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

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 DAS 2023 considers the ways in which we inherit and form vocabularies to understand the world around us, and the mistranslation that can ensue when we try to apply these vocabularies 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 as shapers of history and culture as well as being metaphors for life in general are viewed in an embodied way through the lens of those who live in Bangladesh, next to the sea and rivers, underneath the storm systems, feeling the wind and rain. This is further explored through a consideration of how Bengali children encounter these phenomena, palpably but also via the stories passed down through generations. The aim is to see past the limits of translation which can be incapable of conveying the different ways we negotiate the world, and open up new channels for transcultural empathy. How do you tell the story of a crisis, while facilitating hope? 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. Exhibitions & Programmes বন্যা (Bonna) DAS 2023 Samdani Art Award Exhibition DAS 2023 Curated by Anne Barlow Very Small Feelings DAS 2023 Co-curated by Diana Campbell and Akansha Rastogi with Ruxmini Choudhury To Enter The Sky DAS 2023 Curated by Sean Anderson দ্বৈধ (A Duality) DAS 2023 Curated by Bishwajit Goswami with research support from Muhammad Nafisur Rahman, in collaboration with Brihatta Art Foundation Art Mediation Programme 2023 DAS 2023 Dhaka Art Summit Purposeful Goods DAS 2023 Curated by Teresa Albor Talks Programme DAS 2023 Dhaka Art Summit 2023 LOAD MORE Bonna is the fifth chapter under the Artistic Direction of Chief Curator Diana Campbell and is complemented by a series of intersecting exhibitions including the Samdani Art Award curated by Anne Barlow (Director, Tate St. Ives), To Enter the Sky curated by Sean Anderson (Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture), দ্বৈধ(a duality) curated by Bishwajit Goswami (Assistant Professor, Department of Drawing and Painting, University of Dhaka) with research support from Muhammad Nafisur Rahman (Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the School of Design, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati) in collaboration with Brihatta Art Foundation, and Very Small Feelings, co-curated by Campbell and Akansha Rastogi (Senior Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art) with Ruxmini Choudhury (Curator, Samdani Art Foundation), and a transnational folklore research team with contributions from Kanak Chanpa Chakma and other indigenous thought leaders connecting traditions across Bangladesh and Northeast India. DAS is a continually unfolding story imagined by hundreds of contributors, and this edition will include over 120 artists, architects, and writers, over 60% Bangladeshi, and over 50% producing new work for the show. Rather, the DAS concept of Bonna challenges binaries - between necessity and excess, between regeneration and disaster, between adult and child, between male and female. DAS 2023 invokes and interprets 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 environment crises, and discoveries are named, allowing Bonna, the young girl, to speak from Bangladesh to the world; she asks why the words for weather are gendered, what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be. During Bengali New Year, Bangladeshi people sing a song written by Rabindranath Tagore, Esho he Boishakh , which calls upon the first month of summer to bring storms to wash away any residue of ugliness from the previous year: “'Bring forth and sound your conch of storm, Let the foggy mesh of ugly illusion be gone.” Ebb and flow, drought and abundance are phenomena that have shaped the culture and history of Bangladesh (and South Asia) just as a river cuts an ever-changing path as it seeks lower ground. 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. During the planning stages of DAS 2023, the north-western part of the country was overwhelmed with severe flooding and we are releasing the thematics of Dhaka Art Summit at a time when devastating floods and the many lives lost and made precarious in South Asia demand our urgent attention. This is a sobering instruction to consider the implications during DAS 2023 for a country that has always managed to co-exist with extremes. The word for flood, ‘Bonna,’ is also given as a common name for girls in Bangladesh. A flood in Bangladesh does not simply translate into the dominant idea of the word flood carrying a singular connotation of “disaster.” 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. A tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal was captured in the iconic “Blue Marble'' image of the Earth in 1972, the first full image of the Earth taken from space and one of the most circulated images of all time. The Bangladeshi artist and climate justice activist Nabil Ahmed points out that the cyclone in this image derives “from the same tropical storm system that produced Bhola, which devastated the coast of East Pakistan in November 1970. In its aftermath followed a genocide and war of national liberation for present-day Bangladesh. After Bhola, looking at a cyclone will never be the same; the potential for political violence and an ever-circling wind are united as one.” 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.” 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 is 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? By extension, the Bangladeshi artist and researcher Shawon Akand expands upon mud as a metaphor for the adaptive power of Bengalis; mud can be hard as stone when baked under the summer sun, a fertile bed for crops during the harvest season, and liquid during the monsoon, all without losing its essence.

