fundamentalist uprising movements of the last two decades. Newlyfounded formal institutions like art schools as well as informal art education platforms outside of the capital (S. M. Sultan’s Shishu Swarga and Charupith in Jessore (1985)), artists such as Zainul Abedin with the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1948, Rashid Choudhury with the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong (1970), and Shoshibhuson with Mahesharpasha School of Art; currently Fine Arts School, Khulna University (1904), established deep and resilient roots allowing the culture of East Bengal to spread its branches all over the country. The Birth of Bangladesh The birth of Bangladesh was made possible by a shared hope of creating a secular, democratic and socialist country where Bengali culture would flourish. It was a cultural movement before it was a nationalist one. The government’s commitment to create institutions to nurture the country’s culture was not limited to Dhaka – it extended to Chittagong (Southeastern Bangladesh), Rajshahi (North Bangladesh), and Khulna (Southwest Bangladesh). The 1971 war renewed the search for inspiration from Bengali cultural heritage and sparked a new impulse to communicate with the population at large by incorporating social and political interpretations into art. Quamrul Hassan depicted the furious face of West Pakistani aggression and encouraged people to demolish it in his poster Annihilate These Demons. In 1988 he again awakened the people against the authoritarian ruler of HM Ershad by inscribing his last drawing with the title The country is under an impudent ruler. Many of the artists in the 1950s such as Aminul Islam ( 1931–2011), Murtaja Baseer (1932–), Rashid Choudhury (1932–1986), and Abdur Razzaque (1932–2005) went abroad for higher education and trained in the art centres of the ‘Western world’ (France, Italy, USA) where they came in contact with avant-garde movements. Looking eastward, Mohammad Kibria (1929–2011) travelled to Japan where he adopted a style of abstraction influenced by Japanese (as well as American) philosophy. The artists of the 1960s searched for expanded and more meaningful involvement with ideas that had begun to dominate artistic and aesthetic discourse combining local and international influences. Hashem Khan (1941–) and Rafiqun Nabi (1943–) are notable examples of artists who portrayed local issues through illustrations and cartoons. Mustafa Monwar (1935–) invested his time in introducing art and creative practices to the masses through his widely broadcast television show that taught children how to express themselves with puppets, drawings, and watercolours. A great deal of passion flowed through the works of the 1970s where the impact of the Liberation War was visible. The re-emergence of figurative art was a welcome relief from the obsessive preoccupation with abstract formalism of the previous decades. Hamiduzzaman Khan (1946–), Chandra Shekhar Dey (1951–), Alok Roy (1950–) and many other artists demonstrated an interest in the increased ‘localisation’ of themes and forms. The second generation of East Pakistani Artists of the 1960s worked in parallel with the first generation of Bangladeshi Artists of the 1970s with their teaching and artistic activities. They began to develop the local art scene by introducing art criticism, exhibition and graphic design to support the public dissemination of art. They established formal exhibition platforms (such as the Asian Art Biennale (f. 1981), which is the oldest continually running biennial of contemporary art in Asia) to share their work with both local and international audiences. The generation of the 1980s developed a critical point of view about history and reality to combat the oppressive dictatorial regime of Ershad. The artists from the Shomoy Group (Dhali Al Mamoon (1958–), Shishir Bhattacharjee (1960–), Nisar Hossain (1961–) and others) blended elements of diverse social issues and represented time and history. The contribution of this generation of artists is significant; they brought about new readings of modernism, altering the art world and its values (more information about this generation can be found in Mustafa Zaman’s exhibition at DAS on page 83). Roots, Branches, and Leaves; Generations, Collectives, Individuals The works of art in this exhibition visually stand for the individual contributions of 61 artists as they developed unique styles while being mentored by artist-pedagogues from the previous generation. When the socio-political environment was stable (which it rarely is in Bangladesh) artists became more focused on their personal practices and strove to build an art market in this young country, and several opened up commercial art galleries. However, during the several periods of unrest in the country, many shifted their focus to activism. They built collectives and artist groups to create a support system to push their radical ideas and demand for reform into being. This energy carried across generations, and the borders between individuals, groups, and generations are ambiguous. Visitors are invited to form their own narratives of connectivity across space and time through the artworks themselves, but also through the underlying networks that built the art scene of Bangladesh that we experience together at DAS. A Guide to Bangladesh’s Art Schools Name changes of cities, streets, and buildings are common in South Asia, and the institutions described in these biographies are referred to by multiple names. The guide below is an attempt to map out how the four main art schools of Bangladesh were referred to at different times of their history. Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka: Government Institute of Arts, Dacca (1948–1963) East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts,Dacca (1963–1971) Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca (1972–1983) Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (1 September 1983 – 1 August 2008) Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka (2 August 2008 – present) Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong: Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong (1970–2010) Chittagong Art College (1973–1984) Government Art College, Chittagong (1984–2010) The Department of Fine Arts and Government Art College combined together to form Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong (2010–present) Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi: Rajshahi Arts & Crafts College (1978–1994) Department of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi (1994–2015) Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi (2015–present) Fine Arts School, University of Khulna: Maheshwarpasha School of Art/ Arts (1904–1983) Khulna Art College (1983–2009) Institute of Fine Arts, University of Khulna (2009–2019) Fine Arts School, University of Khulna (2019–present) Abdur Razzaque Simultaneously a painter, a printmaker and a sculptor, Abdur Razzaque is known for his Jagroto Chowrangi (The Vigilant Crossroad), a memorial sculpture dedicated to the valiant Bengali Freedom Fighters from 1971 at Gazipur, Tongi. Razzaque earned his Fine Art Degree from the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1954 and then received a Fulbright Scholarship to study Fine Arts at the State University of Iowa, USA in 1956, where he continued as a research assistant until 1957. Upon his return to Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1958, he joined the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca as a teacher. He established the first sculpture department in the country in 1963 and dedicated himself to the development of the academic programme at a time when figurative sculptural representation was considered antireligious and was therefore discouraged. b. 1932, Shariatpur; d. 2005 in Jessore Abdus Shakoor Shah Over a large span of his career, Abdus Shakoor Shah’s work has been drawing on folk motifs and ancient Bengali ballads including Mahua and Malua love stories, Nakshi Kanthar Maath, Gazir Pata, Manasha Pata through painting, tapestry, batik and serigraphs. Shakoor was encouraged by his mentor Rashid Choudhury to work with heritage, culture and myths while studying at the Department of Fine Arts, Chittagong University. As a teacher, he inspires his students to find inspiration from the region. He earned his BFA from the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1970, and his Post Graduate Diploma from the M.S. University, Baroda, India in 1978. He is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Craft, University of Dhaka and formerly held the position of Director of the Institute of Fine Art. b. 1946, Bogra; lives and works in Dhaka Abul Barq Alvi Abul Barq Alvi, a painter and printmaker, has been an inspiration for several generations of Bangladeshi art students. During the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, he was arrested by the occupying forces and incarcerated and tortured. The war left a deep scar in his psyche that changed his perception of reality. Instead of recording external impressions, he became more interested in exploring the inner world of nature where images are reduced to their essential forms. He completed his BFA at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1968 and conducted postgraduate research at Tsukuba University, Japan from 1983–84. He is currently Honorary Professor of the Printmaking Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka where he held the position of Dean from 2012 to 2014. Abul Monsur Over a more than three-decades-long career as an art educator and writer, Abul Monsur applied his literary practice to contribute to the field of art theory and art criticism, also promoting Bangladeshi artists through publishing artist monographs. To integrate the disciplines of art and literature, Monsur and his friends published the annual magazine Proshongo in 1985 and later established Shilpo Somonnoy (a space for young artists) in 1999. As a student, Monsur was involved with the collective Oti Shamprotik Amra that created a 13-panel mural in 1972 narrating the history of Bangladesh which was part of the India- Bangladesh Friendship Fair in Calcutta (considered to be the first international exhibition of an independent Bangladesh). Monsur started his career as a teacher in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong and taught theory until 2012. He completed his studies at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1972 and received his MFA in Art History from the M.S. University in Baroda in 1982. b. 1947, Chittagong; lives and works in Chattogram Abu Sayeed Talukder Abu Sayeed Talukder played an important role in developing the foundation for modern ceramics and studio pottery practice in Bangladesh, by introducing modern techniques and concepts such as crystalline glaze and establishing ceramics as a mainstream art medium. He experimented with pottery-making, primarily using terracotta. He completed his BA in 1985 and his postgraduate diploma in 1986 in Ceramics at the Central Academy of Applied Art, Beijing, China. He became a teacher at the Ceramics Department, Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1987 where he had previously completed a certificate course in 1980. Alok Roy Alok Roy is known for his monumental figurative sculptures combining folk and classical terracotta style in a contemporary fashion. Inspired by the ancient architecture of Bengal, his sculptures often carry fragments reminiscent of architectural forms and are also often situated in outdoor environments, interacting with the elements of sunshine, wind, and rain. One of his finest masterpieces that combines sculpture and architecture is his residence Aroni, where he also established Chittagong Sculpture Center in 2018, a space for students to share knowledge about sculpture. Alok Roy completed his studies at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1973 and earned his MFA from M. S. University in Baroda, India (1978). He later served as a teacher at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong from 1978–2016. b. 1950, Mymensingh; lives and works in Chattogram Aminul Islam Aminul Islam was arguably the first artist to introduce mosaic murals to the art scene of Bangladesh. The Osmani Memorial Hall, Dhaka has a great example of his mural work on its entrance. An autobiographical streak runs through many of his paintings. His figures gradually became more suggestive and more geometrically organised later on in his career. He drew his designs from various sources, and his compositions became more focused and articulate. He was a student of the first batch of the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1953 and studied in Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze in Florence from 1953–1956. Later he became a teacher at the Institute and became its principal in 1978. b. 1931, Narayanganj; d. 2011, Dhaka Anwarul Huq Anwarul Huq was one of the initiators of the Government Institute of Arts in Dhaka in 1948 and served as a teacher until 1977. He made significant contributions to the development of the curricula of the school. Anwarul Huq was the founding teacher of the Department of Drawing and Painting. He was a somewhat reclusive figure, preferring to stay away from the public gaze, focusing on institution building activities such as teaching and administrative duties. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1941 and a ‘Teachership’ Course at the Government School of Art, Calcutta and taught there until Partition in 1947, after which he relocated to Dhaka. b. 1918, Uganda; d. 1981 in Dacca Banizul Huq Banizul Huq was a vital figure in the foundation of two major art institutes in Bangladesh: Chittagong and Rajshahi Art College. Huq joined Chittagong Art College in 1973 as one of its first teachers. While teaching there, he built a hostel for the art college students to transform it into a residential campus. But soon after, he left the institution to establish Rajshahi Art College in 1978 which is now the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi. He remained there as founding principal until 1986. Huq was a painter whose work reflected the serene beauty of nature with surrealist motifs. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts, Dacca in 1973. b. 1948, Gaibandha; d. 2018, Dhaka Bulbon Osman Despite having a background in sociology, Bulbon Osman has dedicated his career to the teaching of art history. He completed his BA in 1962 and his MA in 1963 at the Sociology Department of the University of Dacca. Osman began his teaching career in 1966 as a teacher of the ‘Sociology of Art’ at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca. Osman’s involvement in theory has also inspired him to become a self-taught artist working across painting and printmaking. He contributed to the Swadhin Bangla Betar Kendra (Free Bengal Radio Centre) during the Liberation War of 1971. Osman is currently serving as an Honorary Professor of the History of Art Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1941, Howrah; lives and works in Dhaka Chandra Shekhar Dey Chandra Sekhar Dey’s canvases capture the magic of everyday life in Bangladesh and its stories, mostly focusing on urban landscapes. His unique use of the colour white in his art practice is notable and stands out in the Bangladeshi context. He worked as a teacher at the Chittagong Art College from 1973– 1977 and from 1984–1988. During that time, he also volunteered at several cultural spaces in Chittagong. Active as a student, Dey was one of the key members of the collective group Oti Shamprotik Amra that created the 13 panel Abahoman, Bangla Bangali murals in 1972. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1972 and his MFA in 1975 at the Fine Arts Department, University of Chittagong. b. 1951, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Debdas Chakraborty Debdas Chakraborty works across various mediums and disciplines creating artworks that are distinct for their combination of lines that build up abstract geometric forms. His Bristi (Rain) series is the finest example of his style. As a politically aware artist, Chakraborty’s artworks repeatedly depict social realism, but in an abstract form. Debdas Chakraborty taught at the Fine Arts Department of Chittagong University for about a decade from 1970–80. During the Liberation War of Bangladesh, he worked as a designer for the temporary Government of Bangladesh. Chakraborty completed his art education at the Government Institute of Arts in 1956. b. 1933, Shariatpur; d. 2008, Dhaka Dhali Al Mamoon Dhali Al Mamoon is known for his versatile experimental works, both in terms of their ideas and the diverse media employed. His drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and videos explore history and identity of Bengal. He finds it difficult to escape history and is driven by the need to articulate the social and political imperatives of the nation. His art writings reflect his anti-colonial standpoint and reveal the inferiority complex issues of colonised people in their cultural contexts. He was a founding member of the Shomoy artists’ group, active from 1980 to 1995. He completed his Master Degree in Fine Arts at the University of Chittagong in 1984 and received the DAAD Fellowship at the Hochschule der Kunste, Berlin, Germany from 1993–94. He is a Professor in the Department of Painting, Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong and one of the most influential teachers in Chittagong. b. 1958, Chandpur; lives and works in Chattogram Farida Zaman Farida Zaman has been an inspiration for women in Bangladesh over her five decade long career due to her persistence to keep working against all odds. The artist’s subjects interact with time and space, and she is particularly well known for her fishnet series. Zaman has published illustrations and articles in journals across Bangladesh. She completed a BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1974 and an MFA at the M.S. University, Baroda, India in 1978 and later earned a PhD from the Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India in 1995. She is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1953, Chandpur; lives and works in Dhaka Foyejul Azim Foyejul Azim’s artistic journey centres on the theory of art which he taught from 1982–2018 at the Institute of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong, publishing several theoretical books parallel to his painting practice. In 1992 he published a collection of articles entitled Charukalar Bhumika, defining fundamental concepts of Fine Arts and their visible processes, helping Bangladeshi art students to enrich their theoretical knowledge. Bangladesher Shilpakalar Adiparba O Aupanibeshik Probhab is another one of his research contributions. Foyejul Azim completed his MFA at the Fine Arts Department of Chittagong University. He earned his PhD from Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta in 1994. b. 1953, Cox’s Bazar; lives and works in Chattogram Golam Faruque Bebul Golam Faruque is an abstract painter and printmaker and his works are notable for their fragmented imagery with varying forms and compositions that depict the anguish and joy of life. His abstract imagery includes a vocabulary of abundant and varied textures and colours and his layering techniques create enhanced expressiveness. He earned his BFA in Printmaking from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978. He later earned an MFA in 1985 in the same subject from the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. He is a Professor of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi. b. 1958, Jamalpur; lives and works in Rajshahi Hamiduzzaman Khan Hamiduzzaman Khan is known for his large-scale public sculptures that are found in Dhaka and across Bangladesh. His work is associated with the Liberation War and freedom fighters, and he uses a wide variety of materials in his sculptures from metal to marble to wood. While his own individual works on these themes began while he was a student in Baroda, the work became more ambitious while he assisted his teacher Abdur Razzaque in executing Jagroto Chowrongi in Gazipur in 1972. Khan earned his BFA in painting from the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1967. His travels in Europe sparked his fascination for sculpture in urban and public space, and he later enrolled in an MFA programme in sculpture at the M.S. University, Baroda from 1974–76. He interned at the Sculpture Centre in New York from 1982 to 1983. He is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Sculpture, University of Dhaka. b. 1946, Kishoreganj; lives and works in Dhaka Hashem Khan