The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. PARTNERS TEAM Inspired by the geological reading of the word ‘summit’ as the top of a mountain, Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 (DAS 2020) considers the various ruptures that have realigned and continue to shift the face of our spinning planet. Seismic movements do not adhere to statist or nationalist frameworks. They join and split apart tectonics of multiple scales and layers; their epicentres don’t privilege historical imperial centres over the so-called peripheries; they can slowly accumulate or violently erupt in an instant. The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. DAS 2020 is a cumulative festival building on the ideas we have been pondering since our first edition in 2012. Like in music, this Summit is arranged into both improvised and organised movements that can be experienced separately, but the complete work requires all of the diverse sounds and rhythms resounding within it to be considered together. It is a sum of many parts that reinforce each other and expand with unplanned trajectories and connections resulting from the energy and vision of our many collaborators and partners. DAS 2020 touches upon geological movements, colonial movements, independence movements, social movements and feminist futures, spatial movements, the conditions that move us to act and the power that comes with moving collectively. We do not just consider forms of artistic production, but also forms of institutional production that enable artistic practices and pedagogies, generating new vocabularies of social organisation and building better ways to create and live together. What do the stirrings of a movement feel like and how do we learn from the experience of living through one? In the words of Sara Ahmed, a movement requires us to be moved. What might happen when ideas move from inside the exhibition to the larger reality outside? We designed DAS 2020 with this in mind, maintaining a porous barrier between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the venue. DAS 2020 is about shaking up our understanding of the present and the past, creating opportunities to come together and make and write (art) history from new perspectives, trying to give a voice to the people who are not in the most dominant positions to be heard. We reach a summit through a journey that pushes our mental and physical limits. We experience ourselves and the world with fresh eyes as obscured vantage points become visible and we feel ourselves grow small as we climb towards the top of a mountain. Could it also be that the mountain, in turn, sees us change in scale as we approach its zenith? Diana Campbell, Chief Curator Dhaka Art Summit Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation with Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury and Teresa Albor Exhibitions & Programmes Seismic Movements is the fourth chapter under the Artistic Direction of Chief Curator Diana Campbell and is complemented by a series of exhibitions DAS is a continually unfolding story imagined by hundreds of contributors, and this edition included over 400 artists, architects, art collectives, speakers and writers. Colonial Movements DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell The Collective Body DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell and Kathryn Weir. Assistant curator: Kehkasha Sabah. Supported by Adam Ondak, Lucia Zubalova, Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Teresa Albor Geological Movements DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell Independence Movements DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell Nobody Told Me There Would be Days Like These DAS 2020 Curated by Mustafa Zaman Assistant Curator: Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury Geographies of Imagination DAS 2020 Envisioned by SAVVY Contemporary with Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure S.B. Ndikung, and Olani Ewunnet with Jothashilpa in association with the Goethe Institut, Bangladesh and Samdani Art Foundation Collective Movements DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell Spatial Movements DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell Roots DAS 2020 Curated by Bishwajit Goswami. Research assisted by Sumon Wahed This exhibition was made possible through the initiative and dynamic energy of Brihatta Social Movements and Feminist Futures DAS 2020 Curated by Diana Campbell Condition Report 4: Stepping Out of Line; Art Collectives and Translocal Parallelism DAS 2020 Envisioned by Koyo Kouoh, Marie Helene Pereira, and Dulcie Abrahams Altass of RAW Material Company, Dakar MAHASSA DAS 2020 Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia LOAD MORE

Artist-led Initiatives The Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum is committed to supporting the work of Bangladesh’s independently established and self-funded art collectives and initiatives. Eleven groups vital to the growth of Bangladesh's creative communities participated in this Forum, led by Diana Campbell Betancourt, Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation, and assisted by Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Assistant Curator at the Foundation. The Forum launched on April 13, 2017 at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Each of the participating initiatives remained members of the Forum and receive support from SAF until the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit. The work each of these initiatives undertakes to provide Bangladesh’s next generation of artists with opportunities is undisputed, yet many have limited resources, which reduces their marketing capacity and prevents them from connecting with a global audience. SAF is committed to supporting the work of Bangladesh’s contemporary artists, in part by increasing their international exposure. The Forum supported these initiatives’ ongoing efforts by helping each to continue to work locally, while building their profile internationally through SAF’s network and collaborators. AKĀLIKO An initiative born out of Dhaka’s Electronic Scene (DES), Akāliko was founded in 2012 by artists Khan Mohammad Faisal and Vru Patel, and later joined by Shoummo Saha and Jami Farooq. The group first aspired to connect Dhaka’s diverse community of bedroom electronic music producers, who at that time were working in solitude across the city. Since then, Akāliko has grown into its current identity as an independent record label with a DIY approach to sourcing new artists and helping other small record labels to grow their own identities. While electronic music is Akāliko's primary focus, the initiative also collaborates with non-musicians, including writers, choreographers/dancers, communication specialists, and psychologists, to produce workshops, music videos, and sound art projects. To watch Akaliko's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here ARTPRO Based primarily in Dhaka, Artpro promotes the work of Bangladesh’s contemporary artists, while expanding the reach of their work to new audiences, both nationally and internationally. Founded by artists, Arpita Singha Lopa, Md. Zahid Hossain ‘Sagor’, Farah Naz Moon, Lutfun Nahar, Mahbubur Rahman, and Ashim Halder ‘Sagor’, each of who actively maintain their own practice, the group’s multi-disciplinary approach utilises each of the founding members individual expertise while rigorously following the group’s collaborative mission to create unique opportunities for visual artists, and most importantly, for the public to engage with their work. To watch Artpro’s presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here BACK ART Finding it challenging to initiate contemporary art projects in Dhaka alone, BACK Art was formed as an endeavour to combine forces and develop activity which would open up the city’s art scene to provide emerging contemporary artists with opportunities to expand their practice and exhibit their work. Believing in the transformative power of art, the group promotes new languages for art within Bangladesh producing a variety of programmes from exhibitions, workshops, and most recently the international performance art festival, the Dhaka Live Art Biennale (D’Lab). To watch Back ART's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here CHARUPITH Charupith was founded in 1985 by Hironmoy Chanda and Mahbubur Jamal Shamim with the ambition of increasing the social impact of art within their local community. Based in Jessore, a district in the south-western region of Bangladesh, Charupith is heavily involved in local social awareness campaigns. Addressing the loss of local industries specific to the region—such as sola or spongewood craft makers and date-palm jaggery production—the group actively runs the Charupith Library, Research Centre, and Institute of Fine Arts—courses include art, dress-making, Architecture, craft, and Art History—from where 15,000 students have graduated for free to date. To watch Charupith's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here GIDREE BAWLEE FOUNDATION OF ARTS The Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts was established in 2001. It is a non-profit multidisciplinary organisation with the aim of bridging cultural gaps and promoting the indigenous presence in Bangladesh’s cultural landscape. Predominantly working in Bangladesh’s northern Thakurgaon district, the group creates space for cultural and artistic exchange between artists and skilled crafts people through site-specific environmentally focused art projects produced in rural communities. Each culminates in a collaborative artwork created through lively interactions and the exchange of ideas. To watch Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts' presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here HILL ARTIST GROUP The Chittagong Hill Tracts, comprised of Rangamati, Khagrachari and Bandarban, are situated in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Division along the country’s south-eastern borders with India and Myanmar. An area with a rich culture and traditions, the Hill Artists’ Group was established here in 1992 to promote the region and its people by organising exhibitions, both nationally and internationally, of indigenous artists work while assisting the region’s novice artists to develop their careers. To watch Hill Artist Group's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here JOG ART SPACE Based in the city of Chittagong, a major coastal seaport city in south-eastern Bangladesh, Jog Art Space was formed by Zahed Ali Chowdhury, Shaela Sharmin, Zihan Karim, and Syed Md. Shohrab Jahan as a platform for artists to create innovative and experimental work not encouraged at the nearby Institute of Fine Arts, Chittagong University. Through mentoring and exhibition opportunities, Jog has created a space for the Chittagong’s artists to continue their education. To watch JOG Art Space's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here JOTHASHILPA A newly formed organisation, Jhothashilpa is a centre in the Adabor district of Dhaka city for traditional and contemporary art practices where all art forms are equal and not measured in terms like traditional, urban, folk, or craft. Pairing traditional and contemporary art, Jhothashilpa encourages artists to work collaboratively to expand their practice and helps traditional practitioners like rickshaw painters to find new income streams to make a sustainable living through their practice, despite the decline in its traditional use. To watch Jothashilpa's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here SHAKO Shako was established by a group of women artists over 13 years ago as a social initiative to raise funds through the sale of art to help fellow artists, male or female, who were in need of medical treatment. Taking their social responsibilities seriously, the group works closely with organisations across Bangladesh that support drug addicts and acid victims by facilitating workshops to teach new skills to these recovering women and help them find alternative ways to generate a sustainable living with the skills they already have. The group does not exclude male artists from their exhibitions; they have, until recently, chosen not to take part. To watch Shako: Women's Artist Association of Bangladesh's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here SHONI-MONGOL ADDA Shoni Mongol Adda is an informal discussion group that began meeting every Saturday (Shonibar) and Tuesday (Mongolbar) in a small artist-run cafe in the heart of Dhaka City during summer 2016. With each session organised by a core team, who prefer to remain nameless, the group covers a diverse range of topics, each session begins with a presentation from a nominated peer who discusses his or her ongoing work and ideas. A supportive space for people from varied professions, the group’s members range from artists and writers to cosmologists and police inspectors. To watch Shoni Mongol Adda's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here URONTO ART INITIATIVE Initiated as a pilot project in 2012, Uronto Artist Community was officially formed in 2013 by artist Sadya Mizan as a way of documenting disused or abandoned spaces in rural areas through art. Each of Uronto’s instalments begins as an open call for proposals with selected participants then attending a residential art exchange programme at the pre-selected space. Through Uronto’s a site-specific residential art exchange programme, selected participants are then challenged to work with unfamiliar mediums, re-animating the abandoned site and interacting with the local community for seven to nine days. To watch Uronto Artist Community's presentation at the inaugural Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum Meeting: Click here COLLABORATORS Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 Uronto Artist Community Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 Shoni Mongol Adda Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Shako and National Trovoa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Jothashilpa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 JOG and ruangrupa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Hill Artist Group Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Charupith Dhaka Art Summit 2020 BACK Art Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 Art Pro Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Akāliko and Jatiwangi Goethe Institut Auditorium, Dhaka, 5 Aug 2019 Pasar Ilmu, Activation Programme by Gudskul A week-long art workshop on Cinema Banner Painting took place from 5 October 2019 at Jothashilpa Studio in the Adabor area of Dhaka, organized by Jothashilpa (A Centre for Traditional and Contemporary Arts) in cooperation with the Samdani Artists Led Initiatives Forum (SALIF). Cinema Banner Painting Workshop Thakurgaon, 1 - 7 Dec 2018 Charcha Sessions Year PROJECTS LOAD MORE

Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh Connect with Bangladesh's Cultural Narratives Go PRESS NEWSLETTER Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) has been collaborating with artists, architects, curators, writers, and thinkers to shift how culture is experienced around the world by creating opportunities for profound encounters with Bangladesh Founded in 2011 by collector couple Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) believes that the planet has much to learn from Bangladesh and South Asia and it supports research for curators to ground their thinking with experience thinking and working in the region. Its international collaborations (which know no geographic borders) seek to expand creative horizons and collapse outdated frameworks for considering art and culture within the limited frameworks of North American and Eurocentrism. All of SAF’s education and exhibition programs are free and ticketless, and the foundation supports the production of new thinking through residencies, exhibition opportunities, and other programs that it produces with its partners. The foundation has developed and continues to produce the Dhaka Art Summit, the world’s highest daily visited contemporary art event that is now entering its seventh edition. DAS is part of the foundation’s ongoing work of expanding The audience engaging with contemporary art across Bangladesh and increasing international exposure for artistic practices that do not lie within the "art capitals of the world” or which have not yet been written into the limited canon of art history. OUR STORY PARTNERS TEAM ALL PROJECTS SAF produces and participates in a variety of projects in Bangladesh and around the world as part of its ongoing commitment to increasing cultural engagement in Bangladesh and broadening the creative horizons of the country’s artists and architects. Initiatives SAF participates in a variety of projects, outside of the Foundation's regular programming, as part of a commitment to increasing world-wide engagement with the work of Bangladeshi and South Asian contemporary artists and architects. SAF assists and supports Bangladeshi artists in participating in art exhibitions and festivals around the world, and follows the international tours of projects it has produced as they grow and develop in the world. SAF AROUND THE WORLD VIEW The Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum is an initiative committed to supporting the work of Bangladesh’s independently established and self-funded art collectives and initiatives. Launched in 2017, this program will be revitalized in 2025 in partnership with Srihatta. ARTIST-LED INITIATIVES VIEW SAF participates in a variety of projects, outside of the Foundation's regular programming, as part of a commitment to increasing world-wide engagement with the work of Bangladeshi and South Asian contemporary artists and architects. The Foundation assists in funding travel grants that enable artists to attend residencies or undertake research abroad and supports international institutions and festivals to include South Asian artists within their exhibitions and programmes. COLLABORATIONS VIEW The annual Samdani Seminars are a lecture and workshop programme that facilitates engagement between international arts professionals and local communities across Bangladesh through participatory artworks, lectures, and workshops. Open to all and free, the Seminar programme complements the existing syllabi of Bangladesh's leading educational institutions covering the mediums and subjects not currently included while expanding the audience engaging with art. SEMINARS VIEW Most SAF publications are available for free download on our website. SAF partners with institutions who publish books related to ongoing collaborations in Bangladesh, which can be ordered online. PUBLICATIONS VIEW The Art Mediation Program plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between art and its audience, enriching the cultural experience for visitors through meaningful engagement and interpretation. Established in 2018, the program began with 25 Art Mediators at the Dhaka Art Summit, and as our February 2023 the program has grown in depth and scope with the collaboration of 123 mediators. These art mediators come from diverse backgrounds, ranging from fine art to political studies, mechanical engineering, journalism, etc, all sharing a common enthusiasm for art. ART MEDIATION PROGRAMME VIEW Recent Projects PREVIOUS ALL NEXT VIEW Photosynthesis VIEW Kamruzzaman Shadhin at Delfina Foundation Spring Residency 2026 VIEW Novera Ahmed's Work from the Samdani Art Foundation