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 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. 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. Samdani Art Foundation also awarded the Samdani Artist Development Award to Khaled Hasan and Samdani Young Talent Award to Musrat Reazi at the closing ceremony of Dhaka Art Summit. The award was judged by a panel of international judges that consisted of Kyla McDonald, Assistant Curator from Tate Modern Museum; Deepak Ananth, a professor at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in France; Elaine W. Ng, Editor and Publisher of Art Asia Pacific Magazine; Bose Krishnamachari, founder of Kochi Biennale; renowned artist Ravinder Reddy from India, and Paris-based Bangladeshi artist Shahabuddin Ahmed.

Contact Us Don't hesitate to reach out to us. Use the form below to say hello, ask questions, or share your thoughts. First name Last name Email* Phone Message* Submit Location Tel: +8802 8878784-7 Fax: +8802 887 8204 info@samdani.com.bd Level 5, Suite 501 & 502, Shanta Western Tower, 186 Gulshan – Tejgaon Link Road, Tejgaon I/A, Dhaka-1208, Bangladesh. SAF Office 01 sazzad@samdani.com.bd +8801777763430 Sazzad Hossain Head of Administration Press Contact 02

ALL PROJECTS MAHASSA Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia The Dhaka Art Summit, Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) at Cornell University, and Asia Art Archive, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, launch a new research project entitled Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia. The project brings together a team of leading international faculty and emerging scholars to investigate parallel and intersecting developments in the cultural histories of modern Africa, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. These regions have been shaped by shared institutional and intellectual developments during the twentieth century, including the rise of modern art practices associated with the withdrawal of colonialism and the consolidation of nationalism, the founding of institutions such as the art school and the museum, and increasing exchange with international metropolitan centres via travel and the movement of ideas through publications and exhibitions. Viewing them in terms of statist and national art histories obscures their analysis in a comparative framework. By contrast, this programme emphasises a connected and contextualised approach to better understand both common developments as well as divergent trajectories. The curriculum will cover both core concepts and emerging perspectives from postcolonial, decolonial, transnational, transcultural, and global discourses, with seminar topics that range from art and social difference, creolisation, exhibition histories, postcolonial nationalisms, media and popular culture, multiple modernisms, pedagogy, and transnational networks, among others. Participants will be actively engaged in the sessions as experts in their own respective disciplines. By presenting two papers during the course of the programme, early career scholars will be encouraged to pursue their research informed by the theoretical and art historical contexts of this project. By integrating presentations by participants with core faculty lectures, the programme is envisioned as a reciprocal process of learning exchange. Presentations will also take place at peer institutions in Hong Kong and Bangladesh, as well as at the Dhaka Art Summit. Field trips such as collection, museum, and modernist architecture visits and guest lectures will be organised during both the Hong Kong and Dhaka sessions. With the goal of optimising the impact of in-person workshops, virtual meetings will be held in addition to the respective Hong Kong and Dhaka sessions. Emerging scholars from and with connections to Africa, South Asia, and/or Southeast Asia currently enrolled in a graduate programme in Art History, Architectural History, or Cultural Studies, or who have finished their graduate training in these fields in the last three years, were encouraged to apply. Twenty-one scholars were selected from a competitive international applicant pool. The scholars and their research proposals can be found on the right-hand column. Building on the initial convening at AAA in August 2019, the MAHASSA curriculum in February will focus on methodologies and specific histories, through