Hashem Khan’s school textbook covers and illustrations have been inspiring many generations of students to pursue art; his simple drawings effortlessly connect to the people and their daily life. His painterly work is romantic, abstract, and colourful. He actively participated in the Liberation War of 1971 and produced many works addressing the subject to rally the cause. Hashem Khan was one of the designers and illustrators of the handwritten Constitution of Bangladesh of 1972, under the supervision of Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin. He completed his Fine Art degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1961. He was a faculty member of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka from 1968 to 2017. b. 1941, Chandpur; lives and works in Dhaka Hashi Chakraborty Hashi Chakraborty was one of the pioneers in synchronising regional and global forms in his paintings, most of which demonstrate a strong presence of nature, the sea in particular. His work explores ideas of progression and epic consciousness. During his undergraduate years Chakraborty founded the Painters’ Group along with his friends in 1973. He joined The Chittagong Art College as a teacher after completing his education at the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts, Dacca in 1972 and earned an MFA from the Fine Arts Department of Chittagong University in 1974. b. 1948, Barisal; d. 2014, Chittagong Hritendra Kumar Sharma Hritendra Kumar Sharma is an artist and an art educator. A contrasting use of light and shade on the surface and drawing-based abstraction dominates his work. His powerful lines create visual illusions and generate dynamic space on the surface of the work. He completed his BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1981. He later earned an MFA in 1984 in the same subject at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. He became a lecturer in Rajshahi Arts & Crafts College in 1989. b. 1961, Netrokona; lives and works in Rajshahi Jamal Ahmed Jamal Ahmed’s artworks portray two-dimensional painted figures against pastoral and urban scenes. He is known for his use of colour and textured surfaces and his ability to invoke drama and tension. He earned a BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978 and an MFA degree at Tsukuba University, Japan in 1982. He studied oil painting in Japan from 1982 to 1984 and completed another year-long research course in Warsaw, Poland in 1980. Ahmed is currently a Professor at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. b. 1955, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Kazi Abdul Baset Kazi Abdul Baset’s work varies from realism to abstraction with a distinct richness of colour. He completed his BFA at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1956, and his MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago under a Fulbright Scholarship from 1963 to 1964. While studying in the USA, Baset was influenced by abstract expressionism. Baset was at the forefront of those who tried to introduce abstract expressionism in Bangladesh and played an important role in modernising painting. In 1957 he joined what is now the Faculty of Fine Art University of Dhaka as a teacher, the Director of the Institute of Fine Art (1991–94) and the head of the Drawing & Painting Department. He retired in 1995. b. 1935 Dacca; d. 2002 Dhaka Kazi Rakib Kazi Rakib is recognised for his glass paintings although he also works in a variety of other media. Rakib was a founding member of the Dacca Painters 1974–1977, an artists’ group inspired by Surrealism and Dada. In 1981, he created a series of prints denoting the corruption, killing, political instability, economic crisis and social discrimination of the time, part of his longstanding work as an artist-witness. Rakib completed his BFA in 1977 at the Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong. He was one of the founding teachers of Rajshahi Art College from 1979–1984. He regularly wrote on art and aesthetics for a newspaper named Dainik Barta. b. 1958, Shariatpur; lives and works in New York KMA Quayyum Stories originating from the sensibility and expectations of life find their place on the canvases of K M A Quayyum. His journey in the field of art finds its distinct identity through the use of a melancholic colour palette. While influenced by western naturalism, Quayyum’s subject matter remains grounded in Bangladesh. After completing his studies at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1973, he completed his MFA degree at the Fine Arts Department, University of Chittagong in 1975. He started his teaching career at the Chittagong Art College in 1978 and taught there for four decades. b. 1952, Comilla; lives and works in Chattogram Lala Rukh Selim Lala Rukh Selim is a sculptor, academic and researcher who was a member of Shomoy, an influential artists’ group active during the 1980’s and 1990’s. She was the editor of ART, a quarterly Journal active from 1994 to 2004 that played an important role in disseminating English texts about art in Bangladesh. She edited the ‘Arts and Crafts’ section of the Cultural Survey of Bangladesh Series, published by the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh in 2007. She completed a BFA at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1984 and earned an MFA at the Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, India in 1989. She was the lead partner for the Faculty of Fine Art in the INSPIRE project which was an educational exchange program with the Slade School of Art, UCL, London, UK from 2010–2017. She is a Professor of the Sculpture Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1963, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Mahbubul Amin Mahbubul Amin played an important role in the country’s fine art movement through his service as a teacher for three decades, helping students to choose their artistic paths. Amin’s works reflected various motifs of village life, both human and nonhuman. Although his taste was enriched and polished by urban life, his mind was filled with the essence of the soil. Amin completed his BFA at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1970 and joined the college as a teacher in 1972. b. 1948, Mymensingh; d. 2001, Dhaka Mahmudul Haque As an artist and teacher, Mahmudul Haque introduced different printmaking and painting processes to his curriculum. Haque’s stylised artworks are non-representational; line, color, shape, textures are dominant on the surfaces of his prints and paintings. He cooperated with the Bengal Foundation to establish the Safiuddin Bengal Printmaking Studio, an alternative space for artists. He completed his BFA at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1968 and an MFA at Tsukuba University in Japan in 1984. Haque was a visiting Professor at Tsukuba University and the Indus Valley School of Art and Design, Pakistan. He is an Honorary Professor of the Department of Printmaking, University of Dhaka and held the position of Director of the Institute of Fine Art from 1999 to 2002. b. 1945, Bagerhat, lives and works in Dhaka Maran Chand Pal The cultural history and heritage of Bangladesh inspired the work of Maran Chand Pal. He made a great contribution to the practising and conservation of traditional pottery folk dolls (i.e. Tepa Putul, peacocks, elephants, horses). He transformed forms and ideas from traditional dolls into impressive sculptures with his unique style. He was one of the first students of the Department of Ceramics at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca where he completed his certificate course in 1964. He later joined the department as a teacher in 1965. Taking his teaching role outside of the classroom, he also taught ceramics to local youth as a tool for improving their livelihood. b. 1945, Dacca; d. 2013 in Dhaka Matlub Ali Matlub Ali is an artist, art educator, art critic, writer, lyricist, composer and playwright. He has been contributing to Bangladeshi literature through numerous books on the socio-political scenario as well as the country’s art and culture. He is highly influential in the development of art historical writing. He completed a BFA in 1969 at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca and an MFA in 1987 at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. He joined as a lecturer of Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts in 1973 and retired as a Professor of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 2012. He held the position of Dean, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka from 2010 to 2012. b. 1948, Rangpur; lives and works in New York Mir Mustafa Ali Mir Mustafa Ali was an artist and art educator who played a pioneering role in the development of ceramics as institutional practice in Bangladesh. He was the founding head of the Ceramics Department at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca. He completed a Fine Art Degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dhaka in 1955 and later went to England to study modeling and ceramics at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London from 1956–1960. Zainul Abedin took the initiative of opening the Ceramics Department in 1961 and invited Ali to join as a lecturer in 1963. Ali collected traditional ceramics and donated those to the department’s permanent collection to enrich the students’ knowledge of the medium. He was the Director of the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka from 1986 to 1988. b. 1932, Burdwan, British India; d. 2017 in Dhaka Mohammad Eunus Mohammad Eunus is a painter and graphic designer whose versatile style enriches the scenography of major events like Amar Ekushey, Zainul Utsab, and many convocations at Dhaka University. He is also known for his painting, which is inspired by abstract expressionism but carries familiar textures of urban society. His canvases depict the effects of time, the rotation of the planet, and the cycle of the seasons through the use of texture across various shapes and forms. He earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978 and an MFA from Tama Art University, Tokyo, Japan in 1987. He is currently a professor in the Graphic Design Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1954, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka Mohammad Kibria Mohammad Kibria was an abstract painter and graphic artist who is remembered as one of the first successful non-representational artists in Bangladesh. Guided by Hideo Hagiwara while studying in Japan, Kibria learned to apply precision and balance to his painted surfaces, values that he passed onto his students. Kibria was inspired by abstract expressionism and his early-works articulated architectural concepts and geometric influences that recalled cubism. He completed his art education at the Govt. School of Art, Calcutta, India in 1950, and studied at the Tokyo University of Arts from 1959–1962. Prompted by Zainul Abedin, in 1958, Kibria joined the Government Institute of Fine Arts and taught painting and eventually moved to the printmaking department. As a teacher and artist, he inspired students and others to be open minded and to create art in a global context. b. 1929, Birbhum, British India; d. 2011 in Dhaka Monirul Islam Monirul Islam is one of the most influential living artists in Bangladesh known for his constant search for new methods of painting and print-making which also involves making his own paint and paper. He studied at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts in Dacca from 1961–1966. He was a teacher at the same college in Dacca from 1966–1969 and left teaching for higher studies in Spain, studying mural paintings at the Madrid Academy of Fine Arts. Even while abroad, he remained in touch with Bangladeshi artists and conducted workshops when visiting Dhaka in order to pass down his methodology. b. 1943, Chandpur; lives and works in Dhaka and Madrid Monsur Ul Karim Monsur Ul Karim expresses himself through paintings that speak to the co-existence of nature and humanity. Coming from Rajbari, a district near the bank of Padma River, he has depicted the life and struggle of people displaced by erosion, using bright and vibrant colours. His works on the hilly region of Bandarban are calm with cool compositions of blue and green. He founded Monon Academy (2005–2015) and established an artists’ group called Amader Chattogram 95 in order to keep the art scene in Chittagong alive. In his retirement, he founded ‘Bunon Art Space (2016–) in his hometown of Rajbari. Monsur Ul Karim earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts, Dacca in 1972. He received his MFA degree from the Department of Fine Arts, University of Chittagong in 1974 where he taught from 1976–2015. b. 1950 Rajbari; lives and works in Rajbari Mostafizul Haque Although Mostafizul Haque has been teaching painting at graduate and postgraduate level and made a considerable contribution in developing a culture for educating children in Fine Art. Very conscious about the relationship between children, art, and psychology, he implemented this knowledge to introduce new techniques to help children learn more effectively. He completed his BFA in 1978 and MFA in 1981 at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca. He later earned another Master’s degree in Japanese Painting from the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1995. He is currently teaching as a professor in the Drawing and Painting Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1957, Bagerhat; lives and works in Dhaka Murtaja Baseer Murtaja Baseer is known for his ‘abstract-realist’ paintings reflecting his daily experience of Bengal. In 1967, he started the Wall series, his first step towards abstraction, which depicted the entropy and layers of textures and colours on the walls of old Dhaka, a reflection on the society under the dictatorship of Ayub Khan (1958–1969). He actively participated in the Language Movement of 1952 and pre-Liberation War demonstrations. He was sent to jail throughout the East Pakistani period for his leftist political views and later left for Paris. Baseer enrolled in the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1949. After earning the degree in 1954, he studied at the Academia di Belli Art of Florence from 1956–1958. He later studied mosaic making at École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (1971–1973) and Etching and Aquatint in Academie Goetz in Paris, France from 1972–1973. Baseer is also a writer, poet, numismatist, and acted as an academic at the University of Chittagong until 1998. b. 1932, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Mustafa Monwar Mustafa Monwar is a painter, art educator, designer,media personality and cultural activist. He participated in the language movement of 1952 and during the 1971 Liberation War he organised puppet shows at refugee camps in West Bengal to inspire and encourage people in the midst of war. Monwar’s television puppet show Moner Kotha ran on Bangladesh Television for twelve years and had a great impact on the children of that generation. Through his television show, many children learned about the different techniques of art. He runs the Dhaka-based organisation Educational Puppet Development Centre (EPDC). He studied at the Govt. College of Art and Craft, Calcutta in 1959. Monwar started his career as a teacher at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca from 1960–1963. He later joined Bangladesh Television (BTV) as Director General and went on to become Director General of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and the National Media Institute. He also served as a managing director of the Bangladesh Film Development Corporation. b. 1935, Magura; lives and works in Dhaka Naima Haque Women and the mother–child bond dominate both the paintings and illustrations of Naima Haque. While earning her MFA, Haque took on the challenge of engaging with the male-oriented discipline of graphic design and later made this her tool to reach out to mass audiences, educating children with her illustrations, story books and witty poems. Being a prominent member of Shako (an association of female Bangladeshi artists established in 2003 that works for the welfare of women), she frequently works closely with organisations across Bangladesh who support groups that are marginalised by society. She completed a BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1974 and an MFA in Graphic Design at the MS University of Baroda, India in 1983. She joined the department of Graphic Design at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1987 as a lecturer. b. 1953, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Nasreen Begum Nasreen Begum broadly practices oriental-style wash painting. Her fluid use of color reflects the restlessness found in capturing the beauty of a passing moment and employs age-old techniques in a contemporary manner. Colour plays a great role in her works and one of her best-known bodies of work is the Cactus Series where women and nature are depicted symbolically. She completed a BFA in Oriental Art at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1978 and an MFA in Printmaking at MS University, Baroda, India in 1983. Nasreen Begum is currently a professor of the Department of Oriental Art, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1956, Chuadanga; lives and works in Dhaka Nazlee Laila Monsur Nazlee Laila Monsur depicts social relationships and issues of urban life in her own distinct style. She looked for inspiration from Indian miniature painting and rickshaw paintings of Bangladesh, transforming these traditional techniques with characteristics of her own. Her paintings display a narrative tendency and use bright and vivid colours. Set in an urban surrounding, symbolised by the presence of crows and rickshaws, her figures seem to be in a mystical mood torn between belonging and non-belonging. Nazlee completed an MFA at the Fine Arts Department of University of Chittagong in 1976. She started her career as a teacher at Chittagong Art College in 1976 and retired in 2009. b. 1952, Rajshahi; lives and works in Chattogram Nisar Hossain Nisar Hossain is a versatile artist, academic, researcher, organiser and cultural activist. He was a founding member of the Shomoy group. Hossain rejected the complacent geometry and singleviewpoint perspective pursued by many artists of his time. His work today includes elements of performance art, sound art, installation, photography and pantomime to create moving images of our time. His research articles on folk art are published in national and international journals. He earned his BFA from Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1981 and his MFA from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santineketan, India in 1985. He is a professor of Drawing and Painting Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka and holds the position of Dean. b. 1961, Dacca; lives and works in Dhaka Qayyum Chowdhury Qayyum Chowdhury was known for his illustrative paintings and book illustrations. He designed many book covers and posters which are still used until this day. He used motifs of folk art more for stylistic reasons than for their content. He focused squarely on the rich style of folk art – its decisive use of lines, its decorative designs and ornamentation, and its detailed workings of various leitmotifs. He was the convener of the Charu Karu Shilpi Songram Parishad during the Liberation War in 1971. He completed his Fine Art degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1954. Chowdhury joined the same institute as a teacher in 1957 and then took a job at the newly established Design Centre and within a year joined the Pakistan Observer where he served as its chief artist. He later returned to the East Pakistan College of Art and Crafts in 1965 as a teacher. Although he retired in 1994, he continued teaching there until 2002 as Honorary and Supernumerary Professor. b. 1932, Feni; d. 2014 in Dhaka Quamrul Hassan Quamrul Hassan was a painter, designer and art educator who was always politically active and is perhaps most famous for the poster Annihilate These Demons of the Liberation War of 1971. He was involved in the Non-Cooperation movement (1969–70) and also took part in the Liberation War, serving as the Director of the Art Division of the Information and Radio Department of the Bangladesh Government in Exile. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1947 at the Govt. School of Art, Calcutta, India. After Partition, Quamrul Hassan came to Dacca and, in collaboration with Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin, established the Government Institute of Arts in 1948. He taught at the same institute until 1960. The East Pakistan Small and Cottage Industries Corporation was established under his leadership in 1960, and he worked there as Director of the Design Centre until his retirement in 1978. Politically active until his death, one of his last sketches became an inspiration for a mass movement that brought about the downfall of the Ershad regime in 1990. Annihilate These Demons, Poster of a representation of Pakistani General, 1971. Courtesy of Liberation War Museum, Bangladesh b. 1921, Calcutta; d. 1988 in Dhaka Rafiqun Nabi Rafiqun Nabi (also known as Ranabi) is a painter, print-maker, art educator and cartoonist, best known for his creation of the icon Tokai. Tokai is a character that represents poor street children who live by begging and scavenging from the garbage and have a knack for telling simple yet painful truths about the current political and socio-economic situation of the country. His Tokai character has become a nationally adopted icon and has inspired many students to become cartoonists. He completed his art education at the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1964. During 1973–1976, he studied printmaking at the Athens School of Fine Arts with a scholarship from the Greek Government. Nabi joined as a teacher at East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts in 1964 and served as a member of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka until 2010 and held the position of Dean. He is currently the Supernumerary Professor in the Department of Drawing and Painting, University of Dhaka. b. 1943, Chapainawabganj; lives and works in Dhaka Ranjit Das Ranjit Das’s romantic works seek to capture the essence of nature with an abstract and poetic disposition. His canvases reflect his experience with colour, space and time through his expressive brush strokes. Das was influenced by Picasso, Rembrandt, Matisse and other European painters as well as Indian contemporary art that he encountered while pursuing a Master’s degree at the M. S. University, Baroda in 1981. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1975 and worked as a teacher in the Fine Arts Department, the University of Chittagong. b. 1956, Tangail; lives and works in Dhaka Rashid Choudhury Rashid Choudhury’s work is unique among his contemporaries as the source of his inspiration was not folk art but rather folk-lore. His works explore the myth, magic and the legend of both Muslim and Hindu cultures living across rural Bengal. While he painted with oil and gouache, Choudhury is best known for his tapestries. He was a significant pioneer in the modern art movement from as early as the 1950s, creating many hand-woven tapestries for government as well as private buildings. He studied at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca from 1950 to 1954. He went to Madrid on a scholarship at the Central Escuela des Bellas Artes de San Fernando from 1956 to 1957. Returning from Spain, he joined the Institute of Arts as a teacher in 1958. He obtained a French Government scholarship to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux Arts from 1960 to 1964. In 1970, the Fine Arts Department was established at Chittagong University and Choudhury joined as one of its first teachers and played a major role in developing the department. He was also a leader in establishing the Chittagong Art College in 1973. His works can be found in the permanent collections of Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the initiatives of Samdani Art Foundation. b. 1932, Faridpur; d. 1986 in Dhaka Rokeya Sultana Courtesy of the artist and Ms Nilu Rowshon Murshed Rokeya Sultana’s painting and printmaking practice is largely focused on her inner life and an exploration of the feminine experience. Sultana’s works recall the relationship between mother and child, the apathy of girl’s care, and the struggles of ‘liberated Bangladeshi women’ as compared with the contemporary global status of women. Her Madonna series is a well-known body of work that carries a strong determined feminist statement. She earned her BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts & Crafts in 1980 and her MFA from Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan in 1983. She is a Professor of Printmaking Department at the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1958, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Safiuddin Ahmed Safiuddin Ahmed is remembered for the lasting legacy he left on printmaking in Bangladesh. He, along with Zainul Abedin and others, played an important role in the foundation of art institutions in Dacca. Ahmed helped raise the profile of a printmaking, a discipline often considered of secondary importance, by adopting it as his main medium. He inspired many other artists from the subcontinent to begin printmaking. He often travelled to Dumka, India, a place populated by Santhal people, and like many modernists before and after him, he was inspired by their way of life. But after coming to East Pakistan the look, posture and the environment of his works changed and he gradually started to move towards abstraction. He completed a Fine Art Degree (1942) and Tearchership Course (1946) from Government School of Art, Calcutta, India and subsequently travelled to London for advanced training in printmaking, enrolling at the Central School of Arts (now Central St. Martins) in 1956. b. 1922, Calcutta; d. 2012 in Dhaka Samarjit Roy Chowdhury Samarjit Roy Chowdhury is a painter, art educator and graphic designer in Bangladesh. His book illustrations, book covers, poster designs, typography and other elements of graphic design are recognisable for their unique style. He was one of the designers of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh prepared in 1972. He completed a Fine Arts Degree at the Government Institute of Arts, Dacca in 1960 and joined as a teacher in the same year and spent 43 years teaching Graphic Design. He later served as Dean of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts of Shanto-Mariam University of Creative Technology, Dhaka until 2010. b. 1937, Comilla; lives and works in Dhaka Shahid Kabir Shahid Kabir’s art speaks to the struggles of everyday life; his art narrates the life experience of ordinary as well as subjugated and underprivileged people. His use of colour and texture in his paintings and prints connect to the earth of his motherland. Kabir was inspired by spirituality and Baul philosophy and he attained local fame for works on Lalon Shah Fakir and Baul masters in the 1980s. He left for Spain in 1981 to seek western contemporary art knowledge and came back to Bangladesh after 17 years. Kabir earned a BFA from the East Pakistan College of Arts and Crafts in 1969. He taught painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca from 1972 to 1980. b. 1949, Barisal; lives and works in Dhaka Shafiqul Ameen Shafiqul Ameen was an art educator, administrator and painter. He completed a Fine Art Degree in 1938 at the Govt. School of Art, Calcutta, India. He assisted in the primary administrative work of establishing the Art Institute in Dhaka. Ameen joined the Government Institute of Arts in 1955 as a founding teacher in the Oriental Art Department. Zainul Abedin retired from the post of Principal in 1967 and Shafiqul Ameen took up this leadership role. He was an excellent administrator and held the position of Executive Director at the Folk Art Museum, Sonargaon from 1976–1982 which was also founded by Abedin. b. 1912, Assam; d. 2011 in Dhaka Shoshibhuson Paul Shoshibhuson Paul was a well-known artist in colonial East Bengal. It is assumed that he was the first initiator of a sustainable art community in East Bengal, working to enrich art skills in the region (especially when it came to oil painting techniques). His works brought him respect and fame with the British Raj. His artworks were appreciated by many patrons and were commissioned by colonial officers and the local wealthy community. Shoshibhuson’s greatest achievement was setting up the first art educational institute for the East Bengal region, named Maheshwarpasha School of Art, in 1904. It was later developed and became known as Khulna Art College, and is now merged with Khulna University. b. 1877, Khulna; d. 1946, Khulna Sheikh Afzal Hossain Sheikh Afzal is well known for his representational art-making from the 1980s. He created many portraits of legendary personalities such as Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Rabindranath Tagore, Zainul Abedin and many others. He earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1981. He completed an MFA at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1984 and the University of Tsukuba, Japan in 1993. He is a faculty member in the Department of Drawing and Painting, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1960, Jhinaidah; lives and works in Dhaka Shishir Bhattacharjee Shishir Bhattacharjee is a painter whose work stands out for its strong social commitment, sarcasm and wit. He was a founding member of Shomoy, an artists’ group which was significant both in terms of the artists’ understanding of time and their role in the course of Bangladesh’s history. His works project a dystopia where power-hungry people rule. He is considered to be one of the leading satirical cartoonists in the vcountry and continues to publish his political satires on the front cover of the highest nationally circulated newspaper. His socio-political commitment inspires him to create murals on the Shaheed Minar (Martyr Monument) premises every year to commemorate International Mother Language Day and he plays a vital role for organising Mongol Shovajatra on Pohela Boishakh (Bangla New Year). He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dhaka in 1982 and MFA at the M.S. University Baroda, India in 1987. He is a professor and chairs the Drawing & Painting Department, Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. b. 1960, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka Showkatuzzaman Showkatuzzaman was known for his watercolour wash techniques and use of tempera, a practice employed by artists practicing ‘oriental art’ in Bangladesh. He was one of the artists who played an important role in developing and inspiring students to pursue oriental art, a genre that was inspired by pan-Asian movements of the 20th Century. Showkatuzzaman earned his BFA from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1974 and completed his postgraduate studies from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, India in 1976 and 1990. Showkat taught at the Chittagong Art College for a few years and joined the Oriental Art Department at the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka in 1992 and taught there until his death. b. 1953, Faridpur; d. 2005 in Dhaka Siddhartha Talukder Siddhartha Talukder’s area of interest is abstraction. He completed his BFA in Drawing and Painting at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca i n 1981. He continued his studies and earned an MFA in 1985 in the same subject from the Institute of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. In 1999, he earned his PhD in the History of Art from Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India. Talukder is currently a professor in the Department of Painting, Oriental Art and Printmaking and also holds the position of the Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Rajshahi. b. 1957, Jamalpur; lives and works in Rajshahi S. M. Sultan S. M. Sultan was known for his energetic paintings of muscular farmers and their engagement with the landscape of Bangladesh. He began to study at the Government School of Art, Calcutta but left without completing his degree in 1944 to travel to Kashmir, which inspired many of his landscapes. After travelling extensively as a celebrated artist both internationally and within South Asia, Sultan retreated from urban life, moving to his home village of Narail, where he founded the Shishu Shwarga art school. His devotion to rural art education has had a lasting legacy, inspiring many initiatives to promote personal growth outside of urban centres through art. b. 1923, Narail; d. 1994 in Jessore Syed Abdullah Khalid Syed Abdullah Khalid belonged to the first generation of sculptors who practiced sculpture-making as an institutional discipline despite discouragement under the West Pakistani regime. He flourished as a sculptor practicing realism. The Aparajeyo Bangla monument of the liberation war of 1971 at the Dhaka University campus is one of his most well-known creations. Today this sculpture stands as a prominent example of modern sculpture in post-independence Bangladesh. He completed his BFA at the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts, Dacca in 1969 and MFA at the Fine Arts Department, University of Chittagong in 1974. He served as a professor at the same institute until his retirement in 2012. b. 1942, Sylhet; d. 2017, Dhaka Tarun Gosh Zainul Abedin Zubanul Islam Bangla-e-Bidroho Photographer: Randhir Sing and Noor Photoface

ALL PROJECTS Experimenter Curator's Hub The Samdani Art Foundation supported Bangladeshi artists Munem Wasif, Mohammad Wahiduzzaman and Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty to travel to Kolkata to attend the Experimenter Curator’s Hub in July 2014. The Hub is a platform for exchange of thoughts, views & possibilities of collaborations between the curators, public and private organizations and various institutional frameworks that coexist in the art world. Several of the presenters at ECH were part of the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit jury and speakers programs. Adam Szymczyk was one of the speakers and his first trip to South Asia was his trip to the 2014 Dhaka Art Summit, which he mentioned in his talk.

ALL PROJECTS Colonial Movements Curated by Diana Campbell Colonial Movements Ongoing legacies of colonialism establish and maintain conditions of exploitation throughout the global majority world (the world outside of Europe and North America which hosts most of the human population on the planet). Naked capitalism and internationalism, sometimes masked under the guise of religion and development aid, continues to drive networks of power controlling the globe. Revealed through its extractive actions of planting and uprooting indigenous goods and people, colonialism still extends deep into the furthest reaches of the Earth through the seeds of commodities. Artists across generations have made works that reflect how histories of land are intimately entangled/embedded with narratives of hunger, dispossession and ultimately erasure. Colonisation is inscribed in the physical and cultural DNA of the worlds we inhabit, and the artists working across these spheres help us navigate through complex webs of greed and addiction to imagine solidarities for alternative and autonomous futures Ongoing legacies of colonialism establish and maintain conditions of exploitation throughout the global majority world (the world outside of Europe and North America which hosts most of the human population on the planet). Naked capitalism and internationalism, sometimes masked under the guise of religion and development aid, continues to drive networks of power controlling the globe. Revealed through its extractive actions of planting and uprooting indigenous goods and people, colonialism still extends deep into the furthest reaches of the Earth through the seeds of commodities. Artists across generations have made works that reflect how histories of land are intimately entangled/embedded with narratives of hunger, dispossession and ultimately erasure. Colonisation is inscribed in the physical and cultural DNA of the worlds we inhabit, and the artists working across these spheres help us navigate through complex webs of greed and addiction to imagine solidarities for alternative and autonomous futures. Adebunmi Gbadebo b. 1992, Livingston; lives and works in Newark True Blue: Peter, Peter 2 and Phillis, 2019 Human Black Hair, Cotton, Rice Paper, Denim, Hair Dye, Silk Screen Print Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery Adebunmi Gbadebo addresses the concepts of land, memory and erasure in her work. Sheets of paper constructed with beaten cotton linters and human hair collected from black barber shops serve as abstracted documentations of genetic histories, embedded in the strands of hair. The dominant blue dye traces Gbadebo’s maternal family history to three plantations where her ancestors were forced into slavery. Gbadebo’s use of indigo inevitably links her historical inquiry to Bengal, where the plant was grown as a cash crop from around the year of 1777 by the British East India Company. The more recent histories of Bangladesh and the USA (where Gbadebo traces her family’s history) are interlinked through the garment industry. The bold, blue colour produced from the indigo plant can serve as a reminder of the vast amount of denim clothing produced in Bangladesh for international export. The conditions under which the clothing worn by western consumers is produced by Bangladeshi workers, should not be erased from history. Using black hair, cotton, rice paper, indigo and sometimes silkscreened photo imagery, Gbadebo creates abstract ‘portraits’ of her enslaved ancestors. The DNA of those people still exists in these works of art. She perceives hair as a means to position her people and their histories as central to the narratives in her work. Annalee Davis b. 1963, Barbados; lives and works in Barbados F is for Frances, 2015–16 Coloured pencil on plantation ledger pages Courtesy of the artist The last will and testament of Thomas Applewhaite written in August 1816 directed that six years after his death his ‘little favourite Girl Slave named Frances shall be manumitted and set free from all and all manner of Servitude and slavery whatsoever.’ At the time, Applewhaite was the owner of Walkers – the site where the artist Annalee Davis lives, works, and explores. F is for Frances maps Frances’ name in a series of seven drawings on ledger pages. The letters forming her name are comprised of 17th-and 18th-century sherds found in the soil of former sugarcane fields, suggesting fragments of history understood only in part – usually through the words of the white colonial-settler and most often a male voice. With Frances, another voice becomes audible and visible. Davis has a hybrid practice as a visual artist, cultural instigator, educator, and writer. With the media of printmaking, painting, installation, and video art, she works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies through engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados. Davis has been involved in the founding and co-founding of numerous initiatives, including Fresh Milk (f. 2011), an arts platform and micro-residency programme, Caribbean Linked (f. 2012), an annual residency in Aruba, and Tilting Axis (f. 2015) an independent visual arts platform bridging the Caribbean through annual encounters. Annalee Davis b. 1963, Barbados; lives and works in Barbados The Second Spring Series I – VI, 2019 Mixed media on paper Courtesy of the artist The Second Spring, 2019 Mixed media on paper Courtesy of the artist A voice which is often silenced is that of the post-reproductive woman. In a series of new large-scale drawings titled Second Spring, Davis explores women’s embarkation into the uncharted territory following the generative stage of life. A woman’s body, clothed in dresses of motherwort and Queen Anne’s lace, shifts on and off plantation ledger pages, while post-reproductive breasts sprout Queen Anne’s lace as part of this profound metamorphosis. Patriarchal narratives confine women’s experience to marriage and motherhood, and often frame this powerful transition in misogynistic terms, arousing anxiety, shame, and judgment. These narratives imply that older female bodies are past their ‘sell-by date,’ no longer useful to or valued by society. This series contests these entrenched fictions through an authentic and personal chronicling inspired by encounters with wildness, intuition, and alignment to spirit. Davis has a hybrid practice as a visual artist, cultural instigator, educator, and writer. With the media of printmaking, painting, installation, and video art, she works at the intersection of biography and history, focusing on post-plantation economies through engaging with a particular landscape on Barbados. Davis has been involved in the founding and co-founding of numerous initiatives, including Fresh Milk (f. 2011), an arts platform and micro-residency programme, Caribbean Linked (f. 2012), anannual residency in Aruba, and Tilting Axis (f. 2015) an independent visual arts platform bridging the Caribbean through annual encounters. Apnavi Makanji b. 1976, Bombay; lives and works in Geneva Appropriation Disinformation – Nature and the Body Politic, 2019 Collage on found paper Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Tarq Sourced from the Atlas International Larousse Politique et Economique (1950), the pages making up Apnavi Makanji’s collages are records of the treasures of the globe as represented through the eyes of imperial powers in their quest for progress and the modern condition. In fact, these pages of statistics are effectively lists of extractivism. They remain silent on the violence inflicted on the environment, on modern-day slavery, and on the displacement of indigenous communities. The artist has chosen to look at them instead as tools of capitalism and proof of systematic violence. These collages are not only a representation of what has been forgotten, buried, or annihilated, they also stand in for a subconscious that is mutant and diseased. In its soft sensuality and secretions, the work attempts to trigger a visceral memory of a situated environment that existed before it was reduced to highly mobile commodities. Installed across the gallery as punctuation points between walls, these collages help the viewer navigate a complex history of connectivity across diverse contexts spanning Africa, South, Southeast, and East Asia, South America, the Caribbean, the Pacific Islands, as well as North America and Europe. Makanji works with the media of installation, drawing, and film, producing complex constructs informed by botany, memory, displacement, and environmental urgency. They are interested in exploring the intersection of these concepts within the context of human-engendered climate emergency. Candice Lin b. 1979, Concord; lives and works in Los Angeles The Tea Table, 2016 Etching on Japanese Kozo paper The Roots of Industry, 2016 Etching on Japanese Kozo paper Courtesy of the artist, François Ghebaly,and Gasworks Candice Lin’s works establish a network of connections between historical and contemporary Asian and African diasporas in the Americas, as well as their generational traumas. In The Roots of Industry, Lin reinterprets an engraving of Bolivian silver mines by Theodor de Bry. The Andean potato was cultivated to feed indigenous miners mining silver and mercury in South America. This silver and the excess potatoes travelled across the sea and fuelled the Industrial Revolution, changing the course of world history. In The Tea Table, Lin appropriates an engraving by John Bowles (circa 1710) which was a satire on affluent fashionable ladies and featured a devil lurking under the table as Envy drives Justice and Truth out of a door. In this rendition, Lin draws connections between tea, opium, and sugar by replacing the symbolic figures with images of tea production and opium abuse. Lin works predominantly with sculpture and video, addressing notions of cultural, gendered, and racial difference, rampant sexualities, and deviant behaviour. Interested in the fluid boundaries between the self and the other, she examines how Western ideologies of the self-influence the politics of power within notions of individualism, selfhood, freedom, and difference. Dhali Al Mamoon b. 1958, Chandpur; lives and works in Chittagong শতাব্দীর উপাখ্যান (The story of the Century), 2019 Spices, tea, and indigo on paper and canvas Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist The history of colonialism is objectively the history of despair. Dhali Al Mamoon’s ongoing work searches for the self through the narrative of historically contextualised images, with a nod to the existentialism found in the analysis of every work of art. Our appearance, sartorial/material representation, and constructed sense of self carry the legacies of colonisation; history, memory, and flashes of coincidence prime our perception of the world. In free-play kinetic works on paper and canvas, the artist draws in commodities that changed the course of South Asian history under the control of the British East India Company: tea and indigo and spices. Tea and indigo, in both solid and liquid form, correspond to the colours of amber and blue used extensively in the artist’s palette, evoking a sense of melancholy associated with the history of how these materials were misused to exploit people and lands. Al Mamoon works with drawings, paintings, kinetic sculptures and installations, addressing issues of knowledge, history and identity. Constructing complex experiences, he is interested in deconstructing the collective memory of his homeland of Bangladesh. He focuses on the ways in which colonialism de-humanised, exploited and dislocated people from their own land, culture and tradition, separating them from traditional systems of knowledge. Elia Nurvista b. 1983, Yogyakarta; lives and works in Yogyakarta Sugar Zucker, 2016–2020 Crystallised sugar, mural Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from the Indonesian Embassy of Bangladesh Beyond their sparkling surfaces, sugar and jewels are linked by stories of violent exploitation of labour and the environment. From Africa and the Caribbean to Asia, from Europe to the Pacific, the history of sugar is tied to the mass movement of people around the world as part of exploitative plantation economies that fuelled a global demand for its sweet taste. This model of commodity production continues today; the amount of money that producers of commodities make is far removed from the taxes that foreign governments levy on them and from the profits that traders and corporations enjoy as a result of addictive cycles of consumption. Elia Nurvista’s gemstone-shaped candy sculptures remind of an underlying bitterness behind the sweet ‘taste’ that we have grown accustomed to. Nurvista presents her social research through mixed-media installations, food workshops, and group discussions. Her predominant focus is on the production and distribution of food, and its broader social and historical implications. Nurvista’s works explore the intersection between food and commodities, and their relationship to colonialism, economic and political power, and status. Faiham Ebna Sharif b. 1985, Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka and Uppsala Cha Chakra: Tea Tales of Bangladesh, 2015–ongoing Photographs, archival material Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist The Baganiya communities of Bangladesh are made up of tea workers who originate from at least ninety different ethnic groups from across South Asia formerly known as British India. While their ethnic and linguistic origins differ, their histories are intertwined as they were forcefully moved as indentured servants to the tea gardens of Sylhet and Chittagong, where they remain to this day. After the partition of British India in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, these people became citizens of Bangladesh and lost touch with their ancestral homelands. Cha Chakra is Faiham Ebna Sharif’s research-based work that uses old printed materials, advertisements, and historical documents show the ongoing story of inequity and exploitation behind the second most consumed drink (after water). His research extends into the resistance of the community as it strives to hold onto its traditions in this newly commissioned presentation. Faiham Ebna Sharif is an artist and researcher interested in long-term explorations of subjects such as tea plantations, the film industry of Bangladesh, the Rohingya refugee crisis, HIV patients, climate change, and migration from the micro-scale of the local bus to the meta-scale of humanity. Although Sharif studied international relations, he chose photography as his medium of expression. Sharif collects manuscripts, published primary sources (such as newspapers and other local media), as well as visual records (painting, photography and video) and oral histories parallel to and contributing to his artistic practice. Gisela McDaniel b. 1995, Bellevue; lives and works in Detroit I am M(in)e, 2019–2020 Oil and assemblage on canvas with sound Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist Many people are unaware that the United States still holds five inhabited territories from the Caribbean Sea to the Pacific Ocean that fall under the definition of a colony. The power and interests of the US military are given as reasons to deny the people of these colonies the same rights of self-governance that America fought for in the War of Independence in 1776. Gisela McDaniel is a mixed-race Chamorro artist whose DNA carries the complex history of colonisation on the American territory of Guam. Her paintings subvert traditional power relations by allowing the subject to talk back to the viewer through overlaid audio interviews. As evidenced in the works of artists like Paul Gauguin, power dynamics can be extremely problematic between native women and the men colonising their lands, and McDaniel’s work pushes back against a primitivist gaze. This haunting new series of portraits provide a portal into the struggle of mixed-race people to find a sense of belonging and to pick a side in conflicted cultural and political battles for autonomy. McDaniel’s work is based on a process of healing from her own sexual trauma while engaging with other female survivors through the practice of portraiture. Interweaving assemblages of audio, oil painting, and motion-sensored technology, she creates pieces that ‘come to life’ and literally ‘talk back’ to the viewer, giving agency to the subjects of her paintings. Hira Nabi b. 1987, Lahore; lives and works in Lahore Good Seeds | Bad Seeds, 2019–2020 Relief prints in vitrine Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist Any attempt to map a history of plant species reveals that it is as migrant and varied, if not more than the human species. Can territorialization be temporal as well as geographical? Good Seeds | Bad Seeds is a series thinking through botanical imaginaries and their influence upon identity making. Building upon a collection of archival Pakistani postage stamps as a site of initial inquiries into marking terrain, cultivating and farming it, extracting from it, hydrating and dehydrating, and designing it in specific ways – Hira Nabi proposes an allowing for a set of future possibilities as a way to expand an inclusive, regional identity of cross-pollination and care. The work explores the arrival and transfer of seeds via colonialism, failed botanical migrations, and economies of land usage. Nabi is a filmmaker and multimedia artist. Her practice moves across research and visual production interrogating the relationship between memory, history and place. She is currently working on researching cinema houses in urban Pakistan, and on identity-making and cultural production in Lahore through a study of its gardens and botanical influences. Hlubaishu Chowdhuri b. 1992, Khagrachhari, Bangladesh; Lives and works in Chattagram Shape of Map 1, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Shape of Map 2, 2017 Acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the artist Shape of Map 3, 2019 Acrylic on canvas. Commissioned for the DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist The Chittagong Hill Tracts in Southeast Bangladesh are comprised of three districts (Khagrachari, Rangamati and Bandarban) hosting eleven different ethnic communities with over a thousand years of diverse cultural, linguistic, and ethnic histories that differ from those of the majority Bengali population of Bangladesh. Chowdhuri’s paintings depict the map of Chattagram (previously Chittagong) division, and forms of figures and objects emerge in the voids of intertwined lines that seem to pulse like veins. In her map series, the artist paints internally conflicted lands. She explores the paradox of forced migration of indigenous people in the face of their non-severable spiritual connections to their lands, stressing the importance of overcoming conflict derived from cultural and ethnic differences in order to find new ways to peacefully coexist. Chowdhuri works predominantly with painting. As a member of the Marma indigenous community of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, her art is greatly influenced by the region’s socio-political instability and cultural history. Chowdhuri’s paintings reflect the existential crises of indigenous people over time through motifs drawn from indigenous knitting and craft techniques. Kamruzzaman Shadhin b. 1974, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka and Thakurgaon The Fibrous Souls, 2018–2020 Jute, Cotton Thread, Brass, Clay Realised in collaboration with Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s collaborative work interweaves strands of history that seem innocently distinct from but are in fact connected to present-day peasant conditions in South Asia. The artist invited ecological migrants residing in his village who moved from the ‘jute tracks’ of Southern Bangladesh to create a memorial reminding us of how the desire and pursuit of a commodity economy continues to transform the land that we stand on. Seventy giant shikas hang in a formation based upon the Assam Bengal Railway that operated under British India from 1892–1942. Railways were a form of connectivity that displaced people and their ways of life; their construction transformed Bengal’s lands from growing food to producing globally desired commodities (jute, indigo, opium). Shadhin’s participatory practice incorporates sculpture, painting, installation, performance, video, and public art interventions. His work maintains a satirical edge, dealing directly with the politics of environmental degradation and destruction and its effects on communities across Bangladesh. Migration, social justice, and local history are recurring themes in his works. He is the founder of the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts (founded 2001) and a founding member of Chhobir Haat (founded 2005). Liu Chuang b. 1978, Hubei; lives and works in Shanghai Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, 2018 Three-channel video, 4K, 5.1 surround sound, 40 min Courtesy of the artist and Antenna Space.Commissioned for Cosmopolis #1 .5: Enlarged Intelligence with the support of the Mao Jihong Arts Foundation Liu Chuang observes the displacement of indigenous peoples and cultures left in the wake of harvesting massive amounts of energy from hydroelectric dams, connecting historical narratives and stories of material and immaterial profit and loss across Asia via the mountainous region known as Zomia – which extends into the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The work links political power, the extraction of minerals and energy from deep within the earth, and new currencies seeking to evade centralised national control, moving from the fifth century BCE to present-day China through a mixture of shot and found footage, the narration of fact and fiction, and sound. Chuang works with found materials, such as window grilles and pulp-fiction books, in addition to video, installation, architecture, and performance. He critically reflects upon life in contemporary China, focusing on its culture of intensive industry and globalisation. The artist is interested in attending to larger socio-political phenomena that often go unnoticed in day-to-day existence. Madiha Sikander b. 1987, Hyderabad; lives and works between Karachi and Vancouver Majmua, 2017–18 Cloves, monofilament, glass, metal beads Courtesy of the artist The artist would like to acknowledge the labour of the students who wove with her: Habiba Saleheen, Mohammad Omer,Yumna Ahmed, Sana Zahid, Azher Khan, Aiman Rauf, Humaira Salaams, Danyal Begg, Hussain Sanjwani, Bakhtawar Majeed, Mansoor Elahi, Salman Siddiqui, Mohammad Abbas, Attika Shahab, Shanzay Ikhlaq, Zulfiqar Ali, Vimal Khatri, Mehwish John, Ayesha Sabih, Nimra Shoaib, Aniqa Sohail, Shayan Nasir, Fiza Batool, Shahrukh Shafique, Sidra Sohail, Sobia Sohail and Maisam Hussain Madiha Sikander’s Majuma (‘assemblage’ in Urdu) is an installation inspired by the similarities in the practices of miniature painting and Canadian First Nations weaving in terms of their relationship with labour and materiality. Cloves, beads, and microfilaments are woven together to create a transparent and powerfully scented curtain that invites us to consider how the world we experience today was designed by labour and trade routes drawn up by imperial powers. ‘Each lozenge refigures how the lines of the Silk Road and the routes of the Spice Trade map the Indian subcontinent, trade routes tracing to the Neolithic and extending to Southern Europe… Africa… and Asia. Each bead recalls the European expropriation of indigenous lands in the Americas and of human beings in the African continent – the ‘slave trade beads’ Europeans used in their dealings with indigenous American groups.’ (da Silva, 2018) Sikander works with found objects, such as books, newspaper images, and family photographs, as well as items from flea markets. Her work addresses historical erasure and memory, notably in relation to labour, space, and material. Through repurposing and layering familiar materials, Sikander collapses the different tenses of time and space. Mahbubur Rahman b. 1969, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Transformation, 2018–2019 Two-Channel HD Video, 14:35 min Courtesy of the artist. This work will be activated by a performance on 7 February 3.30pm Unlike individuals, ideas have the potential to become immortal. Since 2004, Mahbubur Rahman’s performance, sculpture, and video work has been embodying the popular folk story of the hero Nurul Din from the Rangpur Peasant Rebellion of 1783, specifically drawing references from the late Bangladeshi writer Syed Shamsul Haq’s 1982 play Nuruldiner Sara Jibon (Nuraldin: A Life). Just as Haq revived Nurul Din (Nurul Uddin) as an allegory to fight back against the military rule of the 1980s, Rahman evokes this figure to encourage standing up against the injustices of today. Rahman’s fascination with this story begins in a scene when Nurul Din was a child accompanying his emaciated father to the paddy fields to help plough the field. Everything had been taken away from his family, including their bull, as a consequence of their unpaid tax bills to the British Raj who controlled the land and demanded it grow indigo rather than food. Straining under the hot sun, Nurul Din’s father tried to tow the land without a bull, and he collapsed and died under the weight of the plough, groaning like a bull in the process. Rahman created this two-channel video from a performance he realised with Bangladeshi indigo farmers of today, Bihari migrant rickshaw pullers in Kolkata (likened to human horses), and horse riders on the bank of the Padma river in Bangladesh (the same source of water as Kolkata’s Ganga river) surrounding the Farakka Barrage that has divided these once continuously flowing waters between India and Bangladesh since 1975. These locations and stories link East and West Bengal via their shared British colonial history; times have changed, but the stories of oppression of the working class persist. Rahman’s Transformation is a call to rise up, remembering brave figures whose ghosts (that live on through stories) can’t rest until justice is served. Rahman works across painting, video, installation, and performance and is one of the most internationally recognised Bangladeshi artists of his generation. He pushes the experience of art beyond visual pleasure, addressing wider social responsibilities in reference to his personal experience of anguish and anxiety in the context of contemporary Bangladesh. He is a co-founder of Britto (f. 2002), a non-profit space that initiated a successful alternate art scene that breaks from and challenges the persisting colonial barriers found within academic art institutions that discourage cultural reform. Munem Wasif b. 1983, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Spring Song, 2017–2019 Series of 27 Archival pigment prints Sutra, 2019 Silkscreen and Pigment print on archival paper Kala Pani, 2019 Series of 14 Archival pigment prints and ambush text prints on archival paper Documents, 2017–2019 Photographs, text, found footage, archival material, variable sizes Realised with partial support of Samdani Art Foundation and NTU CCA Singapore. Courtesy the artist and Project 88, Mumbai Munem Wasif’s work has long been exploring the concept of a border, re-examining the questions around its formation. How are borders constructed? Who constructs them? How are they broken and re-formed? Wasif began visiting Rohingya refugee camps on the Myanmar/Bangladesh border in 2009. The size of the camps has grown exponentially since the violent incidents beginning in 2017 that have caused hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee into Bangladesh. The artist is unable to type the word ‘Rohingya’ correctly because his computer lacks Burmese language programming; in Myanmar the word ‘Rohingya’ is expunged from official discourse in favour of the term ‘Bengali.’ Silkscreened onto a British colonial map, the distorted typography of the word ‘Rohingya’ hints at Myanmar’s denial of the existence of this ethnic group which has been living within its borders for generations. Kala Pani – which translates to Dark Water – is a new series of black and white photographs which seems innocuous at first. The presence of dark, featureless masses of water, an empty ocean in its most ordinary form, stands as a stark reminder of what Rohingyas have gone through to escape mass extermination. Recalling harrowing details that were told to him by survivors, Wasif created texts which he paired with images to reveal the refugees’ escape at sea. The works reflect the constant flow of migration in the Bay of Bengal across many centuries, where border lines are lost in the shade of night. What can you hold onto when running away to save your life? How can you be, belong, or settle when nobody accepts you as a citizen? How do you legally prove your very existence after decades of systemic violence? Spring Song (2017–2019) is a work in progress that revolves around objects found in Rohingya camps. Placed against vivid monochromatic backgrounds, these precarious assemblages, decaying documents, and faded photographs convey fragmented memories and feelings of displacement. These objects are a testament of determination; a will to eat, to play or to simply reminisce about one's past –in other words, to have the freedom to feel human. Nabil Rahman The Taste of Tea, 2019 Collage of images, texts, objects, artworks collected from tea garden Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from Kabi Dilwar Foundation Born into Tea: Conversation and Songs with artists who currently live in Bangladeshi tea estates. Sunday 9, 5pm First Floor Nabil Rahman was born in and currently lives in the tea-district of Northeast Bangladesh, Sylhet; he was raised in New York and has experienced how value and values (mis)translate across these vastly different yet connected contexts. The least expensive cup of tea at Starbucks costs around $1.75 in the United States, while the daily wage of a tea picker can be less than the equivalent of $1.25 per day of work. Women sometimes collect more than 23kg of tea in one day, and tea is the second most consumed drink after water. The artist plays the role of facilitator when sharing his privilege with creative individuals working in neighbouring tea gardens, allowing their creativity to bloom in ways not tied to capitalist production, searching for new shared tools of expression. On Sunday 9 February at 5pm, artists who live in Bangladesh’s tea estates will perform songs and engage with visitors of DAS in the South Plaza, facilitated through the work of Rahman. Rahman’s practice archives the industrial present using found objects, mark-making and the written word. Creating ironic references to the histories and languages of abstraction, he investigates its politics by weaving traces of the global flows of material into his work, destabilising the supposed aim of abstraction in search of a ‘pure form.’ Neha Choksi The American President Travels (East), 2002 (remade 2019) Installation with wood, bamboo, paint, printed fabric. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Project88 As a study of the possible ecologies of powerful males, this installation visually configures a scratchy and deteriorated archive of the 20th-century travels of nine U.S. Presidents to over two dozen eastern nations, both revealing the paper diplomacy conducted through American newspapers and revelling in the comedy of each President filling his predecessor’s shoes for the public’s family album. A sheen of romantic getaway as well as ‘I-scratch-you-if-you-scratch-me’ is lent to the many recorded moments through the use of sheer silky fabric, backscratchers, and the form of a massage table. Working across performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, Choksi disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of everything – from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Embracing a confluence of disciplines, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural and social contexts to revisit the entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialisation. b. 1973, Belleville; lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai Rossella Biscotti Clara, 2019 VOC document transferred on wall (cargo list ship Knappenhof, departed from Bengal on 30–11–1740 arrived in Delft/Rotterdam on 20–07–1741 passing through Cape) Realised with additional support from the Italian Embassy of Bangladesh and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh Rossella Biscotti is interested in the power of storytelling and how this can open up a deeper exploration of untraced by history that reveals changing value systems. One of the stories that fascinates her is the story of Clara, a female rhinoceros who was brought to the Netherlands from Bengal in 1741 by a captain of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) along with a large shipment of textiles. While the detailed listings of textiles was declared and can be deduced from the reproduction of the ship’s original manifest document reproduced on the wall, Clara was not, suggesting that the captain was trying to profit off her exoticness as a separate source of income from his official VOC duties. Clara toured around Europe for seventeen years. While she is not visible in this official document, collective memory keeps stories (like Clara’s) alive. Surati and Princess of Kasiruta, 2019 Material line natural rubber, food colouring Courtesy of the artist and Mor-Charpentier. Realised with additional support from the Italian Embassy of Bangladesh and the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh Made from cast natural rubber embellished with food-colouring and batik-inspired patterns, this installation carries Biscotti’s interpretations of the powerful female characters in the Buru Quartet (1980–88), a series of novels by the late Indonesian author Pramoedya Ananta Toer while he was in prison. On a material level, the first rubber seeds were brought to Indonesia from the Belgian Congo, and batik techniques were exported to Africa via Europe as African Wax Cloth, speaking to the global scale of colonialism. Pramodeya’s novels tell the story of nationhood narrated on the bodies of women, whose only inheritable possessions were batik fabric and jewellery. Among the characters is a woman called Surati who deliberately infects herself with smallpox to avoid colonial subjugation as a concubine on a sugar plantation, and Annalies Mellema, who is shipped to Holland as property. Biscotti was inspired by the journeys and survival strategies employed by these women to resist the patriarchal colonial regimes they were born into, and imagines their characters in design motifs cast into these seductive floor-based forms. Biscotti describes the constitution of sentient beings as they are, instead of how they may be perceived, using sculpture, images and other materials. Her work explores forgotten or untraced events and the changing value systems they reveal. She explores the individual narratives of those affected by mining, exploitation and confinement, drawing from oral, technical, archival, and field research. b. 1978, Molfetta; lives and works in Brussels and Rotterdam Samsul Alam Helal Disappearing Roots, 2019 Photography, pigment prints, video with sound, 2:20 min Courtesy of the artist Samsul Alam Helal’s series Disappearing Roots considers the displacement of indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. The Kaptai Dam was built in 1962 as a hydropower source, and it produces about 5% of the total electricity consumed by Bangladesh. However, its creation displaced over 100,000 people (70% Chakma) and also submerged many homes, including the palace of the Chakma king which remains buried deep underneath a lake that is currently frequented by tourists. Globally over 10 million people per year are displaced by World Bank development projects (dams and infrastructure projects), according to an article on the adjacent video by Liu Chuang published in ArtReview. Using video and photography created through the artist’s long-term engagement with the Hill Tract communities, Helal’s work captures the remaining traces of ancient ways of life, highlighting the violence of gentrification and the trauma found in submerged symbols of cultural autonomy. ‘If even a royal palace can drown, what hope is there for ordinary people?’ asks the artist. Helal works with photography, sound, 3D models, and video to document the experiences of communities that are often part of the working class or a minority. His work explores the identities, dreams, and longings of their individual members. Helal prefers to explore these in a studio set-up, blurring boundaries between documentary photography and fiction. b. 1985, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Sawangwongse Yawnghwe The Opium Parallax II, 2019 Acrylic on silk and canvas Commissioned for DAS 2020 with in-kind support from the Rijksakademie and Jim Thompson Art Centre. Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from the Embassy of the Netherlands in Bangladesh In Sawangwongse Yawnghwe’s painterly practice, historical and political analyses of Shan State (Burma) are intertwined with personal and familial histories. This work contextualises the Shan State heroin-opium complex within opium’s long and invisible history of impacting the drawing of borders across vast geographies. Opium traverses not only national borders, but blurs the line between the legal and the illegal. ‘Because relationships are informal and regulated in irregular and informal patterns and because the balance of power and coalitions among the powers-that-be are unstable and shifting… no single economic-commercial actor can dominate the field… Entrepreneurial groups… operate with only one goal in mind… making and maximising profit. It is a world where the colour of flags or ideology is not as important as the colour of wealth.’ (Chao Tzang Yawnghwe, The Political Economy of the Opium Trade: Implications for Shan State, 2003) Yawnghwe works with painting and installation, addressing often fictional archives as a critique of Myanmar’s ethnocentric nationalism. Growing up in the context of the country’s patterns of military repression and domination, his work intertwines his personal experience with politics. Yawnghwe’s family history of political engagement represents a point of crossing of the two. b. 1971, Shan State; lives and works in Chiang Mai and Zuphen Shiraz Bayjoo b. 1979, Port Louis; lives and works in London and the Indian Ocean region Pran Kouraz, 2019 Mixed fabrics, dye-sublimation ink on canvas, super 16mm HD video, 14:48 min Commissioned by INIVA and Art Night London. Courtesy of the artist and Ed Cross Fine Art Shiraz Bayjoo’s immersive environment Pran Kouraz (meaning ‘take courage’ in Mauritian Creole) is inspired by his own history in Mauritius, once known as the Maroon Republic, a place created through the will and imagination to escape and overcome slavery and colonial subjugation. The story of the escaped slave becomes a wider metaphor about creating a new world on the back of migration and displacement where hybridity becomes a tool for freedom, survival, and self-transformation in the wake of trauma. Bayjoo worked with a group of eight-year-old migrant students in the UK, asking them to explore their rights as young people and to consider their own stories of courage and overcoming. The children critique the experiences of transmigratory groups today from their experiences of isolation, loss, and displacement stemming from patriarchal colonial legacies, power structures, and relationships that continue to endure and dominate. The resulting conversation, presented in the form of a film, creates a visual metaphor for the multiplicity of pressures facing humanity today. Bayjoo works with painting, photography, video, installation, and artefacts stored in public and personal archives. His work addresses ideas of nationhood and the exploration of identity tied to the history and legacy of European colonialism. Drawing from a past of complex relationships of migration and trade, he traces the meaning of postcolonial collective identity. Somnath Hore b. 1921, Chittagong; d. 2006, Santiniketan Wound series, 1979 Two Pulp Prints Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation ‘The Famine of 1943, the communal riots of 1946, the devastations of war, all the wounds and wounded I have seen, are engraved on my consciousness…Wounds is what I saw everywhere around me. A scarred tree, a road gouged by a truck tyre, a man knifed for no visible or rational reason… The object was eliminated; only wounds remained,’ reflected Somnath Hore, an artist celebrated in Indian art history who was born in what is now Bangladesh. He transformed hand-made paper into scarred, blistered, pierced, and wounded surfaces reminiscent of human skin in the aftermath of trauma in the highly experimental Wounds Series from the 1970s. This body of work speaks not only to the violent regional history that the artist lived through in the build-up and aftermath of the 1947 partition of British India and Bangladesh’s subsequent war for independence in 1971, but also to the social scars of division found across our shared human history. Hore worked to document and reinscribe the suffering working class into public memory, testifying to his important role as an artist-witness in a time of historical crisis. His works were published in various revolutionary publications, notably those of the Communist party. Hore invented and developed various printmaking techniques in addition to working in painting and sculpture. Later on in his career, Hore worked as an educator at multiple arts institutions, such as the Indian College of Art and Draftsmanship (Kolkata), Delhi College of Art, MS University (Baroda) and Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati. Thao Nguyen Phan b. 1987, Ho Chi Minh City; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Mute Grain, 2019 Three-channel video, colour, sound, 15:45 min Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation for SB14. Courtesy of the artist Mute Grain (2019) examines the little-discussed 1945 famine in French Indochina during the Japanese occupation (1940–5), in which over two million people died of starvation, partly due to Japanese demands to grow jute over rice to support their war economy. This three-channel film poetically weaves together oral histories, folk tales, and lyrical chronicles to tell a story that history left behind in Vietnam, creating narratives that sit at the border of fantasy and reality. Beyond her research in Vietnam, Thao Nguyen Phan also consulted Bengali literature in creating the work, notably Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Anandamath (1882), set in the Bengal famine of 1770. Her film revolves around a young woman named Tám, who becomes a hungry ghost unable to move to the next life, and Ba, who anxiously searches for his sister. Ba (‘March’) and Tám (‘August’) represent the poorest months of the lunar calendar, when farmers once borrowed money and worked side jobs to sustain themselves. Phan works with painting, video, installation, and what she calls ‘theatrical fields,’ such as performance gesture and moving images. Utilising literature, philosophy, and open poetic spaces conducive to reflection, she highlights unconventional issues arising from history and tradition. This allows her to challenge received ideas and social conventions. In 2012, Phan co-founded the collective Art Labor, whose work can be experienced in the South Plaza exhibition The Collective Body. Yasmin Jahan Nupur b. 1979, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Let Me Get You a Nice Cup of Tea, 2019–20 Antique furniture, antique tea set, embroidered textiles, tea, performance Commissioned for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist and Exhibit320, with support from the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem Performance is live from 7 to 12 February, 10am–1pm and 4–5:30pm Tea has impacted cultures and changed the course of world history by bringing people together and tearing them apart: from the Opium Wars and the American Revolution to the mass movement of workers as part of plantation economics; from the fostering of friendships to marriage proposals through the ritual of tea ceremonies. Yasmin Jahan Nupur has arranged a tea party through a performative process. She has harvested the tea at home and, through the act of sharing, brings participants together to think more closely about the origins of this everyday commodity. Nupur works with sketches, installations, and performances. Her work explores human relationships from various perspectives, reflecting her belief in democratic rights regardless of social position. She explores social discrepancies such as those of women and migrants in South Asia, hoping to support increased understanding between peoples of different backgrounds. Zainul Abedin b. 1914, Kishoreganj; d. 1976, Dhaka A suite of Untitled works from the Famine Sketches series, 1943 Ink on paper Courtesy of Rokeya Quader Untitled from Monpura’ 70, 1970 Ink on paper Courtesy of Anwar Hossain Manju Zainul Abedin is considered by many to be the founding father of modern art in Bangladesh. In response to the Great Famine of Bengal (1943) under the British rule of India, he made hundreds of sketches depicting starving victims, serving as a form of visual testimony. His sketches spoke to the atrocities experienced by victims under what was a man-made famine and fuelled the public’s will for independence. Throughout his artistic career, Abedin remained true to the representation of the struggles of those most vulnerable in society, notably the rural peasantry. He was actively involved in the Language Movement of 1952 and the Liberation War in 1971. Having witnessed the Bhola Cyclone devastation, he expressed solidarity through his scroll painting Monpura ’70, drawing parallels between the struggle of the victims of the cyclone and that of the people of Bangladesh. Abedin travelled extensively, depicting those suffering under oppression, often returning to his Famine sketches such as in his series on the people of Palestine. In addition to being one of the most important artists of his generation, Abedin was also an academic and bureaucrat who helped establish the first art college in Dhaka in 1947, after the partition of British India. He was given the title Shilpacharya (‘great teacher of arts’) for his contribution towards art education in Bangladesh. Abedin also established the Folk Art Museum and a folk village in Sonargaon in 1975. Zhou Tao b. 1976, Changsha; lives and works in Guangzhou Winter North Summer South (2, 3, 5, 17), 2019 Inkjet prints on paper Courtesy of the artist and Vitamin Creative Space. This project extends from a film produced with support from Samdani Art Foundation and Kadist and commissioned by Council Zhou Tao spent nearly two years in an eco-industrial park at the foot of the Kunlun Mountains creating these images that swiftly alternate between natural landscapes of sandstorms, dust clouds, and the changing seasons, and realistic portraits of humans and other species fighting for survival in a state of exception. Human agency is not only manifested in transforming the external world but can also be exercised by preserving an internal, poetic space. Co-commissioned by Times Museum and Council and supported by Samdani Art Foundation and Kadist, his latest work, North of the Mountain, was shot with an 8K-resolution camera that is able to capture shades of brightness and darkness beyond the capacity of the human eye. It is the artist’s radical attempt to ecologise the body of the filmmaker as well as filmmaking technologies in a place that is largely shut off from the gaze of the world outside. Zhou Tao predominantly works with video, producing plotless events in a documentary language with a core focus on the sense and sensation of time. His works connect disparate milieus, often on the threshold between the natural and the artificial as a metaphor for the spatial multiplicity of modernism, incomprehensible to the human mind.