Collection Exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield VIEW University of Oxford Soma Surovi Jannat at the Ashmolean Museum VIEW A project commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, uniting ten Bangladeshi artists with international curators and mentors to create score-based works that explore the space between dreams and reality, unfolding across global partner institutions in 2026. TONDRA: Phase One VIEW Crafting Togetherness is a collaborative programme initiated and led by Samdani Art Foundation, developed at Srihatta, Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. The programme brings together local artisans and architecture students through workshops and knowledge exchanges focused on sustainable, vernacular building practices. Crafting Togetherness Load More @samdaniartfoundation @dhakaartsummit Load More About Upcoming DAS 2023 2020 2018 2016 2014 2012 The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Dhaka Art Summit INITIATIVES EXPLORE DAS 2023 aimed to listen to the lands and waters of Bangladesh and its people to tell stories and imagine futures where people regard what the planet and non-human bits of intelligence have to say, as opposed to the clock or the calendar. DAS 2023 was about the power of water and the double paradox of how floods and their impact may be (mis)understood. Bonna was also concerned with the power of translation– how do Bangladeshi understandings of life challenge those who might have only understood the flood and its manifestations as a mistranslation and those now experiencing similar climatic challenges? Bonna DAS EXPLORE Inspired by the geological reading of the word ‘summit’ as the top of a mountain, Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 (DAS 2020) considers the various ruptures that have realigned and continue to shift the face of our spinning planet. Seismic movements do not adhere to statist or nationalist frameworks. They join and split apart tectonics of multiple scales and layers; their epicentres don’t privilege historical imperial centres over the so-called peripheries; they can slowly accumulate or violently erupt in an instant. Seismic Movements DAS EXPLORE The fourth edition of the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) took place from 2 to 10 February 2018, featuring both an Opening Celebration Weekend (February 2–4) and a closing Scholars’ Weekend (February 8–10), and several tiers of new programming. Produced and primarily funded by the Samdani Art Foundation, DAS 2018 was held in a public-private partnership with the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the country’s National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts, with support from the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Ministry of Information of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, the National Tourism Board, the Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA), and in association with the Bangladesh National Museum. 2018 DAS EXPLORE The third edition of Dhaka Art Summit welcomed 138,000 visitors in four days, of which 800 were international visitors, and 2,500 students from 30+ schools. Those participating included over 300 emerging and established artists, 100 speakers who attended as part of the Talks Programme, as well as internationally renowned curators and writers. The Summit attracted visitors from over 70 international institutions, who attended to extend and further their research into the region. 2016 DAS EXPLORE The 2nd edition of the Dhaka Art Summit unfolded from February 7 to 9, 2014 at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Marking a strategic shift, the Summit decided to concentrate its focus on South Asia starting from this edition. DAS 2014 showcased a diverse array of programs, including five curatorial exhibitions by both international and Bangladeshi curators, along with 14 solo art projects curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, the Artistic Director of the Samdani Foundation. These projects celebrated artists from across South Asia. The summit encompassed a citywide public art initiative, performances, the screening of experimental films, speaker panels, and the active participation of 15 Bangladeshi and 17 South Asia-focused galleries. 2014 DAS EXPLORE The 1st edition of the Summit was held in collaboration with Shilpakala Academy and Bangladesh National Museum and showcased the works of 249 artists and 19 galleries. The 1st edition of the Summit focused only on the local artists and galleries. The Summit was visited by over 40,000 visitors The Summit also organised talks. 2012 DAS EXPLORE Our curators and art mediators have been dreaming up the 7th edition of DAS - TONDRA. In TONDRA we will float between dreams and reality. The meaning of the word TONDRA in Bangla can be described as a state of existence where reality and dreams collide; a lucid dream that captivates the soul. Upcoming DAS DAS EXPLORE No events at the moment Notices 74 The Samdani Art Foundation collaborates with artists and creatives globally, fostering a diverse and inclusive artistic community. Countries 6 The 6th edition of the Dhaka Art Summit was held in February 2023 Dhaka Art Summits 248 Projects 1919 Participants Rising from the red tinted alluvial soil of Sylhet , Northeast Bangladesh, Srihatta is the future home of the Samdani Art Foundation, rooted in the plurality found in Bangladesh’s history to conjure a more inclusive future through art, architecture , and culture. A unique combination of sculpture park, exhibition, residency, and education programme , Srihatta imagines what an experimental artist-centric institution can be in the 21st Century, beyond of western-centric paradigms. Founded by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani and led by Artistic Director Diana Campbell, this art centre and sculpture park will also feature works from their collection and will be free and open to the public in 2025. INITIATIVES EXPLORE

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the last five editions of the platform with a global team of collaborators. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, adding a scholarly element to the platform through collaborations with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, Cornell University, Harvard University, RAW Material Company, Gudskul, and many other formal and grassroots educational initiatives around the world. Pacific Islands and Bangladesh are at the forefront of climate change; Campbell’s maternal family is indigenous CHamoru from the island of Guam, and her heritage inspires her curatorial practice and the development of DAS as a platform to amplify indigenous practices both in South Asia and internationally. In addition to her exhibition making and writing practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home and community-based residency program at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Campbell’s practice specializes in building networks. She is part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged initiatives, and leading the international development of EDI Global Forum, a global network of art education departments as an initiative of the Campania Region of Italy developed by the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples that is convening over 150 global institutions to address needed change in art education. She is currently curating the 2023 edition of DesertX in the Coachella Valley opening in March 2023, linking the climatic challenges of droughts and floods across California and Bangladesh. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury CURATOR Ruxmini Choudhury is a curator, art writer, researcher, and bilingual translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been working as the Assistant Curator of the Samdani Art Foundation since 2014. Among the many initiatives she has introduced and developed for Dhaka Art Summit are its art mediation program and the Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum, part of her ongoing interest in exploring ways to make art more approachable and interactive to the public. Her research has supported the growth of curatorial knowledge about Bangladesh through her collaborations assisting many international curators on shows in Dhaka such as Dhaka Art Summit, but also in Hong Kong, India, Austria, Norway, Dubai, among others. . She founded the 'Singularity Art Movement' in 2021, a platform which acknowledges social stigmas that impact gendered, social, political, religious, cultural, and racial oppression. This platform acts as a safe space for artists and non-artists to discuss and share these issues, which may or may not result in an exhibition. She completed her BFA in Art History from University of Dhaka in 2014 and previously interned at the Dhaka Art Center, a Dhaka based non-profit art centre. Her research on the crafts of Kushtia, Jhenaidah and Magura districts of Bangladesh has been published in Setouchi Catalogue: Bangladesh Crafts, 2014. She is also an alumna of Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) programme and was previously involved in many social service and youth empowerment activities. Swilin Haque CURATORIAL ASSISTANT Swilin Haque is the curatorial assistant of the Samdani Art Foundation.She trained as a painter at University of Dhaka. She received the ICCR scholarship in 2021 to pursue further studies in Art History and Aesthetics at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India, with a particular interest in the political discourses found in art history. She has worked with organizations including the India Art Fair 2022, Artscapes India, ACCORe - Mexico, Hexydexy Box, Indian Council for Cultural Relations in Kolkata and curated Being and Becoming at Whoyait Art Space in Baroda in 2021. Eve Lemesle PRODUCER Eve Lemesle is an arts producer based between Europe and South-Asia. She started the arts management agency called ‘What About Art’ in Mumbai in 2010. She has produced many exhibitions and consulted internationally for the Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums, Shanghai Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit, Kochi Biennale, the Asia Now art fair at La Monnaie de Paris, Soho House collection amongst others. She is currently a consultant with Reliance for the upcoming JIO World Centre in Mumbai. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Public Art at the University of Shanghai. Eve has been installing some of the most prestigious private and corporate art collections in South-Asia. Noushin Tarannum Neha VIP COMMUNICATIONS Noushin Tarannum Neha she is a VIP Communications Manager for the Dhaka Art Summit 2023. She is currently majoring in Environmental Science at Independent University, Bangladesh. DAS 2023 Team Akansha Rastogi CURATOR ( Very Small Feelings Akansha Rastogi is Senior Curator of Exhibitions and Programming at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in New Delhi, India. She has been part of the core instituting team of the museum since 2011. As a creative practitioner, she is the founding member of artist collective WALA (formed in 2009), and is intensely involved with many artists-led initiatives and forums in New Delhi. Her research and writing focuses on exhibition histories of modern and contemporary Indian art, institutional memory and histories of visual arts, museum studies and storytelling. She studied Art History at National Museum Institute and English Literature at Delhi University. Akansha’s exhibitions, ‘Hangar for the Passerby’ (2017), ‘Zones of Contact/Grazing’ (2013), ‘Inhabiting the Museum’ (2011-15) and ‘Archiving the Studio’ (2011) have been ingenious for their curatorial thinking, approaches and conceptual rigour. Each one positioning and imagining contemporary art museum space in South Asia as an incremental site for the undigested materials and histories. She served as associate curator of India Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). At KNMA, she is currently leading a long-term multipart program under the framework of ‘Young Artists of Our Times’ (YAOT). Through its exhibitions, books, institutional partnerships and assemblies, YAOT explores a range of artistries, approaching the ‘young’ as a sensory body. Akansha is drawn to the language and terms of the young, not simply as an age, but as transformative, restless, and critical space of inquiry and experimentation. Moreover, in the context of South Asia where a large chunk of the world's youth population resides. Sean Anderson CURATOR (To Enter the Sky) Sean Anderson is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture. Anderson was formerly Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in addition to being a practicing architect and educator in Afghanistan, Australia, India, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the U.A.E. He is a founding Board Member of the African Futures Institute (AFI). Long seeking to uncover overlooked contexts for reappraising the spatial, he has written books on South Asian ritual sculpture, the modern architecture of colonial Eritrea and co-edited a volume dedicated to contemporary architecture and design in Sri Lanka. At MoMA, he organized Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016-17) and Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-89 (2017-18) and led four iterations of the Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1. At MoMA, he was co-director of the CMAP Asia and Africa research programs, an editor of post, and established two continuing online educational platforms: “What is Contemporary Art?” and “Reimagining Blackness and Architecture.” Co-organized with Mabel O. Wilson, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the first exhibition and book ever at MoMA to highlight the work of African American and African Diasporic architects, artists and designers, concluded in May 2021. Anne Barlow CURATOR (Samdani Art Award) Anne Barlow is Director of Tate St Ives where she most recently curated exhibitions with Thao Nguyen Phan, Petrit Halilaj, and Haegue Yang. Barlow was formerly Director of Art in General, New York, Curator of Education and Media Programs, New Museum, New York, and Curator of Contemporary Art and Design, Glasgow Museums, Scotland. Much of her work has focused on supporting emerging artists through exhibitions, new commissions, residencies, and international collaborations with museums and non-profit art spaces. Her interest in critical dialogue and experimental curatorial and educational practice led to the development of the Museum as Hub initiative (New Museum) and What Now? symposia (Art in General) and more recently at Tate St Ives, projects that address the specificities of the hyperlocal within a global programme. Barlow was Curator of 5th Bucharest Biennale and Co-Curator of the Latvian Pavilion, 55th Venice Biennale. She has lectured and published widely, and edited the publications Working with Artists and Audiences (2014) and What Now? The Politics of Listening (2016). She is an Ambassador of the EDI Global Forum and has participated in selection panels and juries including the Artist of Tomorrow, Prishtina, Kosovo; kim? Residency Award, Riga; Exposure 8, Beirut Art Center, Lebanon; MAC International 2018, Belfast; and the British Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale. Bishwajit Goswami CURATOR (A Duality) Bishwajit Goswami is a Dhaka based curator and art educator. He is an Assistant Professor in the Drawing & Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and also visiting faculty at the Architecture Department of BUET & BRAC University. Goswami is the co-founder of Brihatta, a research-based, artist-run Platform, with a strong focus on community development, and collaboration. As an art educator he has been part of many conferences and has participated in many national and international exhibitions as a practicing artist. His extensive interest in art and education has led him to extend his practice to exhibition making. In 2020 he curated the exhibition ‘Roots’ at the Dhaka Art Summit which focused on Bangladeshi art educators and the institutions that they built, following this journey across the 20th century until the 1990s, to consider how today’s artistic practices in Bangladesh were shaped. Goswami is passionate about working with students and providing them with opportunities and his practice involves collaborating with young art students and creatives. Muhammad Nafisur Rahman RESEARCHER FOR দ্বৈধ EXHIBITION Muhammad Nafisur Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the School of Design, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati, USA. Trained as an architect in Bangladesh, Muhammad holds a M.Des. in Graphic Design from University of Illinois at Chicago and currently pursuing his PhD in Architecture. In conjunction with his cross-disciplinary research and professional affiliations, he has taught students in architecture and communication design programs in the USA, Portugal and Bangladesh for over 15 years. Owing to his background as a practitioner, architect, educator and photographer, Rahman takes a strong interdisciplinary and practice-informed approach to teaching and research that bridges between built environment, placemaking and typography. He is a MAHASSA Scholar supported by Cornell University and the Getty Foundations and Research Fellow in Academic Advisory Council for Signage Research and Education (AACSRE) for research projects on storefront signage and neighbourhood identity. His works consist of various identity designs, interiors, branding, branded environments, book design etc. Rahman is an Assistant Editor of "Visible Language," the oldest peer–reviewed academic journal for design. Guest Curators Esther Syiem RESEARCHER Esther Syiem teaches English Literature at the North-Eastern Hill University, Shillong and has been involved in the study of Khasi oral narratives for many years. Esther Syiem is a bilingual writer. Some of her publications include three volumes of poetry, Oral Scriptings; of wit and wisdom of follies and frailties; Many Sides of Many Stories a play in Khasi entitled Ka Nam and work of fiction Memoir in Water Speaks the Wah Umkhrah. The Oral Discourse in Khasi Folk Narrative attempts to do a re-reading of the oral, in terms of the contemporary. She is a member of the National Editorial Collective of The People’s Linguistic Survey of India and was the state editor of the Meghalaya Volume which was later translated into Khasi and Garo. She has translated some Khasi folk tales for children and also published books for children. Kanak Chanpa Chakma RESEARCHER Kanak Chanpa Chakma is one of Bangladesh's most significant living visual artists. She was born in Rangamati's hill tracts and was brought up in the indigenous Chakma community, whose way of life and struggle feature prominently in her work. Her paintings are well-known internationally and can be found in many museums including the Bangladesh National Museum, Bhutan Museum, Liberation War Museum alongside many private collections and corporate offices. She is currently the founder of Shako Women Artists' Association and the president of Ethnic Artists' Foundation of Bangladesh. She is a community leader working to empower young indigenous artists by enhancing their visibility both in Bangladesh and internationally. L. Somi Royis RESEARCHER L. Somi Royis a writer, curator, cultural conservationist, and the publisher and translator of the literature of his mother M.K. Binodini Devi. He founded and manages Imasi: The Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi Foundation in Manipur for the protection, preservation, and promotion of the legacy of M. K. Binodini Devi. Michael Lujan Bevacqua RESEARCHER Michael Lujan Bevacqua, Ph.D. (Familian Bittot and Kabesa) taught Guam History and Chamoru language at the University of Guam for 10 years, runs a weekly podcast called Fanachu! and currently works as the curator for the Guam Museum. With his brother Jack, they run a creative company called The Guam Bus (www.theguambus.com) that publishes Chamoru language books, comics and learning materials. He is a co-chair for the political status educational outreach group Independent Guåhan and a member of Guam’s Commission on Decolonization. Mohammed Rezuwan RESEARCHER Mohammed Rezuwan is a 25-year-old Rohingya refugee, currently surviving in the world's largest refugee camp, Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh. He is a Rohingya Folklorist who authored the book Rohingyafolktales to preserve the Rohingya culture and pass them on to the next generation. He is a novice poet and a teacher by profession. He is a Rohingya activist and an asset to International journalists to navigate camps, develop story ideas, and find resources. He is a great lover of art. Many of his poems and short stories were published on international online platforms and anthologies. Transnational folklore researchers for Very Small Feelings exhibition CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan GOETHE INSTITUT BANGLADESH Kirsten Hackenbroch ALLIANCE FRANCAISE DE DHAKA, BANGLADESH Francois Grosjean MUSICIAN Claire Hamid ART COLLECTOR/PATRON Zareef Hamid ARTIST Teresa Albor ALSERKAL AVENUE, UAE Vilma Jurkute UNNATI CULTURAL VILLAGE, NEPAL Surabhi Khaitan Chaudhary CII ART AND CULTURE TASK FORCE, INDIA Tarana Sawhney UPSIDE SPACE, UAE Lisa Ray RANGOONWALA FOUNDATION, PAKISTAN Asif Rangoonwala & Nour Aslam CULTURAL AFFAIRS ATTACHÉ, US EMBASSY, BANGLADESH Sharlina Hussain DELFINA FOUNDATION, UK Aaron Cezar DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