seminars, panels, guest talks, and field trips with core and invited faculty. Working closely with host and partner, Dhaka Art Summit, topics such as architecture, art schools, and the place of collectives will be explored in depth from a conceptual and practical approach. This was a closed-door event. The open call for participation ended on 28 Feb 2019. Image: Muzharul Islam, College of Arts and Crafts, Dhaka. Photo: Randhir Singh. Afropolitan: Contemporary African Art as Paradox Fri, 7 Feb 2020 Respondents: Simon Soon and Sanjukta Sunderason, Diana Campbell (mod.) Art historian and curator Salah M. Hassan (Cornell University) delivered a keynote on contemporary African art and its global significance. Respondents art historian Simon Soon (University of Malaya) and historian Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Leiden) engaged with Hassan in a discussion on parallel developments that emerged in South and Southeast Asia since the 1980s. Art and Hunger: Transnational Frames Sat, 8 Feb 2020 Art and Hunger: Transnational Frames Panelists: Elizabeth Giorgis and Sanjukta Sunderason, Noopur Desai (mod.) This panel by art historian Elizabeth Giorgis (Addis Ababa University) and historian Sanjukta Sunderason (University of Leiden) explores the politics of famine in the context of anti-colonial and antiauthoritarian struggles in South Asia and North Africa, and how competing narratives of nationalism were articulated through social realism and abstraction in response to Bengal (1943), Vietnamese (1945), and Ethiopian famines (1984–85). Modern Architecture Sun, 9 Feb 2020 Modern Architecture Panelists: Sean Anderson, Farhan Karim, Simon Soon, Nurur Rahman Khan, Sneha Ragavan (mod.) This panel by architectural historians Sean Anderson (Museum of Modern Art), Farhan Karim (University of Kansas), architecture historian and architect Nurur Rahman Khan (Muzharul Islam Archives) and art historian Simon Soon (University of Malaya) examines modernisms as they played out in the built environment of the Global South. Panelists will discuss how innovations in domestic and urban life engendered hybrid building typologies and visual motifs that simultaneously resonated with universal modernist tropes, while incorporating local vernacular traditions. Rise of the Art School Mon, 10 Feb 2020 Rise of the Art School Panelists: Ming Tiampo, Sneha Ragavan, Chuong-Dai Vo, Shaela Sharmin, John Tain (mod.) This panel investigates the role of art schools as important sites of transcultural encounter, knowledge sharing, and art production during the modern period. By discussing case studies such as Santiniketan, Baroda, Dhaka and Chittagong Charukala, and Slade, among others, panelists will explore the relationship between pedagogy and community. Panelists include art historian Ming Tiampo (Carleton University), researchers Sneha Ragavan and Chuong-Dai Vo (Asia Art Archive), artist collective The Otolith Group, and Dean of Visual Arts at University of Chittagong and artist Shaela Sharmin. Collectives from the 1950s to the Present Fri, 14 Feb 2020 Collectives from the 1950s to the Present Panelists: Melissa Carlson, Samina Iqbal, Dana Liljegren, Dhali Al Mamoon, Michelle Wong (mod.) By reviewing four case studies: Pakistan in the 1950s, multiple sites in the 1960s, Bangladesh in the 1980s, and presentday Senegal, panelists will examine how artists fashioned modes of resistance and solidarity through new forms of collectivity. Here, formal and informal artist groups created frameworks for negotiating between international, national, and local agents. Panelists include MAHASSA participants Melissa Carlson, Samina Iqbal, Dana Liljegren, and artist and art historian Mustafa Zaman. Reflections on Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia Thu, 25 Jun 2020 Reflections on Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia Panelists: Iftikhar Dadi, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Elizabeth W Giorgis, John Tain (mod.) Organised by Asia Art Archive in America, this panel gather four of the MAHASSA faculty members, Dr. Iftikhar Dadi, Diana Campbell Betancourt, Dr. Elizabeth W Giorgis, and John Tain, who provide an overview and share their thoughts on the impetus behind and outcome so far of this evolving project. Programme Partners: Sponsor: THIS PROJECT IS MADE POSSIBLE WITH THE SUPPORT OF THE GETTY FOUNDATION THROUGH ITS CONNECTING ART HISTORIES INITIATIVE.