ALL PROJECTS Ayesha Sultana at The Delfina Foundation The winner of the Samdani Art Award for the year 2014, Ayesha Sultana completed her three-month residency at the Delfina Foundation in London as part of the award and shared her wonderful experience with us: ‘The residency at Delfina Foundation in London was an invaluable learning experience for me. Meeting and engaging with other creative people, encountering parts of the city, taking educational trips were an immersive period of reflection. The three months created some distance to pause, inquire and reassess my practice at this early stage of my career. It also gave me the opportunity to be able to tap into other, new points of interest and spend uninterrupted time doing research at public archives, which were easily accessible to accumulate and absorb material for future projects.’- Ayesha Sultana In her three month long residency, from July to September 2014, Ayesha explored through various mediums. Her work included drawings on paper, cyanotype prints, screen-prints and ongoing sound works. As part of the Dhaka Art Summit, the Samdani Art Award is given bi-annually to one outstanding young Bangladeshi artist selected from the ten finalists. The Samdani Art Foundation partners with the Delfina Foundation to give the winning artist opportunity to attend a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London. Delfina Foundation an independent, non-profit foundation dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and developing creative practice through residencies, partnerships and public programming. For the 2nd edition of Dhaka Art Summit, There were sixteen nominators, who each elected five artists. These artists were then short listed to ten finalists. The award selection Jury panel Director of Cultural Program at Instituto Inhotin Eungie Joo (Brazil), Guggenheim Adjunct Curator Sandhini Poddar (India), Director of DIA Art Foundation Jessica Morgan (UK) and Khoj Director Pooja Sood (India). The panel was chaired by founding Director of Delfina Foundation Aaron Cezar.

ALL PROJECTS Shoni Mongol Adda Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open-membership artist-led initiative Shoni Mongol Adda (Bangla for ‘Saturday Tuesday Debate Group’) was formed by inviting friends to come to a quiet local café and to pay for their own food and drink (with a little extra to jointly remunerate an invited speaker) and to engage with a different guest speaker twice a week to debate topics such as ‘What is public space?’ (with a police commissioner as a guest speaker). The platform became so successful that members of the group took over management of the restaurant, which is now known as Kamor Café, and which is walking distance from the DAS venue. Here, the collective presents a new question every day at DAS in a sign-based format for the audience to consider and debate in addas organised in the discussion area of this amoeba form. It also invites visitors to join them for addas at Komor Cafe on 8 February and 11 February when they will host artistic delegations from Nepal and Australia.

ALL PROJECTS Critical Writing Ensemble Curated By Katya García-Antón, Antonio Cataldo, Diana Campbell, Chandrika Grover And Bhavna Kakar PREFACE “to reshape some histories, to bring back the forgotten others, to reassess and alter the already hazily known, to redefine some standards of writing and our understanding, thoughts and feelings of an era lost. More importantly, to allow this man to breathe his words […] Memory, collectively lost, can now be somewhat regained.” These thoughts are taken from the last pages of the publication The Art Critic dedicated to the Burmese born, India based critic and artist Richard Bartholomew. The words come from Bartholomew´s son Pablo, and they eloquently comment on the power of his father’s archive, in particular his writing, to critically build different pasts. Bartholomew’s thoughts do more than address the urgent need to fortify the interlinking of art historical narratives - many forgotten or simply unknown - within the South Asia region, but they inspire us to consider their impact beyond it. And they do more, since they demand that we persevere in new ways of nurturing critique that will strengthen regional histories of immense richness to the world. To do so we must nurture structures of empowerment, knowledge sharing and production, within which micro-histories will not just claim their place within macro-histories but also contribute to their revitalisation. It is on the wings of this impulse that Diana Campbell Betancourt, Artistic Director of the Dhaka Art Summit, together with Katya García-Antón, Director and Curator of OCA, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Chandrika Grover Ralleigh, Head of Liaison Office India of the Swiss Arts Council – Pro Helvetia, and Bhavna Kakar, Director of Take on Art Magazine are launched the CRITICAL WRITING ENSEMBLE as part of the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. The project was curated by Katya García-Antón, Director and Curator of OCA, with the collaboration of Antonio Cataldo, Senior Programmer of OCA. Research into the processes and structures that could help to empower writers today has been a part of the curatorial practice of Katya García-Antón in recent years. She was commissioned by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council in 2012-13 to devise a programme for the discussion and activation of critical art writing in Switzerland involving cross-generation peers across the linguistic regions and traditions of the country. CWE has drawn from this valuable experience, repositioning previous thoughts and posing new questions within the context of the Dhaka Art Summit, as well as the histories and currencies of the South Asia region. CWE took a cross-regional approach and was developed in collaboration with Bhavna Kakar, who in addition to convening with the peers in Dhaka, also developed CWE-1 in an official partnership with Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, by organising a series of discussions and workshops amongst regional peers during the month of December 2015 in the lead-up to CWE II at the Summit. Finally, in 2017, CWE will be developed as a further iteration within the context of Nordic Europe through a programme held in OCA, Oslo. CWE therefore brings together peers from the South Asia region and across the globe, into different working constellations to share writing histories and knowledge with each other, experiment together, and produce new critical impulses regarding art writing, which will be compiled in a specially dedicated publication with wide international distribution. Such an endeavour is positioned within a local therefore as much as a global framework, in more ways than one, for not only is this a project of some urgency regionally, it reminds us of the fact the crisis is a global one. Art writing has for some time endured challenges which vary in nature across the world. In some parts there are fewer places in which to write critically and experimentally about art and art history, there is less and less financing for this, there is less and less time; in others whilst platforms for writing may actually be on the rise, their value and impact has declined. Writing is by nature a lonely endeavour, but under these conditions, art writing is being pushed to the margins and alienated from the central and critical position it should have in our societies, as will the immediate contact it should have with our audiences. If this decline continues, art histories around the world will homogenise and the immense richness and diversity of our cultures, essential to rewrite and re-imagine present and past histories, will lose their critical edge as the very voices that should build it, which should experiment it and reinvent it, disappear over time. STRUCTURAL SUMMARY CWE seeks to foster a community of art writing peers working together. Breaking the isolation that characterises much writing practice, the platform hopes to create a lively environment for intellectual exchange. CWE seeks to connect art writers experience and knowledge of regional and national writing histories, across the South Asian region and other regions globally. CWE II seeks to develop these relations through a four-day platform of presentations, panel discussions, lecture performances, group debates and readings, within the context of the Dhaka Art Summit, its exhibitions and talks programmes. CWE views art writing as a practice in its own right. Writing in general is strongly shaped by the contexts in which it is practiced and where it appears, and so the platform will consider discussing writing in a variety of historical and formal contexts. CWE counted on access to the Asia Art Archive that was on site in Dhaka. CWE will publish the material presented during, and derived from these sessions and distribute it internationally by Mousse Publishing. The publication will include a variety of contributions from all peers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=ADjtyZHRC10 Session 1 Discussion, part 2 Al Fresco – Writing Within and Against the Art School Date: 3 February 2016, 3.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy With Yin Ker, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Chus Martínez, Anshuman Das Gupta, moderated by Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=ichWlJfgo7U Session 1 Discussion, part 2 Al Fresco – Writing Within and Against the Art School Date: 3 February 2016, 3.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy With Yin Ker, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Chus Martínez, Anshuman Das Gupta, moderated by Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=DvcAfgmHU5s Rebranding Mesopotamia: The Inextinguishable Fire by Övül Durmusoglu Date: 7 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Turkish curator and writer Övül O. Durmusoglu will focus on the flow of information which builds our disjointed everyday life to address the reality of war and its virtual manifestations. Starting with the reading of contemporary cinematic and installative propositions she asks questions which are immanent upon us – Where did Daesh come from? How did the migrant population increase in Europe? Or, how did the populist right-wing Pegidas movement against non-Muslims and immigrants in Germany, started in Dresden, draw thousands of participants in 2014? – to morph on our future from within and outside the arts. Övül O. Durmusoglu is a curator and writer. She is the director/curator of YAMA screen in Istanbul. She works as a curatorial advisor to Gulsun Karamustafa's monograph in Hamburger Bahnhof in 2016. She also co-leads 'Solar Fantastic’, a research and publication project between Mexico and Turkey. Durmusoglu has recently curated 'Future Queer', the 20th year anniversary exhibition for Kaos GL association in Istanbul. In the past, she acted as the curator of the festival Sofia Contemporary 2013 titled as 'Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground'. She organised different programmes and events as a Goethe Institute fellow at Maybe Education and Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=36jmfF3k7VQ Indian Printed Matters after Independence by Devika Singh Date: 8 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation by Paris-based art historian and curator Devika Singh (who is currently writing a book on artistic practices in India between 1947 and 1991) takes the title of this session on ‘printed matter’ as a point of departure to discuss a moment when art reviews were a critical site of transaction in India between the public sphere and contemporary art currents. For writers of the immediate post-independence period, few issues mattered more than the relation between India and the outside. Opinionated and polemical, writings on art contributed to debates on the nature of art and its dialogue with history and ideas of the nation. Commenting on Indian art of the 1950s in the pages of the review MARG in 1967, Jaya Appaswamy described this changing decade as an opening onto the world, from ‘local nationalistic idioms to a world international language’. Using the first years of MARG as a central example, the presentation explores this period of radical reconfiguration to ask what its internationalism amounted to and how we can make sense of it today. Devika Singh is an art historian, critic and curator based in Paris and an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge. Singh was the Smuts Research Fellow at Cambridge (2012-2015) and has held fellowships at the French Academy at Rome (Villa Medici), the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Washington DC. She has published extensively in catalogues, art magazines and journals, including frieze, Art Press, Art Asia Pacific, Art History and Modern Asian Studies and is currently writing a book on art in post-independence India for Reaktion Books. She is also curating several exhibitions on photography in India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=-8kbn1L33eY Letters– ‘The long awaited morn’ by Salima Hashmi Date: 4 February 2016, 12.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Artist, cultural writer, activist and founding Dean of School of Visual Arts at the Beaconhouse National University at Lahore Salima Hashmi, will read and comment letters of her father Faiz Ahmed Faiz to address the power of the epistolary form as a critical tool for resistance. Salima Hashmi is an artist, curator and contemporary art historian. Professor Hashmi was the founding Dean of the School of Visual Art and Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore; she taught at the National College of Arts (NCA) Lahore for 31 years and was also Principal of the College for four years. Salima Hashmi has written extensively on the arts. Her book Unveiling the Visible- Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan was published in 2002, and Memories, Myths, Mutations – Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, co-authored with Yashodhara Dalmia for Oxford University Press, India, was published in 2006. She has recently edited The Eye Still Seeks – Contemporary Art of Pakistan for Penguin Books India in 2014. In addition, Salima Hashmi curated ‘Hanging Fire’: an exhibition of Pakistani Contemporary Art for Asia Society Museum, New York in 2009, which was accompanied by an extensive catalogue. The Government of Pakistan awarded her the President's Medal for Pride of Performance for Art Education in 1999. And the Australian Council of Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) nominated her as Inaugural International Fellow, for distinguished service to art and design education in 2011.She is a practicing artist and has participated in many group exhibitions and has had six solo exhibitions at a national and international level. She is Council Member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=LTtZl1RFRnc Dislocating Authority in a Colonial Art School: critical interventions of a “native” insider by Dr Shukla Sawant Date: 3 February 2016, 4.00pm Venue: 2rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Focusing on the autobiography, periodical columns and official reports written by Madhev Vishwanath Dhurandhar (1867–1944), a ‘native’ art educator and administrator within the colonial bureaucracy of the Bombay Presidency, the presentation will examine the curricular interventions and nuanced resistance offered by him through his arguments published in English and Marathi to address different language publics. In contrast to the colonial era education policy that insisted on a revivalist typology rendered through language of academic rigor and directed towards design education for the ‘natives,’ Dhurandhar, who was to rise to the position of the headmaster of the venerable Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, while adhering to academic means, was to make his career primarily as an independent ‘History Painter,’ illustrator and landscapist. While Santiniketan’s credentials as a site of Tagore’s resistance project have been dealt with extensively in art historical writing in India, the everyday opposition of figures entangled in colonial institutional structures have received little attention. With her presentation Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor Shukla Sawant, based in Delhi, by drawing attention to rare archival material, hopes to further the discussion on the fissures in colonial structures of power that were chiseled out from within. Dr Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and Professor of Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where she has taught since 2001. She is also currently visiting faculty at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai. Prior to joining JNU, Shukla Sawant taught for twelve years at the Department of Fine Arts and Art Education Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi. After graduating in painting from the College of Art, New Delhi she specialised in printmaking at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later went to the Slade School of Art and Centre for Theoretical Studies, London on a Commonwealth grant. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, art in colonial India, photography, printmaking and new media. Shukla has ten solo shows to her credit and has published various catalogue essays and contributed chapters in books on Contemporary Indian Art. She is a founding member of the Indian Printmakers’ Guild and was a working group member of Khoj International Artists’ Association between 1998–2005. She has delivered lectures at the NGMA, New Delhi; University of Heidelberg, Germany; New School, New York and Brandeis University; and has participated in the 18th International Congress of Aesthetics, Beijing University, 2010. Her recent publications include: ‘Landscape Painting a Formal Inquiry’ in The Indian Quarterly, ‘A Question of Perspective’, The Indian Quarterly; ‘Instituting Artists’ Collectives: the Bangalore/Bengaluru Experiments with “Solidarity Economies”’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University; ‘Out Of India: Landscape Painting Beyond the Picturesque Frame’ in Landscape Painting, the Changing Horizon, Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=_RAqGvaSzCU Art writing from below: Transversality in the country of mistranslation by Mustafa Zaman Date: 8 February 2018, 3.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Conceiving it as a site for raising and debating issues, Depart magazine’s editor Mustafa Zaman will offer the raison d’etre behind the art quarterly published from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose principal aim is providing critical reinforcement to the burgeoning art scene of the country. Zaman will look at the state of art criticism in Bangladesh while simultaneously examining some of the crucial critical interventions as activities from below. Often subject to mistranslation in the artistic circuit, what some writings set in motion is a social/collective reaction, while others pass without notice. Thus, the coincidence of art as a critical praxis and art writing as a critique remains even more misunderstood. Born in 1968 Mustafa Zaman received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1989 from the Institute of Fine Arts (now, Faculty of Fine Arts), University of Dhaka. In the late 1990s Zaman started contributing art reviews to Observer Magazine, a weekly supplement of the daily Observer. He joined The Daily Star in 2002 and worked in the scope of a feature writer for Star Weekend Magazine for three years writing on a gamut of subject matters including art, literature and politics. He has contributed numerous art reviews and articles on major Bangladeshi artists to a number of vernacular dailies including Bhorer Kakoj and Prothom Alo. Zaman is now editor of Depart: a magazine launched in 2010 and focused on contemporary art from South Asia with special emphasis on the emerging art scene of Bangladesh. He has written numerous prefaces to exhibition catalogues of major Bangladeshi young artists. Zaman’s major curatorial efforts include ‘CrossOver’ (2011–2012), which occasioned two back-to-back workshops and exhibitions planned in collaboration with co-curator Sushma K Bahl, sponsored by Art & Bangladesh in Dhaka, and Art Mall in Delhi, with artists from India and Bangladesh as participants; two solo exhibitions in 2013 including ‘DeReal’ by Bahram, a rickshaw painter who crossed over to mainstream art circle, and ‘Gravity Free World’ by expatriate artist A Rahman; and lastly a retrospective exhibition in 2014 entitled ‘In(site)’ by Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed. As an artist Zaman had his first solo in 2002 where sourced image were placed alongside texts to interrogate the order of knowledge; his second solo showcased his large paintings on canvases in an exhibition in 2010, at Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts; and the third was a playful mix of two and three-dimensional works framed as a series of seemingly disparate yet thematically related conceptual pieces at Alliance Francaise in 2010. His most recent multimedia installations and interactive pieces were presented at Bengal Lounge in 2013, at a duo exhibition with fellow artist Rafiqul Shuvo, under the title ‘Automated Subjectivity’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=6LGTHllpTLY Aunohita Mojumdar Date: 8 February 2018, 11.30am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Mojumdar, editor of Himal Magazine, Kathmandu, will speak about the responsibility of the writer and the theatre of war by bringing to light stories of everyday reality in territories of conflict and violence. Aunohita Mojumdar is the Nepal-based editor of Himal Southasian: the region's only long-form independent print publication. She began her career as a freelance journalist in Delhi in the 1980s, and quickly moved onto explore the relationship between citizens and the state in Punjab and Kashmir. She worked for eight years in Afghanistan, writing on topics that ranged from the role of art in women's lives to the evolving social attitudes towards media, incarceration, and family planning. She has contributed to a wide variety of media that includes but is not limited to Eurasianet, Asia Times, Himal Southasian, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, NRC Handelsblad (Dutch), Sydsvenska (Swedish), Al Jazeera, Times of India and Hindustan Times. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=OQ7WMzeVhmw The Artist’s Apostrophe by Mike Sperlinger Date: 8 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy One of the features of recent discussions of art has been the proliferation of the possessive artist's apostrophe, in phrases like ‘artists’ moving image’ or ‘artists' writing’. Thinking about the phrase ‘artists’ writing,’ Professor of Theory and Writing at The Academy of Fine Art, KHiO (Oslo, Norway), Mike Sperlinger, will briefly examine some of the practices, histories and institutional dilemmas concealed by that seemingly innocuous grammatical mark – for example, what kind of relationship between the fields of art and writing does it imply? And who is really in charge of making this kind of attribution – to whom does the possessive apostrophe itself really belong? To do that Sperlinger will present a few examples – in particular Tracks: a journal of artists’ writings, a little-known publication edited by the American sculptor Herbert George in the mid-1970s. Mike Sperlinger is Professor of Writing and Theory at The Academy of Fine Art Oslo. Before that, he worked for more than a decade at LUX: a London-based agency for artists working with the moving image, which he co-founded with Benjamin Cook in 2002. As a writer he has contributed to a variety of publications including Afterall, Art Monthly, Dot Dot Dot, frieze, Radical Philosophy and Texte zur Kunst, as well as catalogue texts for artists including Ed Atkins, Gerard Byrne and Hong-Kai Wang. He has edited publications including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’ Cinema (2008). He has also curated a number of exhibitions, including ‘Let's Take Back Our Space’ (Focal Point Gallery, 2009) and a solo exhibition by Marianne Wex (Badischer Kunstverein, 2012); and he was the producer of the film Crippled Symmetries by the artist Beatrice Gibson, which won the Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2015. He is currently working on a volume of selected writings by the late artist Ian White and an anthology of Tracks: a journal of writing by artists published in New York in the 1970s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=QdSbTbEODug The Art Critic by Rosalyn D’Mello Date: 4 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Mumbai based artist and writer Rosalyn D’Mello played a central role in the research that enabled the publication in 2012 of The Art Critic – a historic selection of the art writings of art critic, poet, writer, painter and photographer Richard Bartholomew (b. Tavoy, British Burma, 1926, d. Delhi, India, 1985). D’Mello will present a lecture performance addressing significant points in Bartholomew’s poetic and literary legacy, from the period of the 1950s up to the 1980s that offered an insider’s account of the little known story of Modern Indian Art. Rosalyn D’Mello is a widely published freelance art writer based in New Delhi. She was the Editor-in-Chief of BLOUIN ARTINFO India. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Open, Mint Lounge, Art Review, and Art Review Asia. D’Mello was among five writers nominated for Forbes’s Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014 and was also nominated for the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014. She was the associate editor of The Art Critic, a 600+ page selection of the art writings of Richard Bartholomew from the 1950s to the early 1980s and was a member of the jury of the Prudential Eye Art Award 2015. Her first book, A Handbook For My Lover was published in 2015 by Harper Collins India. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=G8q5FiVYBqk On Curating Webjournal by Dorothee Richter Date: 8 February 2018, 12.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Drawing from recent research and from her work as an editor of the independent international journal OnCurating, Dorothee Richter, Head of Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland, will discuss hybrid curatorial models to address experiences of working and writing across online and offline platforms. Dorothee Richter is head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and co-founder, with Susanne Clausen, of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme: a cooperation of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Reading. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues, urban situations, power relation issues and institutional critique. In 2005 she initiated, in collaboration with Barnaby Drabble, the Postgraduate Studies Programme in Curating. In 2007 she organised the symposium ‘Re-Visions of the Display’ with Jennifer Johns and Sigrid Schade at the Migros Museum in Zurich; in 2010 the ‘Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?’ symposium cooperation with Rein Wolfs; and in 2013 the symposium ‘Who is afraid of the public?’ at the ICA London, cooperating with Elke Krasny, Silvia Simoncelli and the University of Reading. She was curator of Fluxus Festival at Cabaret Voltaire in 2012, and worked as curator at the Museum Baerengasse in 2014. In 2008 she initiated the web-journal OnCurating.org and has been Publisher since. Her most recent publication is Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft (2012) and the new Internet platform www.on-curating.org which presents current approaches to critical curatorial practice. In 2013 she produced a film together with Ronald Kolb: Flux Us Now! Fluxus Explored with a Camera. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=M3m9AV-P8Kw What we left unfinished: Shahrazade in the archives by Mariam Ghani Date: 7 February 2016, 11.30am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy NY-based artist Mariam Ghani will give a performative, part-text-based presentation of the audiovisual material of What We Left Unfinished – a long-term research, film, and dialogue project centered around five unfinished Afghan feature films shot, but never edited, between 1978 and 1992. Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker and teacher. Her research-based practice spans video, installation, photography, performance, and text. Her exhibitions and screenings include presentations at the Rotterdam, ‘CPH:DOX’ and ‘transmediale’ film festivals, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul and Kassel, MoMA in New York, the National Gallery in Washington DC, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the CCCB in Barcelona. Recent texts have been published by Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, and the Manifesta Journal. Ghani’s recent curatorial projects include the international symposium ‘Radical Archives’, the traveling film programme ‘History of Histories’ and the collaborative exhibition ‘Utopian Pulse’. Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh since 2004 with ‘Index of the Disappeared’: an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions; with choreographer Erin Kelly since 2006 on the video series ‘Performed Places’; and with media archive collective Pad.ma since 2012 on the ‘Afghan Films’ online archive. Ghani has been awarded the NYFA and Soros Fellowships, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the Graham Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, NYSCA, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from SVA. Ghani currently teaches in the Social Practice MFA programme at Queens College and is a Visiting Artist at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=-QSvP6HoeT0 Forms of Address: personal testimony and public engagement by Geeta Kapur Date: 7 February 2016, 11.00am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Art historian, curator, critic and an expert on contemporary art and theory, noted for her many accomplishments in curating and art criticism, Kapur will lecture on the importance of texts and documentation in witnessing and testimonials of the paradigmatic of the historical, political and ethical dilemmas of our times. Starting from her manuscript ‘Public Address: Citing Installation and Performance Art’ she will question the readability of texts in enhancing historical and political consciousness, and the fragility of such instances when annotating trauma, loss, and mourning. Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based art critic and curator. Her essays on alternative modernisms, contemporary art practice and curatorial interventions in India and the global south are widely anthologised. Her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2016). Kapur's curatorial projects include survey exhibitions at the Lalit Kala Akademi and the National Gallery of Modern Art (Delhi and Mumbai). She co-curated the ‘Festival of India’ exhibition, ‘Contemporary Indian Art’, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982); curated ‘Dispossession’, of Indian artists at the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995); co-curated ‘Bombay/ Mumbai’ for the multi-part exhibition, ‘Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis’, Tate Modern, London (2001); curated ‘subTerrain’, for the ‘ Body.City ’ project, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003); co-curated ‘DiVerge: Crossing Generations’, Chemould40, 2003; and curated ‘Aesthetic Bind’, five exhibitions in Chemould50, Mumbai (2013–2014). Geeta Kapur has been a member of the International Jury for the biennials in Venice (2005), Dakar (2006), and Sharjah (2007); she was also on the Advisory Committee of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012–2013). She was a member of the Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007-2009 and 2014); and is currently on the Advisory Board, Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong (since 2009). A founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, she was on the Advisory Council of Third Text for two decades and is now on the Advisory Board of ArtMargin. She is an editorial advisor and Trustee of Marg. She has lectured in universities and museums worldwide and held Visiting Fellowships at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She was awarded the Padmashri in 2009. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=kV6MkX6YEoo Earth Poison: Environmental Writing as Militant Research by Nabil Ahmed Date: 7 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Artist, writer, curator, and team member of the Forensic Architecture research project based at Goldsmiths, University of London, Nabil Ahmed will deliver a lecture which combines video, performance and sound art to address the writing of the world as an accumulation of catastrophic events. Nabil Ahmed is an artist, writer and researcher. His transdisciplinary research explores contemporary status of nature in spatial relation to the law, conflict and development. More recently Ahmed has participated in the Taipei Biennale (2012), Cuenca Biennale (2014) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin where he has been part of the two-year ‘Anthropocene Project’ (2013-14) including the ‘Anthropocene Curriculum’ (with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin) that presented a range of artistic and theoretical approaches, concepts and experimental pedagogical projects addressing climate change and widespread environmental transformations. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and various art and architecture publications recently commissioned by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Third Text, Volume, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routlege, 2014), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014) and many others. Ahmed is co-founder of Call and Response, a sound art organisation based in London. He initiated the Earth Sensing Association – a research organisation for the diffusion of knowledge at the intersection of environmental change, conflict and cultural production. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London with a doctoral thesis that charted hidden narratives and evidenced the coupling of human conflict with natural environments in Bangladesh and West Papua. He is a member of the ERC funded Forensic Architecture Project at Goldsmiths, which brings together architects, artists, filmmakers, activists, and theorists to undertake research that gathers and presents spatial analysis in legal and political forums. Ahmed is a lecturer at The Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan and has previously taught in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a guest critic at the Architecture Association, University of Westminster Faculty of Architecture and the Royal College of Art, London. He is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=3nhB4vTZQbE One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. by Chus Martínez Date: 3 February 2016, 12.30pm Venue: 2rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In recent years Chus Martínez, curator and Head of the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, has reflected upon the relation between art practice, institutions and education in the years to come. For the Ensembles Martínez will give a talk on what she calls the ‘Metabolic Era.’ She will focus on the transformation of life through physical and mental ingestion—from diets to procrastination—and explore how such metabolic processes could potentially inform the future of art. Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. Currently she is the Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland. Before she was the Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, and in 2008 she served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. During her tenure as Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein she curated solo exhibitions of Wilhelm Sasnal among others; and a series of group exhibitions including ‘Pensée Sauvage' and ‘The Great Game To Come’. She was also the founder of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program for international artists, art writers, and curators.While at MACBA Martínez curated the Thomas Bayrle retrospective, an Otolith Group monographic show, and an exhibition devoted to television, ‘Are you ready for TV?’. In 2008, Martínez was the curator of the Deimantas Narkevicius retrospective exhibition, ‘The Unanimous Life’, at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which travelled to major European museums. Martínez lectures and writes regularly including numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum among other international art journals. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=qXAC5J91_NY Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990): Attempts at a Tenable (Hi)Story of a 20th-Century Artist Straddling Nations, Traditions & Disciplines by Yin Ker Date: 3 February 2016, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ker, an educator and researcher on Southeast Asian and Buddhist art based in Singapore, will explore the legacy of Śāntiniketan pedagogy in the work of Burma’s most important exponent of modernist practice, painter Bagyi Aung Soe. Following his return to Yangon in 1952 and over the next three decades, through illustration, which, in place of the virtually inexistent gallery and museum, served as the site of avant-garde artistic experimentations, he examined the linguistic rationale of a plethora of pictorial idioms, ranging from the ukiyo-e to cubism. In innovating new idioms, his non-figurative illustrations published in Shumawa Magazine in January and February 1953 provoked a furore which saw traditionalists branding his art as ‘seik-ta-za-pangyi’, meaning psychotic or mad painting – an epithet that would become synonymous with Aung Soe’s works as well as modern art in general in Burma. Ker’s presentation will share the challenges of developing an adapted narrative of his art which defies the conventions of art and art history. Yin Ker owes her training to the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), INALCO (Paris) and the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University (Yangon). Since 2000, she has been researching on Myanmar’s trailblazer of modern art, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990). Her research interests also include the constructs of ‘art’ and ‘art history’ beyond the Euro-American canons; the intersections of ancient and modern methods of knowledge- and image-making; as well as innovatory ways of telling (hi)stories of Buddhist art. Yin Ker continues to paint and to investigate new modes of image-making in parallel with theoretical research within and beyond the discipline of art history. She currently teaches (Hi)stories of Arts from Southeast Asia; aesthetic manifestations of Buddhist devotion and practice; and ways of seeing and thinking about pictorial strategies from different parts of the world at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She previously taught Art History at Nalanda University (Rajgir) and Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), and curated at the Singapore Art Museum (National Gallery Singapore). As an independent curator, writer and translator, Yin Ker worked on ‘Video, an Art, a History, 1965-2010’, a selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum collections, ‘plAy: Art from Myanmar Today’ and ‘From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar’. Her publications include ‘Kin Maung (Bank) and Bagyi Aung Soe: Two Models of ‘Modern’ Myanma Art and the Question of its Emergence’, in Modern Art Quarterly (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2014); ‘A Short Story of Bagyi Aung Soe in Five Images’ in Field Notes: Mapping Asia (Asia Art Archive, 2013); ‘L’ « art fou » ou l’art moderne birman selon les illustrations de Bagyi Aung Soe’ in La question de l’art en Asie orientale (Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008); and ‘Modern Art According to Bagyi Aung Soe’ in Journal of Burma Studies (North Illinois University, 2006). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=bisCgS3Q_U8 Borrowing your eyes, her words, my prose—the memoirs of a memory impaired by Filipa Ramos Date: 3 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Writer and Curator Filipa Ramos (currently editor of Art Agenda, London) will re-imagine traditional paedagogic formats, and standard exhibition review analysis, with a reading relating to an imaginary visit through exhibition we haven’t seen, but which we can experience through the eyes of an absent spectator. Filipa Ramos was born in Lisbon and is a writer and editor based in London. Currently she is Editor in Chief of art-agenda, commissioning and publishing experimental and rigorous writing on art. She is a lecturer in Art and Moving Image at the Experimental Film MA Programme of Kingston University, and at the MRes Art:Moving Image of Central Saint Martins/University of the Arts, both in London.Ramos is co-curator of ‘Vdrome’: an ongoing programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers, which she co-founded in 2013 with Edoardo Bonaspetti, Jens Hoffmann, and Andrea Lissoni. Previously she was Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal, curator of the Research Section of dOCUMENTA (13), and coordinator of ‘The Most Beautiful Kunsthalle in the World’ research project at the Antonio Ratti Foundation, Como. Interested in the ways in which art – and in particular moving-image based work – provides a site of encounter for humans and nonhumans, she has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions and film programmes on the topic and is currently editing an anthology of art writing on Animals, to be published this coming Autumn. She has been a guest curator at several public and private institutions and her writing has appeared in diverse journals and catalogues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=hQiCgsIlz_8 Location Location Location by Sharmini Pereira Date: 8 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Pereira will discuss about her organisation Raking Leaves, a complex cosmogony of forms for commissioning and publishing artists' books based in Sri Lanka. During her presentation, Pereira will open up three specific projects, one with an artist from Sri Lanka and the other two with Pakistani artists, and she will address how Raking Leaves has catalysed in relation to the socio-political and art historical context of Sri Lanka. Sharmini Pereira is the director and founder of Raking Leaves: a leading non-profit independent publishing organisation. In 2013 she founded the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The archive collects materials in English, Sinhala, and Tamil and host talks, seminars and screenings related to its contents. She curated her first exhibition in Sri Lanka, ‘New Approaches in Contemporary Sri Lankan Art’ in 1994. Selected curatorial projects have included working as co-curator (Sri Lanka) for the Asia Pacific Triennale (1999), co-curator Singapore Biennale (2006), international guest curator Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2011), and as guest curator at Aga Khan Museum where she curated ‘The Garden Of Ideas – Contemporary Art from Pakistan’ (2014). Pereira's writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine, Guggenheim’s Online, Art Asia Pacific, Groundviews and Imprint amongst others. She is currently a nominator for the 2016 Anima/AGO Photography Prize and a judge for the 2017 Geoffrey Bawa Award for Architecture. She was born in 1970 and is based in Sri Lanka and New York. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=pHx6XqeUKac Towards 2019: The futurity of a location by Anshuman Das Gupta Date: 3 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Das Gupta, curator and faculty member of the Art History department in Kalabhavan, Śāntiniketan (Visva Bharati University) will discuss the singular approach of art paedagogy and its relation to text at Śāntiniketan as envisioned through its founder Rabindranath Tagore. Fostered through a pedagogical programme devised by Tagore’s right-hand man Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Śāntiniketan represented the sum of ancient Indian theories of aesthetics, Tagore’s humanist and universalist ideals transcending demarcations of national borders, and the debates on nationalist and Pan-Asianist ideologies initiated by many a luminary in the orbit of the ashram: Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), and Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947). Śāntiniketan as a Location/ site has many acquired dimensions to it; and this presentation will also consider the Location / site through some of its receptions by current scholars and past participants thus producing a discursive horizon leading to many possible directions for its future, in particular when looking at its upcoming centenary year in 2019 and beyond. Anshuman Das Gupta is a curator and currently teaching faculty in the Art History department in Kalabhavan, Santiniketan (Visva Bharati University) and is affiliated with the Curatorial/Knowledge programme in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London as a PhD candidate. Born in 1967 in Kolkata, India, he graduated in Art History from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, and received post-graduate degrees in Art History from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda in 1990 and 1992 respectively. Das Gupta’s essays and seminar papers have been published in several journals and publications such as the Marg publications: Art and Visual Cultures in India 1857–2007 (2009), Akbar Padamsee (in Press, 2009) and Contemporary Indian Sculpture, among others. Das Gupta has taken up several curatorial assignments at various times, which include an exhibition organised by the French Embassy in Delhi on the birth centenary of Antonin Artaud in 1996; Khoj International Artists’ Workshop events in Bengal in 2006; the ‘Ramkinker Baij Centenary’ exhibition in Santiniketan in 2007 (for which occasion he also organised an international seminar); ‘Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture’ for the Museum of Contemporary Art, MuHKA, Antwerp (a collaborative curatorial venture) in 2008. He has participated in around thirty national and international seminars, including ‘Patterns of Reflection: Writing Contemporary Indian Art’ (2009, Santiniketan- Lalit kala and kala Bhavan), ‘Periphery’ in Guwahati, Assam (2009), MuHKA, Antwerp (2008), as well as a seminar organised by ZKM and MMB in Delhi (2008). He was a Joint-Convener, collaborator and speaker in Black House: an international collaboration between artists, curators and architects, with participants from CEPT (Ahmedabad), SPA (Delhi), HCU (Hyderabad) and Dhaka (2015). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=5RgLrdifKF0 Mad heart, be brave by Nida Ghouse Date: 4 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Writer and curator Nida Ghouse has been researching the Soviet-funded multi-lingual Afro-Asian magazine Lotus: a forum for short stories, poetry, reviews of books and literary essays. Lotus was a quarterly magazine that for its time was a ground-breaking literary/artistic cum political expression. The writers of the journal placed themselves in relationship to the broader social and political mechanism of imperial powers. Youssef el Sebai, was the journal’s first editor, and the journal came out of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association, a group of African and Asian writers who spoke a multitude of languages and how met in Tashkent in 1958. Ten years later this organisation launched a journal called Afro-Asian Writings, which would go on to become Lotus. Lotus was published in Cairo and Beirut and was produced tri-lingually in Arabic, English and French. Nida Ghouse is a writer and a curator, and is currently Director of Mumbai Art Room. She has worked institutionally as co-curator for the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in 2010; as assistant curator for the Sharjah Biennial in 2011; and as associate curator for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2014. Ghouse's curatorial projects include the ‘Kharita Symposium on Urban Trajectories with Pericentre Projects’, ‘Untitled Exhibition #1 ’ with Padmini Chettur and the Clark House Initiative, ‘14 Proper Nouns’ with Hassan Khan at the Delfina Foundation, ‘In the Desert of Images’ with Melik Ohanian at the Mumbai Art Room, and ‘La presencia del sonido' at the Botín Foundation in Santander. Her ongoing projects include ‘Acoustic Matters’, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts, and ‘Emotional Architecture’, the first publication of which, launched in 2014, We, started by calling it a summer of two fires and a landslide and whose second publication No Fantasy without Protest was published in Cairo in October 2015. Ghouse’s essays and interviews have appeared in publications such as Arab Studies Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, ArteEast, ArtSlant, Bidoun, Ibraaz, and MadaMasr, and in exhibition catalogues of MuKHA in Antwerp, the New Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. She was the first recipient of the FICA-Delfina Research Fellowship in partnership with Iniva and Goldsmiths Curatorial/Knowledge PhD programme in London in 2011, and was a resident at Fondazione Spinola Banna per l'Arte in partnership with the Resò3 programme in Turin in 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=iD69LncJLyQ A Letter From the People by Chantal Pontbriand Date: 4 February 2016, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Curator, critic and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Chantal Pontbriand will discuss how writing, editing, publishing, curating words as well as works are a continuous process in her work that seeks not to make fiction out of reality but to try to see in-between what words and reality have to offer. This way of working and of seeing is closely related to what she thinks the most relevant art practices have to offer. Pontbriand says: ‘Art or art writing is an on-going investigation into the world today and its issues, socio-political as well as individual. Art has relevance if it succeeds in articulating issues, what is to be worked through in order to go beyond what is known, categorized or classified. Art is the unknown. As such, it is of relevance, in producing knowledge, in advancing knowledge. As such, art writing functions as an open letter. A letter which seeks to understand the world and propose that interpretation to others. It should not be however a letter to the people, but taking the form of an investigation, a mapping of emerging ideas, concepts and forms, it is in that sense a “letter from the people”. Our task is not to dictate a pre-formated way of thinking, but to be enabling, in the sense that we, together with others, as this cannot be done alone, seek to see what lies in-between, as that which lies ahead.’ Chantal Pontbriand is a contemporary art curator and critic whose work is based on the exploration of questions of globalisation and artistic heterogeneity. She has curated numerous international contemporary art events: exhibitions, international festivals and international conferences, mainly in photography, video, performance, dance and multimedia installation. She was a founder of PARACHUTE contemporary art magazine in 1975 and acted as publisher/editor until 2007, publishing 125 issues. After curating several major performance events and festivals, she co-founded the FIND (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse), in Montreal and was president and director from 1982–2003. She was appointed Head of Exhibition Research and Development at Tate Modern in London in 2010 and founded PONTBRIAND W.O.R.K.S. [We_Others and Myself_Research_ Knowledge_Systems] in 2012. In 2015, she was appointed CEO-Director of MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, and curator and advisor of Demo-Graphics 1 (Greater Toronto Area, May-July 2017).In 2013, she received the Governor General of Canada Award for an Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts, in 2014, an Honorary Doctorate from Concordia University, Montreal, and the distinction of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France (Officer of the Arts and Letters Order of France). Most recent exhibitions include: ‘I See Words, I Hear Voices, Dora Garcia’, The Power Plant, Toronto; ‘Mark Lewis Above and Below’, Le Bal, Paris, 2015; ‘PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words’, CA2M, Madrid; ‘The Yvonne Rainer Project’, Jeu de Paume, Centre d’art de la Ferme du Buisson, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ‘Photography Performs: The Body as the Archive’, Centre de photographie d’Île-de-France (CPIF); co-curated with Agency, ‘Dora Garcia, Of Crimes and Dreams’, Darling Foundry, Montreal, 2014; ‘Higher Powers Command’, Lhoist Collection, 2010; ‘HF|RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham]’, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2009. Recent publications include: Mutations, Perspectives on Photography, Steidl/Paris Photo, 2011; The Contemporary, The Common: Art in A Globalizing World, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013; PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words, CA2M/Sternberg Press, Madrid/Berlin, 2014; PARACHUTE : The Anthology, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2012-2015 (4 Volumes). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=zBjWJXtoHSU Readings from Anthology: Essays or Poems, a book in process by Quinn Latimer Date: 4 February 2016, 11.30am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Latimer is an American poet and writer based in Basel and Athens, and currently editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. Her work pays special attention to the literary format of the letter as a space of criticality and community occasioned by the intimacies of its address. In this session she will read from and discuss the work that comprises Anthology – a forthcoming collection of critical prose, poetry, and more hybrid texts that move between genre, and pull from history letters and fiction. She will specifically explore the form and function of the refrain, its serial ecstasies and political possibilities. Quinn Latimer is an American poet, critic, and editor based in Basel and Athens. She is the author of Rumored Animals (2012); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); and Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2014). A regular contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor to frieze, her writing also appears in recent publications for Michel Auder, Ida Ekblad, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Joan Jonas, Julia Wachtel, Kelley Walker, and in Time, for MIT Press. Her writings, readings, and video collaborations have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy; Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; and Qalandia International, Ramallah/Jerusalem. Additionally, Latimer is coeditor of No Core: Pamela Rosenkranz (2012); Paul Sietsema: Interviews on Films and Works (2012); Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created (2013); and Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder (2014). A Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of an Arts Writing Grant from Creative Capitol/Warhol Foundation, Latimer has taught and lectured at Geneva’s Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD); FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel; and The Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Publications for documenta 14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=yJrIZftS9cw Metabolistic Writing by Maria Lind Date: 7 February 2016, Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Drawing from her curatorial research on abstraction, and from a number of texts by various intellectuals and artists, Maria Lind, Director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and Artistic Director of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, has analysed how in the past few decades economic abstraction was primarily dealt with by art as a subject matter or theme which increasingly mirrored the economic, social and political condition of the world. She also analysed how this system affects spatial and temporal concepts, and the writing of a future within it. In Dhaka, Lind is taking as a starting point the writing of Keller Easterling, Paul B Preciado and Matias Faldbakken, to talk about ‘metabolistic writing.’ Such an approach implies digesting and in other ways dealing with specific material at the same time as the process of writing and the use of language make up a performative and generative way of producing text. Maria Lind has been the Director of the Tensta Konsthall since 2011 and was appointed as the Artistic Director for the 11th Gwangju Biennale 2016. She was the director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College from 2008-10. Before that, she was the director of lASPIS in Stockholm (2005–07) and the director of the Munich Kunstverein (2002–04). Previous to that she was the curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (from 1997–2001) and in 1998 co-curated Manifesta 2, Europe’s nomadic biennial of contemporary art. Responsible for the ‘Moderna Museet Projekt', Lind worked with artists on a series of 29 commissions that took place in a temporary project-space, or within or beyond the Museum in Stockholm. She is currently a professor of research at the Art Academy in Oslo. In terms of publications, she is the co-editor of the following books: Curating with Light Luggage (2005) and Collected Newsletter; Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art (2007); European Cultural Policies 2015; and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (2008). Lind’s recent co-edited publications include Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (2012); Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art (2012); and Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe (2015), all with Sternberg Press. She edited Abstraction as part of MIT’s and Whitechapel Gallery’s series ‘Documents on Contemporary Art’. In 2010 a selection of Maria Lind’s essays, Selected Maria Lind Writing, spanning from 1997-2010, was published by Sternberg Press, edited by Brian Kuan Wood. Furthermore, Maria Lind won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2009 and was a board member of IKT from 2006–2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zBViNX_wDTX9Xv4tpX-5to7&v=zYfKA0Ughoo Notes on Process: Writing a Life by Belinder Dhanoa (Read by Sabih Ahmed in Belinder’s absence) Date: 4 February 2018, 11.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Dhanoa is a writer and an artist, and currently teaches Creative Writing at the School of Culture and Creative Expression at the Ambedkar University, Delhi. With a brief introduction on her singular approach to the writing of a life, Dhanoa will read excerpts from the script she wrote for artist Vivan Sundaram’s exhibition-as-play 409 Ramkinkars that opened in Delhi in the spring of 2015. The performative exhibition paid homage to one of India’s most charismatic artist, Ramkinkar Baij, and his work as innovator of sculptural form in the space, revisiting the creative milieu of sculptor-painter-scenographer-theatre artist Baij. Sabih is an art historian and currently a Senior Researcher at Asia Art Archive (AAA). With AAA, he has overseen numerous research initiatives pertaining to modern art which include putting together personal archives, digitisation projects, and bibliography compilations of vernacular art writing. Ahmed is stationed in New Delhi and has co-organised and participated in workshops and conferences in various institutions that include the Clark Art Institute Massachusetts, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Jaffna University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University among others.His recent writings have been published in volumes such as the Sarai Reader and Marg Publications, and he also delivers lectures on art and technology in Ambedkar University's School of Culture and Creative Expression in New Delhi. Sabih’s research interests include institutional histories of art, and in particular the shaping of the art field through second half of 20th century with changes in infrastructures, technologies, and shifting centres of authority.

ALL PROJECTS 'Death Class' and Draftmen's Congress' by Pawel Althamer Faculty of Fine Arts, University Of Dhaka, 24 March 2015 Pawel Althamer is one of the top contemporary artists from Poland who works with sculpture and performance. He conducted Death Class inspired by Tadeusz Kantor’s "Death Class" (1975) and Draftsmen’s Congress with the collaboration of more than 100 students and teachers from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. He continued his Draftsmen’s Congress in Sylhet with street children.

ALL PROJECTS Where Do The Ants Go? at the Horst Arts and Music Festival Brussels Afrah Shafiq collaborated with BC Materials to develop a new outdoor version of her existing work, using earth blocks as the main building material for the Horst Arts and Music Festival in Brussels. The project "Where Do The Ants Go?" is evolving across various geographies and social contexts, involving new participants and bringing fresh cultural perspectives and curatorial insights as it travels from its debut at the 2023 Dhaka Art Summit with curatorial support from Diana Campbell, Fernanda Brenner, Chus Martinez, Daniel Baumann, and Iaroslav Volovod, through the end of 2024 via the To-Gather platform facilitated by the Swiss Arts Council, Pro Helvetia. The anthill changes its form in each iteration, adapting to the unique environment and context of each location. The partnership with Horst was curated by our Artistic Director, Diana Campbell, and is part of the ongoing development of this work. This process began with the original iteration for the Dhaka Art Summit 2023 and continues towards the creation of a permanent outdoor version of the work in Sylhet, our permanent home at Srihatta - the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Bangladesh. This pavilion project is co-financed by the VLAIO Living Lab Earth Blocks. Jeremy Waterfield, Bregt Hoppenbrouwers ( @bcmaterials_org ) and Theresa Zschäbitz (BC architects/ Junior Professorship act of building) worked together to translate Shafiq's vision into a structure of compressed earth blocks, reused wood and prefabricated thatch elements in close collaboration with HORST Ateliers, @ vlaio.be and @democogroup . Forty-five students from BC's Junior Professorship act of building have been working on the construction plan since March and built the pavilion together.

ALL PROJECTS Below the Levels Where Differences Appear Curated by Vali Mahlouji The first iteration of an ongoing transnationally roving amphitheatre, as part of A Utopian Stage, artists, performers and filmmakers were inclusively incorporated within a collective arena of experimentation echoing the progressive pitch of the Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-77), and the highs and lows of universalist utopian ideals. Amidst resurgent forces of cultural and political reactionism around the world, below the levels… proclaimed a radical site of collective exchange. During the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, below the levels… drew upon the music, theatre, dance and politics that informed the utopian aspirations and contradictions of the original festival, with contributions by Hassan Khan, Goshka Macuga with Vali Mahlouji, Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham Trust), Reetu Sattar, Yasmin Jahan Nupur with Santal performers and Lalon Baul singers. GOSHKA MACUGA AND VALI MAHLOUJI | LIKE WATER ON HOT ROCKS (2018) An inaugural performative collaboration in which a procession of known characters from the Festival of Arts, Shiraz – Persepolis protested and occupied. HASSAN KHAN | PURITY (2013) What is it that is so comforting about the narrator’s voice? And is conflict always predicated on some sort of agreement? What does the hammer strike when it does? And why do I hate this word yet choose to speak of it? REETU SATTAR | HARANO SUR (LOST TUNE) Performance with 30 musicians and 30 harmoniumsHow do we encapsulate time via our shared past? This performance engaged visitors with the sound people grew up within South Asia, simultaneously recognising the receding path into so-called ‘modernity.’ This project was co-commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation and Liverpool Biennial, in association with Archaeology of the Final Decade and the New North and South. SILAS RIENER | FIELD DANCES (1963), BY MERCE CUNNINGHAM Silas Riener engaged with the local audience and leading them through Merce Cunningham’s Field Dances workshop, culminating in a site-specific performance. Inspired by children’s carefree, unstructured play, Field Dances was first performed in 1963 to music by John Cage with costumes designed by Robert Rauschenberg. YASMIN JAHAN NUPUR AND SANTAL PERFORMERS Collaborating with the Indigenous Santal people and Lalon Baul singers, Yasmin Jahan Nupur’s performative dance and video series broke down language barriers through a process of body movements and participatory dances, telling stories about life, spirituality, and culture, to create a bridge between city and local dialects, cultures and lost languages.