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

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. DAS 2012 Team Guest Curators Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani DELFINA FOUNDATION, UK Aaron Cezar Organising Comittee Members

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the last five editions of the platform with a global team of collaborators. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, adding a scholarly element to the platform through collaborations with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, Cornell University, Harvard University, RAW Material Company, Gudskul, and many other formal and grassroots educational initiatives around the world. Pacific Islands and Bangladesh are at the forefront of climate change; Campbell’s maternal family is indigenous CHamoru from the island of Guam, and her heritage inspires her curatorial practice and the development of DAS as a platform to amplify indigenous practices both in South Asia and internationally. In addition to her exhibition making and writing practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home and community-based residency program at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Campbell’s practice specializes in building networks. She is part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged initiatives, and leading the international development of EDI Global Forum, a global network of art education departments as an initiative of the Campania Region of Italy developed by the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples that is convening over 150 global institutions to address needed change in art education. She is currently curating the 2023 edition of DesertX in the Coachella Valley opening in March 2023, linking the climatic challenges of droughts and floods across California and Bangladesh. Teresa Albor DIRECTOR OF EXTERNAL AFFAIRS Teresa Albor, Director of Cultural Affairs of the Samdani Art Foundation, is a cultural producer who has been working internationally in the US, UK, and Eastern Europe, and was based in South and Southeast Asia for over a decade. Her roles have included running a London-based art college, co-founding an international artists’ residency programme and others. She has a practice as an artist, making live art, video and sound work which explores questions of human nature, identity and marginalisation. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury ASSISTANT CURATOR Ruxmini Choudhury is a curator, art writer, researcher, and bilingual translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been working as the Assistant Curator of the Samdani Art Foundation since 2014. Among the many initiatives she has introduced and developed for Dhaka Art Summit are its art mediation program and the Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum, part of her ongoing interest in exploring ways to make art more approachable and interactive to the public. Her research has supported the growth of curatorial knowledge about Bangladesh through her collaborations assisting many international curators on shows in Dhaka such as Dhaka Art Summit, but also in Hong Kong, India, Austria, Norway, Dubai, among others. . She founded the 'Singularity Art Movement' in 2021, a platform which acknowledges social stigmas that impact gendered, social, political, religious, cultural, and racial oppression. This platform acts as a safe space for artists and non-artists to discuss and share these issues, which may or may not result in an exhibition. She completed her BFA in Art History from University of Dhaka in 2014 and previously interned at the Dhaka Art Center, a Dhaka based non-profit art centre. Her research on the crafts of Kushtia, Jhenaidah and Magura districts of Bangladesh has been published in Setouchi Catalogue: Bangladesh Crafts, 2014. She is also an alumna of Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) programme and was previously involved in many social service and youth empowerment activities. Eve Lemesle PRODUCER Eve Lemesle is an arts producer based between Europe and South-Asia. She started the arts management agency called ‘What About Art’ in Mumbai in 2010. She has produced many exhibitions and consulted internationally for the Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums, Shanghai Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit, Kochi Biennale, the Asia Now art fair at La Monnaie de Paris, Soho House collection amongst others. She is currently a consultant with Reliance for the upcoming JIO World Centre in Mumbai. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Public Art at the University of Shanghai. Eve has been installing some of the most prestigious private and corporate art collections in South-Asia. Tanzila Reza COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER Tanzila Reza is working as Communications Manager of the Samdani Art Foundation. She is an experienced marketing communication officer who previously worked in the utilities industry. Adam Ondak CURATORIAL ASSISTANT Adam Ondak works as Curatorial Assistant of the Samdani Art Foundation and DAS and is the assistant to Diana Campbell Betancourt. He currently studies Business Management at King’s College London. Ondak participated in an interdisciplinary academic programme ‘Experiencing China 2018’ at Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is part of the organisational team of the annual ‘Central European Conference’ held at London School of Economics. Lucia Zubalova CURATORIAL ASSISTANT Lucia Zubalova works as curatorial assistant of the Samdani Art Foundation and DAS. She is an alumnus of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Zubalova has previously interned at the Slovak National Gallery, worked for the Bratislava-based Linea Collection and was taught by Diana Campbell Betancourt at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts. Enayet Kabir COLLECTIVE PLATFORM FELLOW Enayet Kabir is the Collective Platform Fellow at DAS. He is a Bangladeshi multimedia artist whose work explores speculative Bengali futures and the unreality of Dhaka city. Kabir is a driving force in Brooklyn’s underground electronic music community, as both a live performer and event organizer. He is currently the Creative Director for the musician Yaeji, directing her music videos and conceiving of international stage shows. Fraser Muggeridge and Joe Nava of Fraser Muggeridge studio, London, are the graphic designers responsible for the visual identity and design production of DAS 2020. Throughout a wide range of formats, from artists’ books and exhibition catalogues to posters, marketing material, exhibitions and websites, the studio prioritises artists’ and writers’ content over the imposition of a signature style. Clients include: Artangel, Art on the Underground, Focal Point Gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Sadies Coles, Somerset House, Tate, V&A, The Vanity Press. Alyesha Choudhury ARCHITECTURAL INTERN Alyesha Choudhury works as the Architectural intern for the Samdani Art Foundation and DAS. Living between London, Dhaka and Glasgow, she is a student of architecture and one of the founders of the /other collective. She received her RIBA Part 1 certification from the Mackintosh School of Architecture at the Glasgow School of Art. The /other collective deconstructs colonial discourse in the architectural environment, commissioning installations and hosting a panel for the 2019 ArchiFringe at the Lighthouse Gallery and Transmission Gallery. Her previous experience includes internships with the Delfina Foundation and Rana Begum Studio. DAS 2020 Team Kathryn Weir CURATOR (Collective Body) Kathryn Weir founded ‘Cosmopolis’ at the Centre Pompidou in 2015 as a platform for research-based and collaborative multidisciplinary art practices. The platform constructs bridges between new forms of creative experimentation and critical vocabularies from contemporary theory, and between reconceived geographies and histories. From 2006 until 2014, she led the international art and cinémathèque curatorial areas at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA), Brisbane and was one of the curators of the 5th, 6th and 7th Asia Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art. From 2020 she has been appointed Director of the MADRE museum in Napes. Sean Anderson CURATOR (On Muzharul Islam) Sean Anderson is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture. Anderson was formerly Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in addition to being a practicing architect and educator in Afghanistan, Australia, India, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the U.A.E. He is a founding Board Member of the African Futures Institute (AFI). Long seeking to uncover overlooked contexts for reappraising the spatial, he has written books on South Asian ritual sculpture, the modern architecture of colonial Eritrea and co-edited a volume dedicated to contemporary architecture and design in Sri Lanka. At MoMA, he organized Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016-17) and Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-89 (2017-18) and led four iterations of the Young Architects Program at MoMA PS1. At MoMA, he was co-director of the CMAP Asia and Africa research programs, an editor of post, and established two continuing online educational platforms: “What is Contemporary Art?” and “Reimagining Blackness and Architecture.” Co-organized with Mabel O. Wilson, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, the first exhibition and book ever at MoMA to highlight the work of African American and African Diasporic architects, artists and designers, concluded in May 2021. Bishwajit Goswami CURATOR (Roots) Bishwajit Goswami is a Dhaka based curator and art educator. He is an Assistant Professor in the Drawing & Painting Department of the Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, and also visiting faculty at the Architecture Department of BUET & BRAC University. Goswami is the co-founder of Brihatta, a research-based, artist-run Platform, with a strong focus on community development, and collaboration. As an art educator he has been part of many conferences and has participated in many national and international exhibitions as a practicing artist. His extensive interest in art and education has led him to extend his practice to exhibition making. In 2020 he curated the exhibition ‘Roots’ at the Dhaka Art Summit which focused on Bangladeshi art educators and the institutions that they built, following this journey across the 20th century until the 1990s, to consider how today’s artistic practices in Bangladesh were shaped. Goswami is passionate about working with students and providing them with opportunities and his practice involves collaborating with young art students and creatives. Kehkasha Sabah ASSISTANT CURATOR (Collective Body) Kehkasha Sabah is an independent curator, visual artist and researcher based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is Assistant Curator, Collectives Platform at DAS 2020. She is engaged in contemporary art, new media and curation focusing on socio-political issues such as cultural taboos, identity, body and space. She received the Talent Recognition Award of the Society for Promotion of Bangladesh Art in 2019. She is one of the founding members of Art Lab Dhaka. Mustafa Zaman CURATOR (No One Told Me There’d Be Days Like This) Mustafa Zaman was trained as a printmaker, however he soon veered into multidisciplinary practice turning his attention to contemporary human conditions often observed in relation to the instruments of power. Zaman held solo shows at the Zainul Gallery, Institute of Fine Arts (2000); at the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts (2010); and at Alliance Francaise (2010) Zaman is now chief curator at Dwip, a gallery based in Dhaka. Guest Curators Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan GOETHE INSTITUT BANGLADESH Kirsten Hackenbroch ALLIANCE FRANCAISE DE DHAKA, BANGLADESH Mr. Olivier Dintinger AUSTRALIAN HIGH COMMISSION-BANGLADESH H. E. Julia Niblett ART COLLECTOR Maya Barolo-Rizvi BANGLADESH NATIONAL MUSEUM Md. Reaz Ahmed BANGLADESH SHILPAKALA ACADEMY Mr. Liaquat Ali Lucky GREY ADVERTISING BANGLADESH Syed Gousul Alam Shaon COMILLA VICTORIANS, BANGLADESH PREMIER LEAGUE Nafisa Kamal DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the last five editions of the platform with a global team of collaborators. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, adding a scholarly element to the platform through collaborations with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, Cornell University, Harvard University, RAW Material Company, Gudskul, and many other formal and grassroots educational initiatives around the world. Pacific Islands and Bangladesh are at the forefront of climate change; Campbell’s maternal family is indigenous CHamoru from the island of Guam, and her heritage inspires her curatorial practice and the development of DAS as a platform to amplify indigenous practices both in South Asia and internationally. In addition to her exhibition making and writing practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home and community-based residency program at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Campbell’s practice specializes in building networks. She is part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged initiatives, and leading the international development of EDI Global Forum, a global network of art education departments as an initiative of the Campania Region of Italy developed by the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples that is convening over 150 global institutions to address needed change in art education. She is currently curating the 2023 edition of DesertX in the Coachella Valley opening in March 2023, linking the climatic challenges of droughts and floods across California and Bangladesh. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. Emily Dolan Director of Operations and External Affairs Emily Dolan is the Director of Operations and External Affairs. She originally trained as a visual artist and since 2002 has worked in art institutions, including five years at The Fine Art Society, her primary focus being contemporary art. Since 2012 she has taken on production orientated roles in non-profit organisations and has coordinated exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London, The 55th Venice Biennale, Garage Centre of Contemporary Art and Culture, Moscow, and the Chalet Society, Paris. Eve Lemesle PRODUCER Eve Lemesle is an arts producer based between Europe and South-Asia. She started the arts management agency called ‘What About Art’ in Mumbai in 2010. She has produced many exhibitions and consulted internationally for the Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums, Shanghai Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit, Kochi Biennale, the Asia Now art fair at La Monnaie de Paris, Soho House collection amongst others. She is currently a consultant with Reliance for the upcoming JIO World Centre in Mumbai. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Public Art at the University of Shanghai. Eve has been installing some of the most prestigious private and corporate art collections in South-Asia. Tasmia Nehreen Ahmed Manager of Communications Shabnam Lilani Curatorial Assistant and Assistant to Artistic Director Nivriti Roddam Curatorial Assistant and Institutional Relations Liaison Rezaul Kabir Kochi Architect and Project Manager for Architecture in Bangladesh Safiqul Islam Assistant Project Manager for Architecture in Bangladesh Asifur Rahman Assistant Project Manager for Architecture in Bangladesh DAS 2016 Team Amara Antilla Daniel Baumann Katya Garcia Antón Guest Curators Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan GOETHE INSTITUT BANGLADESH Judith Mirschberger ALLIANCE FRANCAISE DE DHAKA, BANGLADESH Bruno Plasse BRITISH COUNCIL- BANGLADESH Eeshita Azad BANGLADESH SHILPAKALA ACADEMY Liaquat Ali Lucky Rashed Maqsood BARRISTER Anita Gazi DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