ALL PROJECTS Moving Image Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming: Videos, Films and Talks Programme Curated by the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) To use images, sounds, voices, gestures, expressions, noises, colours,spaces and silences to deprogram the inherited orders of temporality, chronology and history that seek to manage and encourage the form of the present and the fate of the future. To formulate audiovisual projects that operate as diagrams for reprogramming the parameters of the present. To intervene in the timelines of the present in order to hack the lines of time. To be guided by an imagination of the future that works on and in and through the present. These impulses, intimations and imperatives subtend the works of the artists selected by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group for Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming. Works by Ayo Akingbade, Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Tony Cokes, Esi Eshun, Black Quantum Futurism, Mohammed Harb, Louis Henderson, Onyeka Igwe, Salman Nawati, Ana Pi, Morgan Quaintance, Alfred Santana, Rania Stephan, Sharif Waked and Rehana Zaman can be understood as rituals for the deprogramming of time, reprogramming in time and programming with time. Rites that aim to bring viewers face to face with the violence of images and the threat of sounds so as to intervene in the foreclosures of colonial time and racial space. Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming includes conversations with invited artists and theorists. The videos directed by Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Mohammed Harb, Salman Nawati and Sharif Waked were programmed by Jasbir Puar and Francesco Sebregondi for the installation Future Lives of Return, 2019, and commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Alfred Santana Alfred Santana is an independent filmmaker and photographer with numerous award-winning documentaries, public affairs films and videos that have aired on both network and public television. Mr. Santana’s production company, Al Santana Productions, produces documentary, narrative and experimental work for television, the web and theatrical presentation. The company also produces industrial and corporate videos. Voices of the Gods examines the Akan and Yoruba religions, two West African traditions practiced within the United States today. It looks at their cosmologies, their use of music, dance and medicine in various ceremonies and rituals. The film includes contemporary and historical examples of the influences of these religions in secular African-American culture, which in turn influenced mainstream American society, more through culture than religion, and in some ways, even politics. Ana Pi Ana Pi is an artist working with image and choreography, a contemporary dancer and pedagogue, a researcher-lecturer performer on peripheral dances and she also collaborates on projects of various kinds. NOIRBLUE opens space to fiction and an atlantic navigation of some peripheral bodies. This exercise interrogates presence, absence, speeches and time to produce an extemporary dance aligned to two specific colors: the blackness of the skin and the ultramarine blue pigment. Ayo Akinbade Ayo Akingbade is a British Nigerian artist and filmmaker who has produced a number of acclaimed artist films exploring the contemporary Black experience in London particularly in relation to housing. She is an alumnus of Sundance Ignite and New Contemporaries. The future of social housing is threatened by the AC30 Housing Bill. Dear Babylon is set in London’s East End, a trio of art students are eager to raise awareness about their neighbourhood, especially the lives of tenants and people who work on the estate. Dear Babylon, 2019, 21 min. Courtesy of the filmmaker Set in 1985 and the present day, So They Say (2019, 11 min) explores and reflects on the often forgotten histories of black and brown community struggle in the East London borough of Newham. Street 66 (2018, 13 min) chronicles the life of Ghanaian housing activist Dora Boatemah and her influence on the regeneration of Angell Town Estate in Brixton, South London. Dr. Theodora Boatemah MBE was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1957, where her mother worked in President Kwame Nkrumah’s cabinet. In 1987, she founded the Angell Town Community Project and campaigned for the community-controlled regeneration of the Angell Town Estate in Brixton. Dora was awarded an MBE in 1994 for services to the community in Brixton and received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University in 1996. Dora died in 2001 at the age of 43. Black Quantum Futurism Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalised communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, video, and object series continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. All Time is Local, 2019, 5 min. Courtesy of the filmmaker Time Travel Experiments (Experimental Time Order) (2017, 9:30 min) documents experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. The depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies, and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. Black Quantum Futurism Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalised communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, video, and object series continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. Time