Nadia Samdani MBE CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, together with her husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, they founded DAS, which has since completed six successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, a member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee, a member of Delfina Foundation’s Global Council, a member of Art SG, also a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council and a Programming Committee advisory member of Whitechapel Gallery, and advisory board member of Neela Asmaan Residency. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France in 2023. Since 2015 she has been on the ArtReview Power 100 list, recognizing her contribution to developing the art scene of Bangladesh and connecting it with the wider world. A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer whose work supports artists, architects, and designers from around the world to develop new work that challenges existing dominant geopolitical frameworks. Institution building and creating forums for interdisciplinary cultural convenings are a core part of her curatorial practice, which builds off of her life experiences working in South and Southeast Asia. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the critically acclaimed 2014-2023 editions. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers from across South Asia through a largely commission-based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, also adding a scholarly element to the platform as well as laboratories for new methodologies of audience engagement. In addition to her exhibitions making practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home, Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet, Bangladesh. Campbell’s practice specializes in building and amplifying networks. Concurrent to her work with Samdani Art Foundation and Dhaka Art Summit, she is Head of Global Initiatives of the Hartwig Art Foundation in Amsterdam working on expanded notions of collecting, commissioning and collaborating, and is also part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged artistic initiatives. She has curated exhibitions in Austria, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States of America, and her writing has been published in Bangla, Chinese, English, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury CURATOR Ruxmini Choudhury is a curator, art writer, researcher, and bilingual translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been working as a Curator of the Samdani Art Foundation and has been part of the core curatorial team since 2014. Among the many initiatives she has introduced and developed for Dhaka Art Summit are its art mediation program and the Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum, part of her ongoing interest in exploring ways to make art more approachable and interactive to the public. Her research has supported the growth of curatorial knowledge about Bangladesh through her collaborations assisting many international curators on shows in Dhaka such as Dhaka Art Summit, but also in Hong Kong, India, Austria, Norway, Dubai, among others. She was one of the participants of MAHASSA in 2019-20 and a CIMAM Grantee for the 2023 conference. She founded the 'Singularity Art Movement' in 2021, a platform which acknowledges social stigmas that impact gendered, social, political, religious, cultural, and racial oppression. This platform acts as a safe space for artists and non-artists to discuss and share these issues, which may or may not result in an exhibition. She completed her BFA in Art History from University of Dhaka in 2014 and previously interned at the Dhaka Art Center, a Dhaka based non-profit art center. Her research on the crafts of Kushtia, Jhenaidah and Magura districts of Bangladesh has been published in Setouchi Catalogue: Bangladesh Crafts, 2014. She is also an alumna of Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) programme and was previously involved in many social service and youth empowerment activities. Swilin Haque CURATORIAL ASSISTANT Swilin Haque is an art researcher based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She joined the Samdani Art Foundation in 2022 as a Curatorial Assistant, where she works closely with the Artistic Director and curatorial team on exhibition research, artist liaison, and production coordination. Her work spans year-round research support for collaborative projects at the Foundation and its permanent home, Srihatta–Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, assisting visiting curators and artists, and contributing to the Foundation’s digital and institutional infrastructure, including the care of its collection. Trained in painting at the University of Dhaka, she continues to maintain an engagement with artistic practice. She completed her postgraduate studies in Art History and Aesthetics at The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda with the support of an ICCR scholarship, with a particular interest in political discourses found in art history. Swilin founded the Whoyait Art Space platform, through which she has organized several independent art initiatives and online talk programs between Bangladesh and India, with a focus on performance-based practices. Currently, she contributes to the Foundation’s research and archival development as part of Asia Art Archive’s “Archiving for the Future” workshop. Chloe Ysikl Yano COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST Chloe Ysikl Yano is the Communications Manager at the Samdani Art Foundation. She is from the island of Palau (Belau) located in the Oceania region. After returning to Belau in 2018 after completing her degree in International Business and Trade in Taiwan, she began her career working with cultural tourism and marketing in the government with the Palau Visitors Authority. The year after, she co-founded Create Belau, an artist and curator-led platform to encourage, inspire and echo the voices of artists from Belau and its diaspora. Meet The Team

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Diana Campbell is a Princeton educated American curator and writer working in South and Southeast Asia since 2010, primarily in India, Bangladesh, and the Philippines. She is committed to fostering a transnational art world, and her plural and long-range vision addresses the concerns of underrepresented regions and artists alongside the more established in manifold forums. Since 2013, she has served as the Founding Artistic Director of Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, Bangladesh and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit, leading the last five editions of the platform with a global team of collaborators. Campbell has developed the Dhaka Art Summit into a leading research and exhibitions platform for art from South Asia, bringing together artists, architects, curators, and writers through a largely commission based model where new work and exhibitions are born in Bangladesh, adding a scholarly element to the platform through collaborations with the Getty Foundation, Asia Art Archive, Cornell University, Harvard University, RAW Material Company, Gudskul, and many other formal and grassroots educational initiatives around the world. Pacific Islands and Bangladesh are at the forefront of climate change; Campbell’s maternal family is indigenous CHamoru from the island of Guam, and her heritage inspires her curatorial practice and the development of DAS as a platform to amplify indigenous practices both in South Asia and internationally. In addition to her exhibition making and writing practice, Campbell is responsible for developing the Samdani Art Foundation collection and drives its international collaborations ahead of opening the foundation’s permanent home and community-based residency program at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet. Campbell’s practice specializes in building networks. She is part of the facilitation group of AFIELD, a global network of socially engaged initiatives, and leading the international development of EDI Global Forum, a global network of art education departments as an initiative of the Campania Region of Italy developed by the Fondazione Morra Greco in Naples that is convening over 150 global institutions to address needed change in art education. She is currently curating the 2023 edition of DesertX in the Coachella Valley opening in March 2023, linking the climatic challenges of droughts and floods across California and Bangladesh. Mohammad Sazzad Hossain HEAD OF ADMINISTRATION Mohammad Sazzad Hossain is the Head of Administration of the Samdani Art Foundation. Sazzad has worked for the Samdani Art Foundation since 2012 and has been a key member of the management team from the first edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, now moving into its 7th edition. He is responsible for the artistic production of DAS, along with the management of all the teams on site, as well as the production for Srihatta and its artistic program. From the outset, Sazzad has managed the production of major international artist’s projects, such as Rana Begum, Afrah Shafiq, Antony Gormley, Shilpa Gupta, Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran, Nilima Sheikh, Damian Ortega and Antonio Dias to name a few. He was one of the key members of the Srijan Abartan, a cross-disciplinary sustainable exhibition design research programme introduced in 2020. Sazzad Hossain completed his M.A. and B.A. from Stamford University Bangladesh majoring in English Literature. Emily Dolan Director of Operations and External Affairs Emily Dolan is the Director of Operations and External Affairs. She originally trained as a visual artist and since 2002 has worked in art institutions, including five years at The Fine Art Society, her primary focus being contemporary art. Since 2012 she has taken on production orientated roles in non-profit organisations and has coordinated exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery in London, The 55th Venice Biennale, Garage Centre of Contemporary Art and Culture, Moscow, and the Chalet Society, Paris. Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury ASSISTANT CURATOR Ruxmini Choudhury is a curator, art writer, researcher, and bilingual translator based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has been working as the Assistant Curator of the Samdani Art Foundation since 2014. Among the many initiatives she has introduced and developed for Dhaka Art Summit are its art mediation program and the Samdani Artist Led Initiatives Forum, part of her ongoing interest in exploring ways to make art more approachable and interactive to the public. Her research has supported the growth of curatorial knowledge about Bangladesh through her collaborations assisting many international curators on shows in Dhaka such as Dhaka Art Summit, but also in Hong Kong, India, Austria, Norway, Dubai, among others. . She founded the 'Singularity Art Movement' in 2021, a platform which acknowledges social stigmas that impact gendered, social, political, religious, cultural, and racial oppression. This platform acts as a safe space for artists and non-artists to discuss and share these issues, which may or may not result in an exhibition. She completed her BFA in Art History from University of Dhaka in 2014 and previously interned at the Dhaka Art Center, a Dhaka based non-profit art centre. Her research on the crafts of Kushtia, Jhenaidah and Magura districts of Bangladesh has been published in Setouchi Catalogue: Bangladesh Crafts, 2014. She is also an alumna of Kennedy-Lugar Youth Exchange and Study (YES) programme and was previously involved in many social service and youth empowerment activities. Eve Lemesle PRODUCER Eve Lemesle is an arts producer based between Europe and South-Asia. She started the arts management agency called ‘What About Art’ in Mumbai in 2010. She has produced many exhibitions and consulted internationally for the Venice Biennale, Qatar Museums, Shanghai Biennale, Dhaka Art Summit, Kochi Biennale, the Asia Now art fair at La Monnaie de Paris, Soho House collection amongst others. She is currently a consultant with Reliance for the upcoming JIO World Centre in Mumbai. She is also a researcher at the Institute of Public Art at the University of Shanghai. Eve has been installing some of the most prestigious private and corporate art collections in South-Asia. Khan Md. Mobinul Haque Engineer Emma Sumner HEAD OF PUBLICATIONS Emma Sumner is the Head of Publications, Samdani Art Foundation and Dhaka Art Summit, and an independent writer, researcher and lecturer. Originally trained as a visual artist, in 2010 Emma was awarded an Arts and Humanities Research Council Studentship to study Art History and Curating. During her study and since graduating Emma has worked with numerous institutions and independent platforms, including Tate Liverpool, National Museums Liverpool and the Liverpool Biennale, she has lectured at Liverpool John Moores University, The University of Salford and Wirral Metropolitan and contributes regularly to numerous international platforms including, Art Agenda, Monopol Magazin and e-flux Conversations. Nawreen Ahmed COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER Nawreen Ahmed is working as Communications Manager for Samdani Art Foundation. She has worked as Junior Operations Officer for ME SOLshare Limited and taught Strategic Management and Business English while she worked as a Lecturer for BiMS. She has completed her BBA from Heriot Watt University and MBA from Eastern University DAS 2018 Team Guest Curators Lena Eriksson ART MEDIATION ADVISORS Inviting multidisciplinary collaborations Lena Eriksson’s work encompasses various approaches and genres including performance, drawing, installation, video and organising projects. She was an editorial board member of the web art journal Neulandmagazine (www.neuland-mag.net), and coorganiser of Kasko (www.kasko.ch) and a co-founder of lodypop (a projectspace for power without pressure and performance without panic). She gained her BA Painting from Ecole cantonale d’art du Valais in Sierre and her MA in Teaching and Art in Public Sphere from the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Lucerne, where she is currently a Lecturer. Rachel Mader ART MEDIATION ADVISORS Rachel Mader is an art researcher. Since 2012 she has directed the competence centre Art, Design & Public Spheres, at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art. Between 2009 and 2014, she headed up the project Organising Contemporary Arts: Artistic Practice and Cultural Policy in Postwar Britain. Between 2002 and 2009 she was research assistant in the field of arts research (at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Research at the Zurich University of the Arts), and in Art History (Bern and Zurich). Besides that she has been engaged as an art critic, curator and organiser of multiple events, including artists talks and transdisciplinary conferences. Her publications, talks and research cover the topics of artistic research, art in public spheres, art and ambivalence, political and community arts, feminist approaches in art and science, art mediation, cultural politics and institutional studies. Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan CO-CHAIR Aktari Mumtaz GOETHE INSTITUT BANGLADESH Philip Kuppers ALLIANCE FRANCAISE DE DHAKA, BANGLADESH Bruno Plasse Kendall Robbins BANGLADESH SHILPAKALA ACADEMY Liaquat Ali Lucky BANGLADESH NATIONAL MUSEUM Faizul Latif Chowdhury GREY ADVERTISING BANGLADESH Gousul Alam Shaon BANGLADESH MINISTRY OF CULTURAL AFFAIRS Abdul Mannan Ilias COLLECTOR Maya Barolo-Rizvi AUSTRALIAN HIGH COMMISSION-BANGLADESH H. E. Julia Niblett DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani Organising Comittee Members

ALL PROJECTS বন্যা (Bonna) DAS 2023 is told through the voice of বন্যা (Bonna), a character who speaks from Bangladesh to the world. She is a bold young girl who expresses her dynamic personality fearlessly, refusing to be silenced by her brothers, uncles, or forefathers. Bonna is a common name in Bangladesh, and it also means ‘flood.’ In Bangladesh, a flood does not simply translate into a singular connotation of “disaster.” The DAS concept of বন্যা (Bonna) challenges binaries - between necessity and excess, between regeneration and disaster, between adult and child, between male and female. DAS 2023 invokes and interpretsবন্যা (Bonna) as a complex symbol-system, which is indigenous, personal and at once universal, an embodied non-human reversal of how storms, cyclones, tsunamis, stars, and all environmental crises and “discoveries” are named. বন্যা (Bonna),the young girl, is an activating creative force who offers us an invitation to join her in sharing stories and asking questions. She asks why the words for weather are gendered, what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be…why her namesake has been deployed as a weapon against indigenous people for centuries across the continents. She is filled with wonder when she sees that the traces of her physical growth and traces of floods are measured with similar horizontal lines marked vertically on a wall. She wonders if her name might mean something different now, as the floods she encounters in traditional as well as modern forms of artistic expression are very different from the ones she witnesses outside with her own eyes today. “বন্যা (Bonna)” is joined by over 1,200 Bangladeshi children who made artistic contributions to the exhibition as part of the production process and education programming of DAS 2023. As with the movement of peoples and ideas, languages travel too, often embedded in songs and stories from which we can try to trace their point of origin. DAS 2023 considers the ways in which humans form, inherit, and establish vocabularies to understand the world around us, and the mistranslations that can ensue when we try to apply singular terms to unfamiliar contexts. The same word can migrate from positive to negative connotations and back depending on how and where it travels. Weather and water are shapers of history and culture, as well as being metaphors for life in general. The aim is to see past the limits of translation which can be incapable of conveying the different ways we negotiate the world, while opening new channels for transcultural empathy. How do you tell the story of multiple crises, while facilitating hope? Storms have eyes and eyes have storms. We can be flooded with emotions, yet reduced to singular drops of tears. We give storms human names; we describe human emotions using terms that are also applied to weather. Extreme weather and the absence of state management was the tipping point for Bangladeshis to declare independence in 1971 and fight for the right to express themselves in their own language. As the Ghanaian-Scottish designer, thinker and educator Lesley Lokko insightfully points out, “When you are in the eye of the storm, this is often the right point to push for maximum change.” For millennia, humans have invoked their minds and bodies through prayers, rituals, songs, and dances to summon rain from the sky. Bonna is now learning that humans with power are not only filling the earth with genetically modified seeds, but also now seeding the sky with clouds. During Bengali New Year, Bangladeshi people sing a song written by Rabindranath Tagore, Esho hey Boishakh, which calls upon the first month of summer to bring storms to wash away any residue of ugliness from the previous year. When considering this, and the traditional ways of coping and celebrating polar forces, we must acknowledge that climate change is accelerating and causing even more dramatic events, often beyond the capacity of even the most resilient people’s ability to survive. Climate change is not unidirectional. It is a systemic and episodic transformation of ecologies, systems and structures over time. While these same conditions once historically evolved to be considered as protective, today they are fragile, imbalanced and precarious at multiple scales. DAS 2023, in collaboration with its artists and curators, presents the work of organizations from across the country who are realizing the capacity for more meaningful, just, and beautiful forms of life in situations some may misguidedly see as “hopeless.” Bonna is the overarching narrative of DAS 2023; made up of works of art that tell a story across the venue of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, also containing chapters within it which are complete exhibitions in themselves: Very Small Feelings; Samdani Art Award; To Enter the Sky; and Duality, which are also part of Bonna and are told through the voice of guest curators in dialogue with Chief Curator Diana Campbell, Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Curator and Swilin Haque, Curatorial Assistant. ARTISTS: LOCATION: GROUND FLOOR Joydeb Roaja Submerged dream 8 (জলমগ্ন স্বপ্ন ৮), 2022-2023 Ink on Paper and board Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary This immersive installation submerges visitors in a metaphorical lake of tears. In 1962 under Pakistani rule with American financial and technical support, the construction of the Kaptai dam flooded 400km of Chakma land in what is now Bangladesh, even submerging the Chakma royal palace. Today, tourists in Bangladesh take boat rides over these beautiful waters, mostly unaware of the trauma submerged below the reflective surface that mirrors the sky. To the local indigenous Chakma people, this lake is the site of a heartbreaking event called Bor Porong, or “the great exodus.” Over 100,000 people from about 18,000 families, mostly from indigenous communities, were displaced, resulting in the forced migration to neighboring India of over 35,000 Chakmas and Hajongs. Dams and flooding are a shared weapon of violence against indigenous people all over the world. Roaja’s installation imagines people from the Chittagong Hill Tracts raising the submerged palace from the bottom of the lake back up to the surface, a promise of hope for renewed ways of life after the flood. Part of the artist’s making process involved interviewing multiple generations of indigenous people who remember life before the dam, and also younger generations who have only heard about life before the dam via storytelling and oral tradition. Roaja has an interconnected performance, painting and drawing practice that highlights the challenging social and political landscape of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. His works are tied to the experiences of indigeneity, often emphasizing the deep and symbiotic connection of indigenous people with their land as well as the fight for recognition and rights. His work is an empowering demand preservation of minority cultures. b.1973, Khagrachari; lives and works in Khagrachari Kasper Bosmans No Water, 2019/2023 Instruction based mural Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery No Water refers to the descending level of the ground water table, otherwise known as the boundary between water-saturated ground and unsaturated ground. This descent is partly the result of sand mining and the proliferation of concrete architecture. These works were produced according to the instructions of the artist Kasper Bosmans, which are always the same: the uppermost segment of the painting must be blue, the lowest one brown. Specific hues of each color are chosen by people who have a connection with the place where the work is being shown, in this case, nine people who have been working on Dhaka Art Summit since 2012. They also determine the height of the horizon, but this may never be situated precisely in the middle of the wall, giving rise to playful involvement to create a portrait of Dhaka Art Summit and its surroundings. This is part of a series of instruction based, participatory works found across the Summit. Bosmans is a storyteller; a keen observer of the many ways in which images probe the boundaries between nature and fiction, art and craft. From an intuitive, playful, as well as anthropological approach, he takes the remnants of local traditions, tales, and mythological iconography to speak about global questions in today’s world. b. 1990, Lommel; lives and works in Brussels Matt Copson Age of Coming, 2021 Laser animation with 16 minute audio soundtrack Samdani Art Foundation Collection Formed by a laser machine that flickers in nearly every color, a naked baby created by the artist Matt Copson faces storms inside and outside of his shapeshifting body, which sings to us about his existential conflicts. This work is inspired by the iconic self-help book Diary of a Baby that follows the journey of a baby discovering the world step by step until he turns four years old. The baby expresses how he feels hunger as a storm: “A storm threatens. The light turns metallic. The march of clouds across the sky breaks apart. Pieces of sky fly off in different directions. The wind picks up force, in silence. There are rushing sounds, but no motion. The wind and its sound have separated. Each chases after its lost partner in fits and starts. The world is disintegrating. Something is about to happen.” Copson’s ravenous baby swallows a chair, then a gun, then a plane and grows larger and larger until disintegrating into an abstract work of art. Copson talks about this shift: “The baby wants it all: every color possible, to grow and grow and this is impossible. The laser projector is a mechanical device and the growing density of information eventually means that it can no longer even depict an image and becomes a barrage of spinning broken lines.” This work captures the struggle of trying to obtain something impossible, and the beauty that can be found in these existential quests. Based on theatrical elements and artistic tropes, Copson broaches notions of contemporaneity, abstraction, automation, recurrence, the eternal, and the strange in his work as an artist and a director. He uses elements ranging from classical philosophy to traditional folklore to introduce familiar characters, sometimes partially sketched or whose process of abstraction is incomplete. Generally expressed in the form of a monologue, these characters are perceived through perpetual questioning as to their state or present situation, always hard to pin down and impossible to resolve. b. 1992, Oxford; lives and works in London and Los Angeles Miet Warlop Chant For Hope, 2022-2023 Participatory performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation in partnership with KANAL, Centre Pompidou, Brussels with support from the Flemish Region of Belgium and EUNIC Inspired by the history of the language movement and movement of language in Bangladesh, visitors get swept into the trance conjured by a participatory dancing sculpture which injects energy to propel makers (of history) past exhaustion. Chant for Hope is an incantatory ritual that aims, literally and figuratively, to convey hope for a better world. The performers act as cheerleaders and freedom fighters, injecting energy and meaning into the struggle for life. A group of performers sculpt a series of words in Bengali by flooding molds with plaster, which become moving sculptures that can be rearranged and find new meaning as they are passed between the performers and the audience. The audience thus becomes a participant: spectators are asked to take all the words out into the 'real' world, into the street and/or into their homes. The content of Chant for Hope thus spreads, literally, as a critical reflection and as an invitation to connect ourselves more with each other, as human beings. Warlop’s work is about making the static-dynamic and making the dynamic-static. She treats art as an experience, like ritual concerts or objects animated by choreography. She works in cycles rather than in projects and believes in the attitude that accompanies an idea, using a combination of performance, choreography, theater, and sculpting skills to make her shows. Her work amplifies the dynamics of personal relationships that are created between memories, skin, objects and sounds. b. 1978, Torhout; lives and works in Brussels LOCATION: SOUTH PLAZA Afrah Shafiq Where do the Ants Go?, 2022-2023 Immersive game installation This project was created as part of the "to-gather" international collaboration of Pro Helvetia, Swiss Arts Council with curatorial support of Diana Campbell, Fernanda Brenner, Chus Martinez, Daniel Baumann, and Iaroslav Volovod Where do the Ants Go? is a large-scale sculpture of an anthill that the audience can enter and interact with a colony of ants that live within it. Using real time inputs the “players” within the anthill make choices that affect the behavior of the individual ants and the collective outcome of the colony. The anthill is imagined as a real-life rendering from the game Minecraft, using the logic of voxels and referencing immersive environments, speculative futures and web3.0; the ant colony set within it translates ant behaviors from the natural world into algorithms and data sets. As more and more of human existence continues to play out in the virtual space where conversation is mediated by seemingly invisible algorithms, the installation creates a meeting ground between the physical and digital, the algorithm and consciousness, the virtual world and the natural world and offers a space to step back, observe patterns and perhaps even re-set. Shafiq uses the process of research as an artistic playground. She intertwines archival findings, history, memory, folklore and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remix culture. Her work moves across various mediums drawing from the handmade language of traditional folk forms and connecting them to the digital language of the Internet and video games. When she is not glued to her computer she makes glass mosaics. b. 1989, Bangalore; lives and works in Goa Ahmet Öğüt Balanced Protest Banners, 2022-2023 Bamboo stilts, Digital Print, Performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and Latvian Center for Contemporary Art with support from SAHA and Goethe Institut Bangladesh and the curatorial contribution of iLiana Fokianaki Performers walk across the South Plaza on bamboo stilts that are both support structures and also protest banners highlighting difficult-to-find goods and commodities in Bangladesh such as cherry blossoms, avocados, blueberries and kiwis. This precarious balancing act invites us to consider what we might take for granted as we exert ourselves in the world. Bangladeshis in villages, as well as Indians in similar climatic contexts, address their rising water levels by creating tools for living similar in form to these stilts, finding new ways to walk on unstable ground.Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist, and lecturer. Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, the artist often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on serious and/or pressing social and political issues. Öğüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in collective perception of society. B. 1981, Diyarbakır; lives and works in Istanbul, Amsterdam and Berlin This work is also part of Very Small Feelings Antony Gormley TURN, 2022-2023 A 2.5km line of bamboo Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationCourtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens Bamboo, the world’s largest grass, can be a metaphor for generative transfers of energy in Bangladesh. It grows high out of the earth powered by photosynthesis and when harvested, is bundled and tied together to form large rafts that float down Bangladesh’s many rivers, then unbundled and transferred to construction sites across the country to be transformed into architecture, a kind of second-body for human and non-human bodies to dwell in. Antony Gormley and a team of Bangladeshi artisans have transformed 2.5km of bamboo into a drawing in space that could also be seen as a sculpture or as a second skin for the visitors passing through it. It is an energy field, exploding like unfurled springs and seemingly boundless orbits, a line transformed into an infinite loop without beginning or end. It makes us think about time, which can be perceived as linear in some contexts, circular in others. Our bodies, and how they move in making drawings, sculptures, and architecture are interconnected in their role in world-building. How can we create and collaborate on the same scale that society has the capacity to destroy? Continuing along the shapeshifting journey of bamboo in Bangladesh, the work will be recycled into other forms after Dhaka Art Summit is over. Antony Gormley is widely acclaimed for his sculptures, installations and public artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space. His work has developed the potential opened up by sculpture through a critical engagement with both his own body and those of others in a way that confronts fundamental questions of where human beings stand in relation to nature and the cosmos. Gormley continually tries to identify the space of art as a place of becoming in which new behaviors, thoughts and feelings can arise. He studied meditation in South Asia in the 1970s prior to attending art school, and this is his first return to the region since 1974. The Making of Antony Gormley’s TURN b. 1950, London; lives and works in London Ashfika Rahman বেহুলা আজকাল (Behula These Days), 2022-2023 Community-led photography and textile installation Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist বেহুলা আজকাল (Behula These Days) is a collaborative community project articulating the violence against women around in one of the most flood-prone areas in Bangladesh, which is also the birthplace of the mythological figure Behula. Behula is the protagonist of one of the most popular epic mythological love stories in Bengal - Behula and Lakhindar - written between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries. In the plot line, Lakhindar (Behula’s husband) lost his life on their wedding night through the curse of the Hindu goddess of snakes, Manasa. In the hopes that a victim of a snake bite could miraculously be brought back to life, it was customary that the dead body would float down the river rather than be cremated. Behula accompanied her husband’s dead body on a raft towards heaven, facing many dangers and praying to Manasa and all of the gods to revive her husband. Once in heaven, Behula pleased all of the gods with her beautiful and enchanting dancing and earned her husband's life back. Behula’s sacrifice and isolation from society are regarded as the epitome of a loving and loyal wife in Bengali culture. This popular mythological love story is translated through the lens of feminism in Ashfika Rahman’s work. Idolizing such a sacrifice and celebrating such isolation through the reverence of Behula, while villainizing Manasa (the goddess of the snakes) who needed devotion from a man in order to reach heaven, speaks to ongoing systemic violence against women. Behula and the many women she represents float without agency on their own lifes’ paths. Rahman’s epic investigative project traces the footprints of Behula through the riverline and landscapes mentioned in the epic story. She collected stories of violence against women on the river bank, which is isolated and almost impossible to navigate during the many floods there. The women illustrated their stories on their own portraits displayed here, which reconsider this epic love story from the lens of contemporary reality. Death rates during floods do not have gender balance; more women die in floods, speaking to the gendered nature of climate-based violence, which is tied to societal beliefs about a woman’s role at home. Rahman’s practice explores and experiments with photography, using media ranging from historical techniques like 19th-century printmaking to documentary approaches and contemporary media. Photography is the predominant medium that she uses to express her views on complex systemic social issues such as violence, rape, and religious extremism – often overlooked by the administrative machinery of the state. In her practice, she creates a conceptual timeline of the stereotypes of victims, repeated across history, notably in regard to minority communities in Bangladesh. b. 1988, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Bhasha Chakrabarti নরম অতিক্রমণ (Tender Transgressions), 2022-2023 Site Specific Installation Made from Jute, Bamboo, and Tropical Plants Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation with support from EMK Center, Dhaka Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter নরম অতিক্রমণ (Tender Transgressions) is a site specific installation which explores the concept of Bonna as the feminine form of bonno, meaning wild, untameable, and excessive, all words historically used to denigrate women’s sexuality. The large-scale work transforms nine columns that structurally hold up the building of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy into a jungle of anthropomorphic feminine forms. It materially references Navapatrika, a Hindu practice common in Bengal, where plants are wrapped in sarees and worshiped as embodiments of the goddess Durga. Here, the plant being venerated is jute: essential to the economy of Bangladesh, dependent on excessive rainfall, and commonly used as a fabric support in Western painting. This transformation of rigid architectural supports into supple caryatids of cloth and crop, breaks down binaries of strong and soft, functional and decorative, necessity and excess. Chakrabarti engages with art-making as a process of mending, which is primarily associated with clothing, and then extended to relationships. As opposed to other forms of repair, traditionally undertaken by men in a professional capacity, mending is largely non-transactional and often delegated to women. Working across painting, weaving, sound, and installation, her work explores how art can function as a mode of public discourse rather than being a self-contained discipline, bringing feminist ways of being to the fore in a patriarchal world. b. 1991, Honolulu; lives and works in New Haven Bishwajit Goswami ঋতু, 2022-2023 Mural and interactive performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist The word ঋতু (Reetu), meaning ‘seasons’, is also a commonly used first name for Bengali girls, culturally and symbolically related to the name ‘বন্যা (Bonna)’. Bangladesh has six seasons (and some would argue “had” as climate change has made two of the seasons difficult to recognize anymore) each harkening a particular mood, feelings and cultural practices. (Human) life can also be measured in seasons. Goswami connects these personal stories of land, nature and seasons with words, pigment and touch. Fragments of memory enable a sensorial, intimate exchange of feelings and words to take place with the artist, and within the self, manifesting in moving drawings connecting our inner and outer worlds. Bishwajit Goswami began his career as a figurative, hyper-realist painter. Inspired by the Bangla language and its written formation, the artist has been breaking down and rearranging and reconstructing his artistic language into abstract forms and shapes. Institution building and education is also a core-part of his creative practice as the founder of Brihatta Art Foundation and as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Dhaka. B. 1981, Netrakona; lives and works in Dhaka Roman Ondák Measuring the Universe, 2007/2023 For the whole duration of the exhibition, gallery attendants offer to the exhibition visitors marking their height on the gallery walls along with their first name and the date on which the measurement was taken. Performance, felt-tip pens, guards, audienceFrom the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York As we grow(up), our scale to the world and our understanding of time changes. Flood lines and people are measured in similar ways; vertical markings on walls. Measuring the Universe extends out of Roman Ondák’s interest in blurring lines between art and everyday life, and using simple means to create complex images that can metaphorically compete with cutting-edge technology. Ondák got the idea to create this work after frequently taking measurements of his sons’ heights at home as they were growing up, and he created this instruction-based work by extrapolating this personal, intimate act into an exhibition space where guards write visitors’ measurements on the wall, creating the presence of people into a physical object. The work begins with a blank, white, room, but over time, a thick black band of names will begin to encircle the walls, almost resembling a galaxy where each black mark of a visitor’s name could resemble a star. These marks are part of registering the passage of time, the public experience of Dhaka Art Summit. Ondák’s artistic interventions blur the boundaries between art and the everyday, challenging traditional hierarchies between artists and non-artists, the artwork and the spectator and between public and private domains. In presenting elements of everyday life in an art context, new perspectives on social relations and human experience arise. Ondak’s relational art practice breaks with the traditional idea of the art object - the constructed social environment becomes the art. Choosing immersion over representation, he invites viewers, friends and family, to play a vital role in his work, enlisting their own creativity in the process of following his instructions. The result is a controlled study of collective discovery and imagination. b. 1966, Zilina; lives and works in Bratislava Sumayya Vally They who brings rain, brings life, 2022-2023 Ceramic vessels activated by performance Performance 7pm daily Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationCo-curated by Diana Campbell and Sean Anderson as an overlay of “To Enter the Sky” on the 2nd floor of DAS oletha imvula uletha ukuphila Translation: “They who brings rain, brings life” IsiZulu proverb Wielding the comings of rain is a tradition practiced by cultures across geographies. To possess the power to command rainfall is by inference possessing the power to dictate the flow of the natural cycle and climatic conditions. Across Southern Africa, rain-making rituals are directed towards royal ancestors because they were believed to have control over rain and other natural phenomena. One of these rare and powerful individuals is the Moroka of the Pedi tribe in South Africa: the traditional rain-making doctor. Here, a series of fired and unfired clay vessels are assembled as a temporal space to hold gatherings. Over the course of DAS, a series of performances which draw on the traditions of rain-making and harvest are performed in the space where the hands that formed the pots also work to un-form them. The rituals include the use of water, which allows the un-fired pots to dissolve over time, revealing areas and niches of gathering contained by the pots, as well as rhythmic drumming that evokes the sound of thunder at the end of each day. Vally’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions. Her design process is often forensic, and draws on the aural, the performative and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. B. 1990, Pretoria; lives and works in London LOCATION: SECOND FLOOR, GALLERY 4: STORMS HAVE EYES AND EYES HAVE STORMS Antora Mehrukh Azad Ground Zero, 2022-2023 Oil on Canvas Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist Ground Zero is a large-scale landscape painting that depicts the modern relationship between nature and humans. The work depicts how the natural Bangladeshi landscape has gradually been subdued and replaced by citified objects such as traffic signs, poles, and neon colors. It is a stylized, exaggerated rendition of common Bangladeshi flood scenes. Bangladesh is suffering from severe floods and rising sea levels, more extreme than in the past as a result of global warming. With the next flood perpetually around the corner, Bangladesh is frequently referred to as “ground zero for climate change.” The bright neon pink water body symbolizes how this situation is not entirely natural but rather manmade, and how silently Bangladeshis are metaphorically treading water as the sea level rises, finding new ways to survive. Azad’s work is based on the modern connection between nature and humanity. Exaggerating the increased toxicity in this relationship with an overtly artificial color palette, her paintings reveal how urban life is gradually taking over the natural world. b. 1994, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Ayesha Sultana Breath Count, 2019 Mark-making on clay-coated paper Samdani Art Foundation Collection Nightfall, 2022 Acrylic and oil on canvas Samdani Art Foundation Collection Untitled, 2023 Aluminum Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from Experimenter Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter Untitled, 2023 Aluminum Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from Experimenter Courtesy of the artist and Experimenter Ayesha Sultana’s recent work negotiates space and distance by measuring the space between things – such as the breaks between taking breaths – marking the rhythm of the day. She contemplates the relationship between her hand, her body, and the rest of the landscape surrounding her, making visible the motion of rhythm without being seen. Through a body of scratch drawings on clay-coated paper, Breath Count are personal explorations of movement, mark-making and corporeality. Ayesha reveals staccato patterns that represent a delicate inward probe of her own body using count, distance, motion and removal in breath in these works. Like the marble lines in Louis Kahn’s parliament building, which mark the labor of a day’s work casting concrete, Sultana’s marks measure the labor of internal bodily systems, which are related to the toxicity of the world outside which are internalized as we breathe. Floor-based aluminum sculptures seem to freeze a flood of acid rain, holding toxicity back from its onward journey. A painting depicting the sea and a seemingly infinite space beyond can be seen as a portrait of the artist’s personal emotions as well as her constant return to looking at water as an amorphous, shape-shifting medium that holds more than what is apparent on its surface. Sultana works with drawing, painting, sculpture,and sound, through processes that translate notions of space. She employs drawing as a tool of inquiry, through cutting, folding, stitching, layering, recording, and tracing applied to her series characterized by repetition, variation, and rhythm. Sultana often draws inspiration from architecture and the natural environment. b. 1984 in Jessore; lives and works in Dhaka Hana Miletic Materials, 2022 Hand-woven and hand-knit textile (azure blue cottolin, cobalt blue repurposed mercerised cotton, dark blue peace silk, deep blue organic cottolin, gold repurposed polyester, indigo washed rub- ber cotton, ocean blue organic linen, variegated blue recycled wood, and white peace silk) Materials, 2022 Hand-woven (barley white organic cotton, beige repurposed mercerised cotton, brown variegated recycled wool, gold metal yarn, and organic hemp) Materials, 2022 Hand-woven textile (beige peace silk, and white repurposed polyester) Materials, 2022 Hand-woven and felt textile (copper repurposed polyester, dandelion yellow, dark brown, cinnamon brown, russet brown, and white-yellow raw wool) Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with the support of the Flanders Region of Belgium Courtesy of the artist, LambdaLambdaLambda and The Approach The positions, shapes, colors and textures of repairs and transformations in public space, often made in quick and improvised ways on buildings, infrastructure and vehicles as the material consequences of economic and political actions, can also be seen as marks of gestures of care and repair. They are core to the way the artist Hana Miletić experiences the world, and these woven sculptures are based on repairs and transformations that the artist observed after a recent flood in her home country, Croatia. The museum quarter where the artist was exhibiting flooded due to heavy rainfall combined with rising sea levels. As is the case of Bangladesh, but admittedly to a lesser extent, this huge influx of water is the result of climate change. The world outside seeped into the museum world inside, a normally pristine, utopian space. The artist photographed the repairs and transformations made by the city authorities and the individual residents the morning after the flood, and based on these photographs, she produced these works for Dhaka. Through these hand-woven textiles, Miletić is sharing in Bangladesh the soft power of care and resilience from her homeland, and proposing a dialogue between these two geographically remote yet familiar practices of repair. Miletić reflects on issues of representation and social reproduction by making linkages between photography and weaving. The artist models her handwoven textiles after her photographs that document vernacular, often do-it-yourself, repairs in public space. Remaking these repairs allows Miletić to understand and participate in the complexity of society, striving to tell alternative feminist stories of technology and progress stemming from the loom, the precursor of the computer today. Miletić uses the weaving process – which requires considerable time and dedication – as a way to counteract certain economic and social conditions at work, such as acceleration, standardization and transparency. b. 1982, Zagreb; lives and works in Brussels and Zagreb Krishna Reddy River, 1959 Whirlpool, 1963 Samdani Art Foundation Collection Krishna Reddy’s prints consider elements of nature and his life experiences in diverse landscapes. Early representational works including Insect (1952) and Fish (1952) explore the physical structure of those animals, physically bringing about the image by mixing liquid inks of different densities together at the same time, freezing them in time by printing them on a single plate. Through the 1950s, his works became progressively more abstract, and River (1959) refers to the movement of its subject but avoids direct representation. Reddy’s prints of the 1960s reflect a strong sense of dynamism, as Wave (1963) and Whirlpool (1963) each reveal the immediacy of water in motion, and through color variation and modulation of line show the fleeting collision of water with air and light. Reddy was born in rural Andhra Pradesh, India and educated at the idyllic Kala Bhavan at Santiniketan. As a student of pioneering artist Nandalal Bose at Santiniketan in the mid 1940s, Reddy absorbed India’s great heritage of figuration by traveling to historical sites including Ajanta and drawing the goddesses represented at the caves. He later studied sculpture under famed British artist Henry Moore, whose work shaped Reddy’s abstracted figurative sculptures. Reddy then moved to Paris where he joined Stanley William Hayter’s intaglio printmaking studio, Atelier 17. He approached the intaglio plate from the perspective of a sculptor, lending a sculptural quality to his printmaking throughout his career. At Atelier 17, Reddy invented the technique of simultaneous color printmaking by experimenting with the use of several colors of different viscosities on a single plate. Reddy is best known for this innovation, and it can be seen in the fluid layering of colors in the works on view here, especially from the 1960s onwards. b. 1929, Nandanoor; d. 2018, New York Lala Rukh Mirror Image II 1, 2 & 3, 2011 Graphite on carbon paper Samdani Art Foundation Collection Gazing deep into the dark black carbon paper, subtle, almost flickering glimpses of water’s movement on a moonlit night reveal themselves to the viewer. In the words of the artist and art historian Mariah Lookman, the subtle graphite markings appear “like phosphates that are able to absorb and reflect back barely visible traces of light. The marks one can see are like those signs of life that are reflected back onto the paper by hand of the artist, who [was] living through perhaps the bleakest of times in Pakistan’s history. Given the high level of violence that is perpetrated on innocent civilians, the darkness in the work speaks volumes of the horror and tragedy that is witnessed in everyday life. And yet, in the fine lines against the darkness of the paper, I can see signs are still symbolic of hope, of anticipation, expectation, and a force and belief against pure forces of nihilism.” One of the foremost feminist activists of South Asia, Rukh’s contribution to art and culture spans far beyond the visual arts and into politics, music, and countless other parts of civic life in Pakistan and the wider region. Her works often chart horizons and draw together the waves we experience in nature as sight and the waves we experience within as sound, bridging inner and outer worlds and asking for heightened sense of perception from the viewer. b. 1948, Lahore; d. 2017, Lahore Lucas Arruda Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2018 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2020 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2020 Untitled (from the Deserto-Modelo series), 2021 oil on canvas Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM who also provided support for this presentation The first image of Earth taken from outer space, Blue Marble, captures the image of a cyclone over the Bay of Bengal; it is fitting that Arruda’s cyclones find their debut here in Bangladesh.“Light constitutes an essential aspect of Lucas Arruda’s paintings, even though it’s never as much a representation of light as a representation of the presence of light; indirect, subtle, glowing not shining. Only a hint of the sunlight, whose rays struggle through dark clouds above the seas, is nervously reflected by countless waves. Or are these foreboding images of impending climate change, of toxic skies and a world void of inhabitants?” “The small format, the repetitiveness of Arruda’s imagery may strike one as minimalistic, yet it is anything but mechanical. There’s a physical dimension: Arruda presses his brush into the paint, roughens it up. Turned and turned while pressed, the brushes move in circles and in angular strokes. They scratch the paint. The handle of the brush incises the paint, cutting the surface up like with a knife or a burin, revealing what lies below the surface, revealing more than meets the eye. It reminds us on an etching and yet the quality of the engraved paint is not a one-dimensional image as in a print. The landscape visibly becomes a painted construct. The hair of the brush transforms into bristle scratching the wet painting away in a manner that is as forceful as it is elegant. Arruda’s subtractive method of painting is like writing a story in beautiful calligraphy, one that goes under the skin. Paintings that glow from within.* ” *Text by Till-Holger Borchert edited by Diana Campbell Between sky and earth, ethereal and solid, imagination and reality, Arruda presents meditations on the infinite drawn from his memory while highlighting the materiality of the media he works with, from paint to film. As we move above and below horizon lines, the artist puts us before atmospheres that are charged with visual as well as metaphysical questions. b. 1983, São Paulo; lives and works in São Paulo Marina Tabassum Photograph of Khudi Bari structure photo credit: Asif Salman, 2022 Marina Tabassum and her team are among a generation of architects and designers who see the power of design as a generative resource; a significant creator of value even in the face of meager financial resources and plentiful contextual challenges. To quote her, a paucity of means should not limit hopes and dreams. The Khudi Bari (Bengali for ‘Tiny House’) is an example of this kind of thinking and action, a modular, mobile home that can be fabricated for as little as 500 dollars that provides elevation to save goods and lives in the wake of flash floods on tiny “desert islands” of sand known as 'chars' that are dotted precariously across the Bengal delta (and also visible in the background of SM Sultan’s painting exhibited next to this photograph). Land is fluid on the floodplains of Bangladesh, and these islands often break off and erode into the water, making it necessary for people to physically move their home as the land it was originally placed on may no longer exist. Tabassum’s design mimics the traditional language of architecture on the Bengal delta to create modular mobile housing units that are low cost, durable, and can be assembled and disassembled within a short time with minimum labor, taking advantage of a rigid space-frame structure. Khudi Bari reminds us to look to locally rooted knowledges to innovate solutions for uncertain futures. As an architect, Marina Tabassum has established a language of architecture that is contemporary to the world yet rooted to the place. She rejects the global pressure of consumer architecture, a fast breed of buildings that are out of place and context, pledging to root architecture to the place informed by climate and geography. She and her team engage in extensive research on the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh, working closely with geographers, landscape architects, planners and other allied professionals. The focus of her studio, Marina Tabbasum Architects (MTA) and the Foundation for Architecture and Community Equity (FACE) which she founded, also extends to the marginalized ultra-low income population of the country with a goal to elevate the environmental and living conditions of all people. b. 1968, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Marzia Migliora Paradoxes of Plenty #51 (Big Wave), 2022-2023 Ink on paper Courtesy of the Artist and Lia Rumma Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationPresentation realized with the support of ARAV s.r.lSilvian Heach, SH, John Richmond, JR kids, Trussardi Kids, Marcobologna Marzia Migliora’s ongoing series of drawings, I Paradossi dell’abbondanza (Paradoxes of Plenty, 2017-2023), is a continuation of the artist’s studies over the last years reflecting on the relationship between food production, commodities and surplus value of the capitalist system and the exploitation of natural, animal and human resources. A visual exploration of the paradoxes that govern consumer society, this series outlines the limitations of an anachronistic model antithetical to present-day environmental and social emergencies. Reflecting on the dramatically visible consequences of climate change in Bangladesh, such as frequent flooding, tropical cyclones, riverbank erosion, and high salinity levels in groundwater, Paradoxes of Plenty #51 is a large-scale drawing depicting the rush of a giant wave that reveals the depths of a sea. Ecosystems of a multi-species universe are animated in this work by schools of fish realized using the gyotaku technique, used by Japanese fishermen in the nineteenth-century. This technique is a direct printing method that involves fish covered in cuttlefish ink as a matrix imprinted directly on Washi rice paper. The presence of fishing nets lying on the bottom of the work points to the consequences of intensive fishing and the phenomenon of ghost nets, which constitute 85% of the plastic waste in the world's marine waters. In the metaphorical sense, the words ‘Big Wave’ in the title also refer to the surfing practice of looking for the perfect wave. The artist pays homage to Ayesha, a young surfer from Cox's Bazar, who defied social norms and dared to surf in the ocean, becoming the subject of the award winning Bangladeshi documentary Nodorai (I'm not Afraid). Marzia Migliora uses a wide range of media including photography, video, sound, performance, installations and drawing to focus on everyday life. She investigates themes like identity and desire, delving into present and past history and putting memory into relation with places and spaces. Her projects are like questions that trigger the active engagement of the observer, who