Travel Experiments (Experimental Time Order) (2017, 9:30 min) documents experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. The depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies, and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. Black Quantum Futurism Visual Astrolabe (2015, 7:07 min) focuses on the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism, an astrolabe known as the first computer, that was recovered in 82 fragments from a sunken shipwreck off the island of Antikythera around 1900. Although it is widely believed to have been constructed by a Greek astronomer around 100 BCE, this origin story has not been confirmed. No other such technologically complex artifact appeared anywhere in Europe until the late 14th century. In 2015 AD, BQF Theorists unearthed rare, previously unseen records and unheard sound clips claiming to detail the true origins of the mechanism as designed and constructed by a secret society in ancient Ifriqiyah as a device for time displacement. On the occasion of the 50 year anniversary of the enactment of the United States Fair Housing Act, Black Space Agency Training Video (2018, 4:09 min) explores the chronopolitical imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements during the space race, particularly as it unfolded in North Philadelphia in 1968. The series follows the pattern of entanglements in the fight for affordable and fair housing, displacement/space/land grabs, and gentrification for a better understanding of its present day implications on Black spatial-temporal autonomy. Futurist Garvey // Gravity WAVES Sound Image Study (2016, 2:42 min) represents one example of futurity in the Black diaspora, which predates the coining of the term afrofuturism. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Star Line envisioned the future of Black Americans as a return, by ship, to Africa, and took practical steps to create an alternative economy to achieve these goals. Imagine how different the course of history would be, had the Black Star Line succeeded with its stated mission. On the other hand, one can see the spread of the Garveyite waves of gravity, his impact on the future of Black America-to-come, as a catalyst and inspiration for other Black resistance movements, with an influence in name and philosophy capable of binding space-time. Esi Eshun Esi Eshun’s work encompasses poetry, performance and music making and has been presented across a number of platforms including Norway’s 2018 Radio Space Borealis Festival, Resonance FM and Wave Farm FM, and at live venues including Iklectik, New River Studios and The Intimate Space. Unfolding through a series of enigmatic tableaux, told through the artist’s poetry, voice, field recordings and improvised score, The Beast (2018, 8 min) takes the listener on a dreamlike journey through myth, collective memory and fable, to a place where dark undercurrents linking the city of London, the West African coast, muck, gold and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial classic, The Wretched of the Earth, coincide. Francesco Sebregondi Francesco Sebregondi is an architect and a researcher, whose work explores the intersections of violence, technology, and the urban condition. He is a researcher and project coordinator at the independent research agency Forensic Architecture, as well as the co-editor of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press, 2014). His current research examines the architecture of the Gaza blockade. Hadeel Assali Hadeel Assali is a Palestinian-American filmmaker, writer, and currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University. She created several experimental short films centered around the Gaza Strip, which have been screened in several small film festivals, academic conferences, and art exhibitions. Assali is currently working on her first feature-length documentary. Daggit Gaza is a play on translation, as the spicy tomato salad made in Gaza (called daggah) also means ‘the pounding of Gaza’. Preparation happens whilst a phone conversation between Houston and Gaza serves as voiceover commentary. Jasbir Puar Jasbir Puar is a queer theorist and Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Puar is the author of award-winning books Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories. Louis Henderson Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Developing an archaeological method in cinema, his films explore the sonic space of images, geologic time, haunted landscapes and voices within archives. Wandering from a study of the handwritten memoirs of Toussaint Louverture in the French National Archives to his prison cell in the Jura mountains in which they were written, Bring Breath to the Death of Rocks proposes an archaeology of the colonial history of France buried within its landscapes and institutions. If stratigraphy is the writing of strata, here we have a reading of this strata in which the fossilised history of Louverture can be brought to life through a geologic haunting. The film dramatises the escape of Louverture’s ghost from his castle prison (through the body of a young Haitian researcher) into a form of marronage and errantry within the fields of snow and a dark baroque-like cave. The film offers what Glissant described in the introduction to his play Monsieur Toussaint as ‘a prophetic vision of the past’. We hear an echo, a spiral retelling. Mohamed Harb Mohammed Harb was born in Gaza and