becomes the protagonist without whom the work cannot be resolved. The artist’s goal is to propose an experience that can be lived and shared by the audience. B. 1972, Alessandria; lives and works in Turin Michael John Whelan And they did live by watchfires 1, 2020 pigment print on paper, 50 x 40cm, edition 1/3 And they did live by watchfires 2, 2020 pigment print on paper, 200 x 160cm, edition 1/3 Courtesy of the artist and Grey Noise These analog photographs explore light pollution, specifically skyglow, as an eco-marker of humanity’s unbridled global population growth and subsequent effects on the environment. Today over half the world’s population live in cities. According to research from the UN, by 2050 2.5 billion more people will be living in cities. Michael John Whelan has been documenting urban densification from an array of locations (including Dubai, Vienna and Dublin) and elevations, focussing on the abstract visual gradient caused by the artificial light refracting in the night sky. The light sources themselves are excluded from the image, focusing only on the effects. Abstraction becomes a tool for accessibility and contemplation on how our ways of life affect the circadian rhythms of the planet. Working across film, video, photography and sculpture, Whelan’s practice asserts the landscape as a place where traumatic narratives overlap with the evidence of anthropogenic processes. Whelan undertakes extensive long-term projects documenting elusive but ever-present phenomena like light pollution or darkness. Animals, people or places, like the last Irish wolf, a young marine biologist struggling with the effects of climate change, or the world’s most radioactive ocean, are given agency within his work. b. 1977, Dublin; lives and works in Berlin Pol Taburet Out the womb, 2022 Parade, 2022 alcohol based paint and raw pigment Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM who also provided support for this presentation with alongside Alliance Francaise de Dacca For millennia, humans have invoked their minds and bodies through prayers, rituals, songs, and dances to summon rain from the sky. These bold, spiritually charged paintings depict that age-old human desire to extend our power of movement on earth to universes above us. Ghostly figures in the foreground dance and pulse with the energy of thunder and lightning inside of them to make it rain and bring about abundance. There is something haunting, even sinister about these figures, who seem to conjure dark magic. In the language of hip-hop, the term “make it rain” refers to a hypothetical relationship between the rapper and the devil invented by fans, where the rapper conjures the devil in a quest to make money manifest itself as if falling from the sky. Taburet’s work brings a complex range of reference including his Caribbean background and its syncretic voodoo traditions and belief systems, wider contemporary culture, and Western classical painting. He developed his unique painting style by incorporating the use of airbrushing alongside traditional brush painting with acrylic colors, symbolic of his work which mixes the old and the new. Working across painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, his work speaks of life and death, and the passage from one state to the other. b. 1997, Paris; lives and works in Paris Rithika Merchant Transtidal, 2022 Gouache, watercolor, and ink on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Tarq who also provided support for this presentation River deltas are environments, gateways between rivers and seas that offer challenges and opportunities, where the conditions for sustaining life change throughout the days and seasons. Deltas are cradles of life and tell a story of evolution from the sea, by the river, to the land, possibly representing what the future holds. We now have to go backwards as the sea gains ground and makes land hostile. Like the mudskippers floating in the foreground of this work, we too will have to learn to be amphibious as waters rise. This watercolor is inspired by the nomadic river based Bede community of Bangladesh. They reap the benefits of water as a life giver and have adapted to overcome the more destructive aspects of the water. As waters rise, their amphibious way of living on the river is something many of us may have to adopt on our ever flooding planet in order to survive. Figures from Bangla lore such as crocodile djinns and snakes appear in the work, speaking to fertility, prosperity, and abundance tied to river based life. Snakes are a source of livelihood for the Bede community who earn income from snake charming, snake catching and snake selling, generating possibility from a place others may cower away from in fear. Both the Goliath Heron and the Peregrine Falcon inhabit the mangrove and can be seen as sacred animals integral to the ecosystem, immortalized here as constellations and stars reflecting in the winding rivers connecting the desert to the mountains to the sea to the sky. Merchant is fascinated with navigation. She is inspired by how old maps and celestial charts are folded and stored, and how they are built up with water-based paint on paper, transformed by exposure to the sun and the elements over time, appearing very different to us now than when they were originally made. After she finishes her paintings, she folds them up into geometric shapes and unfolds them to create and reveal a narrative of the paper’s journey. She imagines that in the future, someone might come across her folded drawings in a book or in a drawer and when they unfold them, they would find strange and otherworldly maps, with creatures and clues from another time. b.1986 Mumbai, lives and works in Barcelona and Mumbai Safiuddin Ahmed Flood, 1994 Flood 8, 2004 Gusty Wind, 2005 Bare Trees-2, 2004 Charcoal on paper The Cry, 1980 Copper engraving print Courtesy of the Shilpaguru Safiuddin Ahmed Memorial Storms have eyes and eyes have storms. Safiuddin Ahmed emblazoned the relationship between Bangladeshis and the storms plaguing them from inside their bodies and outside through floods and wars in his iconic prints and lesser-known, haunting charcoal drawings, which are rarely exhibited. Pulsing with emotion, these works speak to Bangladesh’s ongoing cry for freedom from both natural and manmade violence. Their symbolism speaks to the entanglement of human and non-human life on the Bengal delta. Ahmed helped raise the profile of printmaking in Bangladesh, a discipline often considered of secondary importance, by adopting it as his main medium and inspiring others to engage with the medium through his teaching practice. His work addresses the violence of water and the storms, literal and metaphorical, that Bengali people live with culturally. Many of his titles address strong emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear paired with symbolic scenes of water, fishing, and flooding. b. 1922, Calcutta; d. 2012 in Dhaka Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska The Womb of the Land, 2022 People of De-occupied Territories, 2022 Oil on Canvas Courtesy of the Artist Voluptuous female forms keep a violent sky at bay, feeding and fuelling a counter-apocalypse with their life-giving energy. Sana Shahmuradova-Tanska has been painting harbingers of life in the midst of war-torn Ukraine, depicting the role that women play in keeping the world alive in the midst of man-made horrors, both today, and also historically in her homeland with countless injustices including man-made famine, the Holodomor, which parallel histories in Bangladesh when it, too, was a colonially occupied territory. As a visual artist, Shahmuradova-Tanska she mainly works with graphics and painting, searching for the barely explored roots of her ancestry through collective and personal archetypes. Women are the main protagonists in her work, which is also inspired by her experience training in ballet and studying drawing with an elderly Jewish artist who introduced her to Jewish frescoes, among other references. b. 1996, Odessa; lives and works in Kyiv SM Sultan Untitled, 1987 Natural dyes on unprimed jute canvas Samdani Art Foundation Collection While South Asian art history describes him as a landscape painter, S.M. Sultan is remembered in Bangladesh for his energetic paintings of bulbous-muscled farmers made after 1975. These large-scale paintings, primarily made with natural pigments on unprimed jute canvases, celebrate the strength of Bengali peasants, both male and female, in their struggle against colonial and ecological disasters. Famine had been plaguing the country on and off from the era of the British Raj until just the year before Sultan first painted these icons of physical might. In this context, his depiction of the weak and downtrodden as invincible forces cultivating the future of Bangladesh can be seen as subversive. Small islands, known as chars, dot the landscape in the background of this painting, an integral part of the Bangladeshi landscape. While still violent, the storms and floods impacting Bangladesh’s landscape during Sultan’s time are different from those experienced now, yet architects and designers are turning toward traditional solutions from Bangladesh’s wetlands to imagine ways to survive on wetter and wetter land. Sultan’s work as both an artist and an educator highlight the importance of rural culture in the collective identity of Bangladesh. After traveling 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 centers through art. b. 1923, Narail; d. 1994, Jessore Veronika Hapchenko Shelter, 2022 Acrylic and Ink on Canvas Samdani Art Foundation Collection This painting is Veronika Hapchenko’s contemporary interpretation of the mosaic Windfighter, a depiction of a bird fighting the wind that was created by the legendary artist Alla Horska in 1967 for Mariupol’s restaurant Ukraina, recently destroyed by shellings in July, 2022. This work commences a new series by the artist devoted to the topic of Soviet avant-garde mosaics and murals from the 1960s and 1970s located on the territory of Ukraine. These works of art once spoke of a bright, peaceful future of the republic, and are now being destroyed in the course of the Russian invasion and bombardment of Ukrainian cultural heritage sites. A first glance at this painting reveals two figures of long-haired women flanking a mysterious shape placed in the center of the scene. Upon a closer look, one notices that the women’s strands of hair form a roof over the heads of the multitude of figures whose faces emerge from the body outlines. With silhouettes infinitely looped in the composition, it is difficult for the viewer to establish the number of people who are sheltered in this painting. Like Bengal in the 1940s, Ukraine also suffered a man-made famine in the 1930s known as the Holodomor. Responding to violent, ongoing histories of oppression, Hapchenko, as well as the iconic Bangladeshi painter SM Sultan, paint figures with bulging muscles of epic strength, refusing to be reduced to skin and bones by occupying forces and rising up to protect their communities and ways of life. Coming from a stage design background that migrated into painting and object making, Hapchenko’s practice has a strong research foundation. Looking to philosophical theses, cultural archives and oral history in her work, the artist traces legends and taboos surrounding revolutionary artists and political gurus to deconstruct and rethink the cultural tropes of the former USSR, which oscillated between esotericism and militarism throughout the twentieth century. This work was commissioned by KANAL- Centre Pompidou, Brussels to mark their inaugural feminist conference and garner support for the crisis in Ukraine. B. 1995, Kyiv, lives and works in Krakow LOCATION: SECOND FLOOR Amit Dutta Mother, Who Will Weave Now?, 2022 Digital AnimationCommissioned by MAP (Museum of Art and Photography) Bangalore on the Textile Collection of the Museum Mother, Who Will Weave Now? attempts to sample and mirror the grand tapestry of Indian textile traditions and histories by interweaving snippets of Indian cloth on an editing table, using poetic elements of classical Indian literature sewn together with the words and motifs of the weaver-saint Kabir. Dutta attempts to create in film what he sees in painting, and describes all of his formal work as an attempt in that direction. Whether examining India’s contemporary artists, traditional weavers, or classical painters and the scholars who know their every brushstroke by heart, Dutta’s process-oriented films attest to the ardor of art history. b.1977, Jamu; lives and works in Palampur Kamruzzaman Shadhin Irrelevant Field Notes, 2020-2023 Two-channel video, sound, sculptures Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist This installation traces the seasons and cycles of indigenous rituals, poetry, myths, and practices that have been intertwined with agricultural landscapes and the act of cultivation in Bangladesh. Drawing from Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s childhood memories of deeply ingrained community practices rooted in agriculture, the work tells the story of how the move towards an extractive nature of cultivation has slowly rendered a disconnection in the intimate/intrinsic ties between humanity and land. Incorporating sculptures, video, and sound and using materials related to land and rituals, Shadhin creates an imaginary landscape where the old rhymes, songs, fables, and other “irrelevant beings” hover around in apparent aimlessness, disconnected from the earth. They are displaced, but linger on as a distant and fragmented memory of a forgotten link, almost as if to stage a secret rebellion against this capitalist aggression on soil, water, and many ways of life. Made over a three-year period, this two-channel video chronicles the fields at different seasons through movements of masked figures who also appear in this space as various forms, linked through an immersive soundscape where the disappearing songs and rhymes come alive again. Shadhin's participatory practice incorporates installation, sculpture, performance, video and public art interventions. His work is shaped by long-term engagement with communities, exploring themes of the environment, migration and local history, and their connection to personal and collective memory. He usually works with locally sourced materials, drawing inspiration from the techniques and practices of the past to comment on the present. He is the founder of the Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts (f. 2001). b. 1974, Thakurgaon; lives and works in Dhaka and Thakurgaon Najmun Nahar Keya বর্ণগীতি(Symphony of words), 2022-2023 Soft Sculptures Made from Antique Sarees Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery Bengali script seems to drip from the ceiling as rain, or flow through space like a river, similar to how the words of Khana have flowed across time in Bangladesh. Khana was a poet and an astrologer active in Bengal somewhere between the 9th and 12th centuries, and her verses are among the earliest compositions of lyrical Bengali verse and tied to wisdom gleaned from observing nature. According to legend, Khana attracted the attention of King Vikramaditya by solving problems that neither her husband nor her father-in-law, who were both court astronomers, could answer. Threatened by her knowledge and divinatory power, her father-in-law had her tongue cut off and forced her into exile. In another version, Khana cut off her own tongue to spare her father-in-law the shame of being upstaged by a woman. Both scenarios speak to how the fragility of male egos threatens the basic wellbeing of women. Putting Khana’s words into the air as sayings and/or writing them into physical form as text, or inscribing them as an artwork as the artist Najmun Nahar Keya has, speaks to the power of orality and of collective memory to keep alive the wisdom that oppressive forces, such as patriarchy, have tried in vain to silence. These sayings that are still alive in rural Bangladesh today, known as Khanar Bachan (Khana’s words), are also a collective memory of climate, and how human behavior and weather could interact to produce fruitful results. These adages must have worked at some point; otherwise it is unlikely that they would have been carried across so many generations, but they don’t all make sense anymore as weather does not move over the lands in the same way it once did. Like the Tangail sarees that Keya and her elder sisters used to craft these sayings into soft sculptural form, they are likely to become obsolete as these generationally passed down wisdoms are at risk of being forgotten. Najmun Nahar Keya is primarily a painter, but also employs old photographs, gold gilding, drawing and printmaking, which she juxtaposes to create nostalgic settings. Having grown up in the old part of Dhaka, Keya draws her inspiration from the rapid social, economic and environmental changes happening in the area as a result of urbanization. She is interested in the duality of society focusing on lifestyle, culture, cityscapes, urban motifs, customs and architecture. b. 1980 in Dhaka, lives and works in Dhaka Miet Warlop The Board II, 2014/2023 Performance Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from BGMEA In a dynamic collaboration with female garment factory workers in Bangladesh, this performative installation challenges preconceptions of “who wears the pants” in society. A group of trunkless, armless, and headless pants in heels walk across the Dhaka Art Summit venue, taking stock of the artworks and the exhibition, laughing hysterically that anyone could take life so seriously and releasing their own irreverent gestures in paint for the audience to take in. Warlop’s work is about making the static-dynamic and making the dynamic-static. She treats art as an experience, like ritual concerts or objects animated by choreography. She works in cycles rather than in projects and believes in the attitude that accompanies an idea, using a combination of performance, choreography, theater, and sculpting skills to make her shows. Her work amplifies the dynamics of personal relationships that are created between memories, skin, objects and sounds. b. 1978, Torhout; lives and works in Brussels Rana Begum No.1234, 2022-2023 Fishing Net and Bamboo Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation with support from British Council BangladeshCourtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Inspired by the fragile drape of fishing nets and the filtered reflections of light across water, No. 1234 Net is closely connected to Begum’s childhood memories growing up in Bangladesh. The work sweeps above the visitors, layering veils of color and form. This organic expression marks a departure from Begum’s language of ordered geometric abstraction, growing in the space to create a dramatic, site specific installation. Begum utilizes industrial materials such as stainless steel, aluminum, copper, brass, glass, and wood in her minimalist sculptures and reliefs. Her contemplative works explore shifting interactions between geometry, color, and light, drawing inspiration from both the chance encounters of city life and the intricate patterns of Islamic art and architecture. b. 1977, Sylhet; lives and works in London Sahej Rahal Black Origin, 2022 Digital Collage Courtesy of the artist and Chatterjee and Lal This series of images, rising from the artist’s imagined world of digital “storm sisters,” gathers a collection of digital collages conjured in collusion with AI-driven image generation programs. The images portend visions of an Earth exhausted of all human life. In this aftermath, new denizens populate the planet, petroleum-drenched beings, draped in the ruins and refuse of humankind. They rise under mangroves that rest over ramshackle housing complexes, highway lines, boulevards, banks, and bureaucratic enclaves, mounting insurrections on the other side of extinction. Rahal’s work builds up mythology that he weaves together by drawing upon local legends and hidden histories and bringing them into conversation with the world today. He manifests his myth-making in sculptural installations, paintings, performances, films, and video games that he creates using found materials, ranging from digital technology as well as ephemera, found footage, salvaged furniture, and scrap material. b. 1988, Mumbai; lives and works in Mumbai Shawon Akand ধীরে বন্ধু ধীরে (Slow friend, be slow), 2022-2023 Hand-woven installation Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist Turtles are icons for slowness, and slowness is necessary to keep certain cultural practices alive that fall outside of the speed necessary for mechanical reproduction. Shawon Akand worked with traditional jamdani weavers to transform turtle motifs in his paintings into a woven installation. ধীরে বন্ধু ধীরে (Slow friend, be slow) questions where in the fast paced world the need for slow process work falls, and how slowness can be adapted in this timeline of urgency. When a slow-pace culture merges with a fast paced life, will any good come out of it? Akand’s body of work questions cultural norms with a critical perspective on social and political structures through painting, printmaking, installation, photography and video. He is passionate about empowering and amplifying the reach of Bangladeshi craftspeople in his creative work which extends from art making to curating to entrepreneurship. He founded the organization Jothashilpa which has been a melting pot where various categories of arts (such as fine art, folk art, native art, crafts etc.) are brought together to create a new art language rooted in cultural history. Since its inception Jothashilpa has been working with artisans and traditional folk artists living in rural as well as urban areas. This includes women who are experts in hand embroidery, jamdani weavers, cinema banner painters and rickshaw artists who he regularly collaborates with. b. 1976, Kushtia; lives and works in Dhaka Tanya Goel Botanical Studies (Monsoon Flowers), 2020-2023 Crushed pigments on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte who also provided support for this presentation Like flowers, we are formed by feelings that follow our relationship to sunlight and moonlight that illuminate our time on this planet, transforming what we perceive with our eyes into emotions that we feel with our hearts. The artist Tanya Goel has been meditatively studying flowers and the role that color plays in lived experience especially when it comes to the “laws of attraction.” As part of that process, she has been building what she refers to as “a collection of dust”; an archive of pigments that reminds her that color is ground. Ground: both in the sense of being a pulverized material (a physical process she actively engages with when making pigments), but also as coming from the surface beneath our feet (such as chalk and titanium dioxide). This series of Botanical Studies is inspired by monsoon flowers, forms that grow when the ground is wet and flooded with rainwater, just as beautiful as flowers blooming in the spring, but often overlooked when the global imagination around flowers relates to a world of “four seasons” that does not correspond with the seasons in South Asia. The artist perceived new universes when observing the pistils of flowers under a magnifying glass, zooming closer and closer in order to understand how the interplay of color around the reproductive parts of flowers serves to attract bees while also attracting our eyes. Goel reminds us that color is a powerful harbinger that life will go on in a duration that defies the limits of the optics of a human life-span. Goel’s compositions, noted for their density and complexity, are mathematical formulas which are established and then violated, resulting in a balance between structure and chaos. The artist makes her own pigments from a diverse array of materials including charcoal, aluminum, concrete, glass, soil, mica, graphite and foils, many sourced from sites of architectural demolitions in and around New Delhi. She is interested in the textures of her pigments as well as their colors, which is a direct result of how they reflect light. b. 1985, New Delhi; lives and works in New Delhi LOCATION: THIRD FLOOR Anthony McCall Line Describing a Cone 2.0, 1973/2010 Digital projection with fog machine Samdani Art Foundation Collection Like watching the sunset, experiencing the work Line Describing a Cone requires a duration of 30 minutes to watch a white curve appear and transform in space. This iconic work by Anthony McCall, key to the artistic movement that opened up the visual arts towards cinema, was inspired by the artist observing how projections in a cinema hall - where dust swirling in the air interacts with light spewing from the projector - can produce sculpture-like effects. Here, a thin mist flows into the room, allowing the viewer to progressively see a large cone of light which simultaneously becomes a light sculpture that the audience can walk into, almost like a portal into another universe. This work is not just something to watch, it is a universe to be absorbed in and to participate in. The artist inverts the relationship between the projector and the audience. Here, the public faces the projector, not the movie, destroying the illusion of a moving image while opening up another kind of space of wonder. The process of the realization of the film becomes its content. During the 1970s, Anthony McCall was one of a number of filmmakers who rejected the narrative demands of Hollywood cinema as well as the more abstract content of independent films, addressing instead the specific properties of the film medium itself–light, surface, projection, frames, and time. His work spans across drawing, installation, and performance, one of his preferred mediums. He is an indispensable reference to a younger generation of artists working in video and installation, including Matt Copson whose work is found at the entrance of DAS. b. 1946, Saint Paul's Cray; lives and works in New York Daniel Boyd Untitled (GPS Coordinates), 2022-2023 Vinyl on glass Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace Courtesy of the artist and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery with Curatorial Contributions from Alexie Glass-Kantor and Michelle Newton Daniel Boyd’s works often explore the ways in which Indigenous people and histories are seen, interpolated, and represented within a western or colonial vision. In this site-specific window installation, circular cut outs re-frame the views outside, transforming them into a web of illuminated dots, and spilling new light patterns across the gallery. As in Boyd’s artworks re-working colonial imagery, he uses a simple technique for mediating the audience’s vision to transform and reorient how things are seen. The work disrupts any kind of passive consumption of the landscape as usually framed by the architecture, while creating a new immersive visual spectacle. These circular forms are used to perform a complex re-envisioning wherein dark matter becomes part of a total image, connecting a multitude of flashes of detail beyond. Daniel Boyd is an Indigenous Australian multidisciplinary artist. His paintings, installations, and sculptures are informed by his Kudjla/Gangalu heritage, and examine Eurocentric narratives around Australia's colonial history. Through his signature 'dot' painting technique, Boyd presents visual manifestations of Indigenous collective memory and perception, suggesting a form of lens with which to view the world. b. 1982, Cairns; lives and works in Sydney Marina Perez Simão Untitled 1-9, 2022Oil on canvas Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Mendes Wood DM who also provided support for this presentation In a world where we are supposed to know everything through the touch of a screen, Marina Simão paints in order to conjure the wonder and awe that comes with experiencing a sense of being that was previously unthinkable. Her paintings open up possibilities for new states of matter beyond known solids, liquids, gasses, and plasmas. What colors might suffuse the smoldering gasses of yet-to-be-discovered atmospheres in far-off extraterrestrial landscapes? These paintings could be window portals of a spaceship, imagining rivers and waterbodies in yet-to-be-known planets in yet-to-be-known galaxies. Our minds are left free to wander in the myriad paths that open up in her paintings and reach far beyond the limits of the canvas. She takes us to the edge of an abyss with no solid place to step, but with no need to touch the ground. Simão uses a variety of techniques, such as collage, drawing, and oil painting, as starting points in order to marry interior and exterior landscapes, she composes visual journeys that sometimes traverse the unknown, the abstract and the nebulous, but also include visions and memories. With interests ranging from science to literature, the artist is on a constant quest to surprise viewers and herself by creating new worlds with visions we might have never imagined before. B. 1980, Vitória; lives and works in Sao Paulo Munem Wasif পতন / Collapse, 2021-2023 Spatial design in collaboration with Architect Salauddin AhmedArchival pigment prints, Variable sizesMetal structures, Wooden frames With additional support from Samdani Art Foundation Courtesy of the artist and Project88 Munem Wasif brings forward the conflicted relationship between the idea of development and the larger ecosystem. On one side flows a mighty river while on the other stands an intrusive structure made out of rods, cement, sand and stones. In these photographs, we see a man-made structure, geometric, brutal and monumental in scale, standing tall against the forces of vigorous currents of the Jamuna river that race down on the horizontal plane amidst soft and fragile elements of nature. Bangladesh is born out of the nerves and veins of numerous rivers spurring out of the Himalayas. These rivers move through the mountains, deciding the very nature of the land they pass through, the ecology, human character, life’s rhythm, politics and economy. Neo-liberal development processes in the last few decades have neglected the natural flow of water, climate and the lives around these areas. With human-centric notions of development, economic gain and consumption of natural resources as the basis of modern life, the voices of other species have been excluded resulting in the consequent loss of biodiversity. Grains of sand particles glisten like stars in these black and white photographs, a ferocious body of water bends hurriedly down the curves, and tall mutilated parts of the structure pierce through the skin of the river silently witnessing the flat plane. Bringing forward this juxtaposition of a horizontal and vertical axis, Munem Wasif’s image based installation discloses a contradictory tale of climate, life, nature and development. One can’t help but ask “What is the definition of development?” Wasif’s image-based works explore the notion of trace in its various forms. His complex installations often mix photographs with moving images, archive documents or collected paraphernalia to reveal notions of impermanence and insecurity. Never exhaustive and always open to interpretation, the narratives they develop simultaneously test the limits of documentary representation and the possibilities of fiction. b. 1983, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Shahzia Sikander Singing Suns, 2016 Digital animation with music by Du Yun Samdani Art Foundation Collection Shahzia Sikander recontextualizes traditional motifs from Indo-Persian miniature painting, such as the hair found on gopis (female worshippers of the Hindu god Krishna), into dynamic forms in motion in her animation practice that makes painting sing and dance. Gopi hair swirls in orb-like-forms of varying densities, reminiscent of the shape-shifting movements of flocks of birds or colonies of bats, creating an illusion of singing suns that light up the room. We often think about the sun as singular, but every star is a sun and there are billions of stars in billions of universes. The music accompanying this piece by the Chinese composer Du Yun rejects linearity, and through working cross-culturally across musical traditions, her collaboration with Sikander speaks to the way that cultural practices have developed new forms in circulation, taking new paths by way of collision and deep integration. Sikander reinterprets the tradition of Indo-Persian miniature painting in a vibrant multimedia practice that considers colonial legacies, orientalizing narratives, and current events, pairing ancient traditional painting techniques with the latest digital technology. She introduces postcolonial and feminist perspectives into rigorous compositions that feature scenes and abstractions related to trade, migration, and imperial histories. b. 1969, Lahore; lives and works in New York

ALL PROJECTS Geographies of Imagination Envisioned by SAVVY Contemporary with Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure S.B. Ndikung, and Olani Ewunnet with Jothashilpa in association with the Goethe Institut, Bangladesh and Samdani Art Foundation Geographies of Imagination is a growing research and exhibition project that manifests itself as a cartographic time-line, a performative process of un-mapping the geography of power and a space of discourse. The project is an attempt to rethink, reconfigure and pervert history-at-large and cartographic histories in particular. Each iteration of Geographies of Imagination assumes a different point of departure, situates itself within another real or fictional geography, and thus brings about differing bresearch processes and outcomes. For this rendition in Bangladesh, Geographies of Imagination had two vantage points. For its first point, it takes the partition of 85 million people throughout Bengal in 1905 implemented by the British Raj in an effort to ‘reorganise’ but ultimately to divide and rule, by cutting through the middle of the Bengali-speaking ‘nation’. Its second point is the Congo Conference hosted in Berlin in 1884, a moment in which fourteen Western ‘great powers’ partitioned the African continent amongst themselves for their geopolitical, exploitative economic and colonial agendas and fantasies, thereby re-imagining the cartography of the African continent irrespective of the peoples, cultures, and languages of Africans. This incomplete timeline winding across the South Plaza of DAS features significant socio-political and cultural movements that pre-defined identities and nationhood, as well as rebellions and revolts against colonial rule, such as those that forged forms of resistance that planted seeds for future emancipation across different geographies. This includes how the socio-political movements on the African continent informed resistance movements in Asia and vice-versa. One such example is the Indigo revolt (ca. 1859–1862), through which Bengali farmers organised against plantation owners who severely undercut the price of indigo, thereby forcing farmers to sell their products at a price far below their own cost of production. We trace lines that move across centuries and oceans, looking for instance at the Anlu revolt (1958–1961), brought forth by Kom women in western Cameroon against the British administrative interference in agriculture (which was a female domain) and the alleged plan by the ruling political party to sell Kom land to Nigerian Igbos. The rebellion, which was crucial for the victory of the democratic party at the time of independence from colonial rule, had at its core women stripping naked in front of men as a weapon of rebellion – a practice implemented by other groups like the Takembeng. We weave in connections between conferences and alliances that have strengthened positions of emancipation in contexts facing similar conditions of oppression. Novel forms of trans-national solidarity, from the first Pan-African conference held in London (in 1900), through the Baku Congress (1920), the Asian Relations Conference (1947), the Bandung Conference or African-Asian Conference in Indonesia (1955) and to the foundation of the Movement of the Non-Aligned that followed in Belgrade (1961–ongoing), among others. We pause on movements for independence and listen to fragments of charismatic political speeches bearing witness to new proposals and ideas with regards to justice, and sovereignty. But we also look at populistic and nationalistic speeches of more recent political leaders, at new border control monitoring systems, visa regulations, economic trades, and import and export of labour forces, that create and multiply invisible frontiers and partitions, and at how recent technological developments have facilitated novel forms of cartographic scarification and forced constructions of spaces and communities. In a time when in Cameroon the lines of citizenship are drawn upon remnants of colonial language structures between Anglophones and Francophones, in a time when the Citizen Amendment Act and national register of citizens want to make Indian Muslims foreigners in their own country, in a time when black Africans are kicked out of South Africa in several waves of xenophobic attacks, in a time when the Rohingyas are openly persecuted in Myanmar, we must reconsider the powers that make geography be. This iteration of Geographies of Imagination was developed through a wide range of interviews with academics and researchers from various disciplines, artists, curators, and researchers based predominantly in Dhaka in collaboration with the Samdani Art Foundation and Goethe Institut, Bangladesh. The timeline recurs with dates held in Bengali, Ethiopian and Gregorian calendars, to emphasise how the system of time itself is situated and subject to different representations and variations. The visualisation is the outcome of a close dialogue with the Dhaka based Jothashilpa collective, working with master cinema banner painter Ustad Mohammad Shoaib, artist and researcher Shawon Akand, and artists Sharmin Afroz Laboni and Alia Kamal. RESEARCH: Antonia Alampi, Bonaventure S.B. Ndikung, Olani Ewunnet and Shawon Akand. VISUALIZATION: Jothashilpa PRODUCTION MANAGEMENT: Hamayet Himu PAINTERS : Mohammad Shoaib, Didarul Dipu, S., M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim Dhaka Art Summit 2020 "Seismic Movements" CURATOR: Diana Campbell Betancourt ASSISTANT CURATOR: Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury RESEARCH ASSISTANCE: Eshan Kumer Maitra and Taiara Farhana Tareque Thanks to the many conversations had with Dhaka-based artists, researchers, historians, professors, and designers, including Sadya Mizan, Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Tayeba Begum Lipi, Mahbubur Rahman, Emran Sohel, Jewel A Rob and Sanjid Mahmud, Reetu Sattar, Mustafa Zaman, Rezaur Rahman, Tanzim Wahab, Kabir Ahmed Masum, Nurur Khan, Amena Khatun, Sanjoy Chakraborty, Shayer Gofur, Nazrul Islam, Wakilur Rahman, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Huraera Jabeen, Imtiaz Ahmed, Marina Tabassum, Parsa Sanjana Sajid and Sayeed Ferdous.