graduated from Al Najah University, Nablus, with a BA in Fine Arts in 2001. He is a member of the Palestinian Association of Fine Artists and since 2003 has been working as a director at the Palestine satellite TV channel in Gaza. Harb has also participated in many local, regional and international exhibitions, festivals and workshops, in Europe and the Arab world. He lives and works in Gaza. Light From Gaza is a meditation on the waxing and waning of access to light and other daily necessities due to the titration of electricity in Gaza. Morgan Quaintance Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. His moving-image work has been shown recently at LIMA, Amsterdam, Cubitt Gallery, London; Jerwood Space, London; the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, London Film Festival 2018, and November Film Festival. Bataaxalu Ndakaaru (Letter from Dakar) surveys aspects of the vibrant grassroots arts and culture scene in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Highlighting the difference between the openness and innovation of community run spaces versus the staid professionalism of established galleries and museums, the film offers the first critical look at the much touted Museum of Black Civilisations. Another Decade (2018, 26:50 min) combines archive and found footage from the 1990s, with recently shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Focusing on testimonies and statements made by artists, theorists and cultural producers that are still pertinent over two decades later, the film is propelled by the sense reality that very little socio-cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom. While recent attention paid to the ’90s casts a largely apolitical and monocultural view over the decade, the work seeks to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, iconoclastic, and confrontational decade that promised a future still yet to arrive. Onyeka Igwe Onyeka Igwe works between cinema and installation. Her research-based practice uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives exploring the physical body and geographical place as contested sites of cultural and political meaning. This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria –retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. The Names Have Changed tells us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown. Rania Stephan Rania Stephan has directed videos and creative documentaries notable for their play with genres, and the long-running investigation of memory, identity, archeology of image and the figure of the detective. Anchored in the turbulent reality of her country, her documentaries give a personal perspective to political events. She gives raw images a poetic edge, filming chance encounters with compassion and humour. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni is a rapturous elegy to a rich era of film production in Egypt, lapsed today, through one of its most revered actress: Soad Hosni, who from the 1960 into the 1990s, embodied the modern Arab woman in her complexity and paradoxes. Pieced exclusively from VHS footage of films starring Soad Hosni, the film is constructed as a tragedy in three acts where the actress tells her dreamed life story. Irreverent, playful, marvellous, serious, the film proposes a singular rewriting of a golden period of Egyptian cinema, enacted by an exceptional artist, tragic star, symbol of modern Arab womanhood. Entirely taken from an old Egyptian science fiction film The Master of Time (1987) about an illuminated scientist wanting to extend human life, Threshold (2018, 11:30 min) is built on the intuition that if this science fiction film were emptied of all its fictional elements, retaining only the transition shots featuring doors, gates and boundary crossings, The Master of Time would reveal its quintessence: its obsession with eternity and the extension of time. Here, the science fiction experience is doubled. This new condensed version of The Master of Time lies on the threshold of fiction and abstraction, narration and experimentation, cinema and art. Double Cross (2018, 3:40 min) reduces the intricate labyrinth of Threshold into an infernal drama of entrance and exit that condenses space and time into an infernal loop of crossing, recrossing and re-recrossing. Double Cross is Rania Stephan’s profound meditation on the power of montage: an ode to the plot twist and the fatal destiny of film noir enacted in the eternal passage from illumination to occlusion. Memories of a Private Eye (2015, 30:35 min) is the first chapter in a trilogy which investigates the filmmaker’s personal archive. Evoking the language of film noir, it foregrounds a fictional detective to help unfold deep and traumatic memories. The film spirals around a lost image: the only moving image of the filmmaker’s dead mother. How is absence lived? What remains of love, war and death with the passing of time? These are the questions that are delicately displayed for contemplation. Weaving together images from different sources (private archive, history of the cinema, television, you-tube) while investigating the past, the film unfolds into a labyrinthic maze to create a blueprint of remembrance itself. Rehana Zaman Rehana Zaman is based in London, working with moving image and performance. Her work considers the interplay of multiple social dynamics that constitute subjects along particular socio-political formations. These narrative based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? emerges from a nine-month collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers, a new women’s film collective made up of young women from Somali and Pakistani backgrounds. The film documents the group as they work together to create a thriller focusing on a teenage girl’s attempt to find a missing local boy. Comprised of candid footage captured during the workshop process, behind-the-scenes filming and archive footage of antiracist organising in the aftermath of the Toxteth race riots, the film questions how modes of representation and societal structures are gendered and racialised. Your Ecstatic Self (2019, 31:50 min) is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency. Salman Nawati Salman Nawati was born in Gaza in 1987. He works as a Coordinator of Plastic Art in Qattan Centre for the Child. In 2011 he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Painting within the Faculty of Fine Art at Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. His works were shown in group exhibitions internationally. Port Hour shows the artist’s vexed relationship with the Gaza port, where he struggles with the sea which acts as both freedom and barrier. Scenario (2013, 2:43 min) is a meditation on movement, and an oblique reference to maiming. Sharif Waked Sharif Waked was born in Nazareth in 1964. He studied Fine Art and Philosophy at Haifa University, Israel between 1983 and 1986. His work critically engages the prejudices, propaganda, and institutional violence that inform Middle Eastern politics. By creating striking juxtapositions between the representations of Arabs and Islam in the media and injustices experienced in reality. Waked reveals the ways that power, politics, and aesthetics are powerfully inscribed on the surface of everyday life. In 2009, two donkeys were transformed into zebras in Gaza by an entrepreneur whose zoo was badly damaged in the Israeli incursion earlier that year. The aftermath of this cross-dressing of species is the subject of Bath Time, where a donkey takes a good shower after a long day saturated with the spectator’s gaze and laughter at the Gaza Zoo. Taysir Batniji Taysir Batniji was born in Gaza and lives and works in Paris. Since the 1990s Batniji has worked mainly with video and photography, two ‘light’ mediums that fit with a career which has involved much travelling to and from between Palestine and Europe. He documents Palestinian reality in a physically vivid, anti-spectacular way by focusing on displacement, intermediate states, and the inhibition of movement. These objective issues which are part and parcel of the social, political and cultural context in Palestine also reflect the position of the artist as a witness and contributor to the life of his country, but also the Western art scene. Transit presents a silent slideshow, made up of photographic images, taken at border passages between Egypt and Gaza, reflecting the passing of time and the difficult and often impossible conditions of mobility for today’s Palestinians. Tony Cokes Tony Cokes investigates identity and opposition through reframing and repositioning. He questions how race and gender influence the construction of subjectivities, and how they are perceived through ‘representational regimes of image and sound’ as perpetuated by Hollywood, the media and popular culture. His assemblages consist of archival footage, media images, text commentary, and pop music. Face Value can be said to have started with a short text that Cokes was asked to write prior to the American release of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in 2006. At the time he decided to focus his commentary on one section of the film the end credits featuring the David Bowie song Young Americans. The text was not published, but while writing it a friend informed him of some quotations from David Bowie that seemed to be relevant to it. When in 2011 he had an opportunity to publish a portion of the text in a new context, another friend and colleague suggested some then recent quotations from von Trier himself that might relate to the project. What started as a long epigraph to a text became a sequence of images. The text in Evil 12 (edit B) Fear, Spectra and Fake Emotions, (2009, 11:43 min) is excerpted from Brian Massumi’s essay Fear (The Spectrum Said), which discusses the Bush Administration’s terror alert colorcoding system as a method to modulate public affect via media representation. The insertion of a soundtrack by Modeselektor with uncanny vocals from Paul St. Hilaire (remixed by Dabrye) seeks to double (ghost) and thereby underline the point of Massumi’s complex media textual analysis. Mikrohaus, or the Black Atlantic? (2006–2008, 31:07 min) presents transcribed text interviews set to music. The project was inspired by the writing of music critic Philip Sherburne, who coined the term “Micro House’ to describe the conjuncture of minimal techno and house music tropes in the early 21st century. Central to the video’s intent is foregrounding how black pop cultural forms are consumed and then redeployed to produce hybrid interventions in today’s global contexts. The work also features fragmented interviews with German techno/ house producers framed by the comments of Detroit techno artists discussing the relation between their practices, which reference Afro-American musical traditions, and questions of racial politics, perception, and identity.

ALL PROJECTS Rehearsing The Witness: The Bhawal Court Case, A Talk By Zuleikha Chaudhari Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, Dhaka, 21 April 2017 The Bhawal court case was an extended pre-independence Indian court case that revolved around the identity of a sanyasi (or Hindu religious ascetic), claiming to be the second Kumar of Bhawal (the heir of one of the last large zamindari estates in Dhaka), who was presumed dead a decade earlier. The claim was contested by the British Court of Wards and by the widow of Ramendra Narayan Roy (the second Kumar of Bhawal) Bibhabati Devi. The case was in trial from 1930 – 1946. Over the course of sixteen years, the physical attributes, birthmarks, portraits and testimony were collated as forensic evidence to establish the claimant/sanyasi’s identity as being the Kumar. Hundreds of witnesses, including doctors, photographers, artists, prostitutes, peasants, revenue collectors, tenants, holy men, magistrates, handwriting experts, relatives and passers-‐by were deposed. The case went from the District Court in Dhaka to the High Court of Calcutta to the Privy Council in London, finally ending in 1946 with a victory for the plaintiff, who died a few days after the verdict. Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case uses this trial about a possible impostor to re-examine the enormous archive that the case produced, through performance as a means of problematising the notions of evidence, archive and identity. Both the domains of the law and theatre/acting frame larger questions that pertain to the production of truth and reality, assumptions of stable, consistent and believable identities and the construction of a credible narrative. The project explores the questions of law as performance, the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. The talk at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute described the three-day performance at the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 which drew a relationship between re-enactment, (crime-scene) reconstruction and retrial; the complex tension between forensic evidence, the act of speculation/imagination and truth-finding and truth-making. . Zuleikha Chaudhari is a theatre director and lighting designer. Her current research uses archival documents (texts and photographs) to develop theatrical performances as a way of thinking about the relationship between production of memory and the role of the archive and how this pertains to the retrieval and reliving of an event. The constructed narratives within the works looked at the relationship between personal lived experience and memories and larger historical events and narratives. These works use a combination of reportage, portraiture, documentary and fiction - the editing, re-interpretation and re-positioning of speculative ideas, opinions, beliefs and anecdotes towards the production of new narratives is central to these investigations about the relationship between history and theatre. Her ongoing research considers the structures and codes of performance as well the function and processes of the actor as reality and truth production. It investigates the tension between looking or watching and doing or acting. Her current projects include three court trials – The Bhawal Court Case (1930-46), The Trial of Bahadurshah Zafar (1858) and the India National Army Trials (1945-46) within the framework of law as performance; the role of performance in law and the performativity of legal truth-production. Her works have been shown at performance festivals, galleries and exhibitions in United States, Germany, France, Belgium, Vienna, South Africa, South Korea, China, Japan, The Netherlands, Pakistan and India.

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

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

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

ALL PROJECTS 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.

ALL PROJECTS One Hundred Thousand Small Tales MMCA, Colombo, 12 Dec 2019 - 12 Mar 2020 Dhaka Art Summit 2018 exhibition one hundred thousand small tales travels to The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Sri Lanka. Commissioned by the Dhaka Art Summit, the exhibition was first shown at DAS in February 2018.