ALL PROJECTS My Oma 8 December 2023 — 1 September 2024, Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands Sheelasha Rajdhandhari's remarkable piece, 'My great-great-grandmother’s shawl,' from the SAF collection was featured at Kunstinstituut Melly, Netherlands, as part of the 'My Oma' exhibition. 'My Oma' was curated by Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy, Rosa de Graaf, Jessy Koeiman, Julija Mockutė, and Vivian Ziherl. Its key producers were Shana Lewis, Pilar Mata Dupont, and Wendy van Slagmaat-Bos. Advisors to the research and planning process of "My Oma" include our Artistic Director, Diana Campbell, alongside Edward Gillman, Sun A Moon, and Manuela Moscoso. In the performative artwork titled 'My great-great-grandmother’s shawl,' Kathmandu-based artist Sheelasha Rajbhandari intricately weaves together the threads of change embedded in fabric and time. The three sets of photographs depict generations of women in the artist’s maternal family, tracing the evolving clothing preferences that mirror broader political and economic transformations within Nepal. The first image features the artist's great-great-grandmother, Purna Kumari Vaidhya, adorned in a Dambar Kumari Shawl, a 19th-century textile composed of a block-printed fabric sandwiched between fine muslin. The second and third portraits depict her grandmother, Chiniya Devi Bijukchhe, and the artist herself, both framed in the same posture and draped in a shawl. However, these two shawls are replicated by the artist, evident by the clothing tags. This visual narrative explores the growing influence of capitalism and ready-made items, prompting an interrogation on notions of authenticity and mimicry in the production of culturally significant items.

ALL PROJECTS Stitching Collective Envisioned by Gudskul, Jakarta Stitching Ecosystem Stitching Ecosystem is a mini-festival format comprised of a series of workshops, sharing sessions, and market spaces with a focus on five of Gudskul’s eleven ‘collective studies’ subjects: Collective Sustainability Strategy, Public Relations, Spatial Practices, Art Laboratory, and Knowledge Garden. Gudskul will connect and reconnect collective networks and foster inter-collectiveness in order to understand and collaborate across different themes and contexts. We take this opportunity to build a bigger ecosystem, while maintaining the valuable organic intimacy found in any collective praxis. Further, this series of activities will cultivate, foster and distribute knowledge among the participating collectives in DAS, while also expanding network and sharable resources with the general public. Collective as School Collective as School is a sharing session between over forty collectives participating in DAS 2020 from Africa, Australia, Central and South America, Oceania, and South and Southeast Asia. Each collective will share their respective stories about how and why their collectives were established, what their goals are, how their regeneration processes unfold, what they learned, what their structure looks like, how they have sustained and survived, how they self-evaluate, how knowledge gets distributed within the collective internally and externally to broader communities, and how their collectives support each member as an individual. This closed-door introductory session will produce a series of schemes/maps of potentials, strategies, and common understanding to prime the remaining nine days of DAS. Speculative Collective Speculative Collective is Gudskul’s latest iteration of a knowledge-sharing and mapping module that was conceived as a tool to explore forms of collectivising through direct practice, forming a kind of know-how. Compressed both spatially and temporally, the project extends from ongoing work within the context of Jakarta. In a loosely defined process, Gudskul invites strangers to meet and share what they consider to be ‘knowledge’ by playing the roles of both teacher and student in a quick reciprocal exchange. This newly formed pair must then couple with another pair, forming a temporary collective. Gudskul has designed a ‘tool’ to enable participants to record this process for themselves and carry it on past these random yet choreographed meetings. Gerobak Cinema Gerobak Cinema is a mobile screening station presented as part of The Collective Body curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt and Kathryn Weir. The Chattogram based collective Jog and the Jakarta based collective ruangrupa collaborate using a rickshaw, producing screening sessions in several spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment will be collaboratively designed by artists, designers, IT technicians and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos/movies, or even particular Bangladeshi movies. With these activities, we are trying to strengthen the relationships and collaboration potentials with the local community who may have not arrived at the world of contemporary art. Printmaking Workshop A collaborative workshop and sharing session between Grafis Huru Hara (Jakarta) and Pangrok Sulap (Sabah) and Shunno Space (Dhaka) will explore and raise similar issues the collectives are facing through specific media: woodcut and linocut techniques. This workshop will be open to students. Loneless Market One of our central focuses in developing an ecosystem is how sustainability could be understood through different perspectives. Not only in monetary aspects, but also values and notions, network and regeneration. Loneless Market is a session designed by Gudskul to develop exchange activities in material and immaterial things, and also at the same time generating revenues to benefit all of the participants of this marketplace. This will be a celebration of the nine days of collective work built across DAS. DAS is a Non-commercial research platform that exists to support grassroots art ecosystems – and all proceeds go directly to the collectives involved in this platform. Cooking & Karaoke Tent For the last evening before DAS closes, Gudskul will collaborate with local collectives to imagine a big dinner through creating a fusion of Bangladeshi and Indonesian food recipes. A karaoke session will play some well-known Bangladeshi and Indonesian songs and the group will be open to song requests. Open to all participating collectives and artists in DAS, this event serves to strengthen the bonds and networks built up across DAS 2020.

ALL PROJECTS Solo Art Projects Curated by Diana Campbell Amanullah Mojadidi (b. 1971, Jacksonville, USA, lives and works in Paris, France) Untitled Garden #1 , 2015-2016 Neon, wood, stone and grass Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist. Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Jenni Carter Untitled Garden #1 by Amanullah Mojadidi opens up a space to think about the role misunderstandings play in shaping history and the way we view our place in the world. Neon Katakana Japanese characters in this garden spell the word Mu, referring to a state of “nothingness” or “nonbeing” in Zen Buddhism. Mu, however, is also the name of what several pseudoscientists believed was the lost continent and civilisation of Mu, a white race civilisation that fell into the ocean but whose descendants became the great early cultures around the world, including in India. The neon crown in the garden refers to a sacred symbol of this lost Kingdom of Mu, representing "The Lands of the West." In this work, the Japanese definition of Mu is a place with an absence of desire; the second symbol of Mu illustrates what happens with the human desire to explain what they cannot understand. Mojadidi’s Zen Garden explores the hidden dangers of how Eurocentric institutions present themselves as “discoverers” of art from conflicted/developing countries, and creates parallels between the colonial anthropologist discovering the noble savage in exotic lands and the Western curator discovering the noble artist in equally exotic locales. Mojadidi takes a sarcastic approach toward the Afghan and American culture that he comes from, and stereotypes surrounding identity and the capitalism around conflict. “We are all at conflict,” shares Mojadidi, “Whether with others or ourselves, with our own ideas, thoughts, desires, history, present, future. We are all at conflict as we try and navigate ourselves through a life we understand only through our experiences, through our confrontation both internal and external with social, political, cultural, and personal strife.” Ayesha Sultana (b. 1985, Jessore, Bangladesh lives and works in, Dhaka, Bangladesh) A Space Between Things, 2015-2016 Iron, plaster, wire mesh, glass, glue, paint, concrete, aluminium, copper, wood, brass and fabric Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation and Experimenter Photographer: Jenni Carter Ayesha Sultana’s newly commissioned solo project, A Space Between Things, is an ongoing exploration referencing the theme of landscape that threads much of her practice. Sultana works in intimate proximity to the material around her, sensitively reconfiguring it and adding to the potential energy that lies in the space between function and dysfunction. The artist playfully sculpts material culled from found and reclaimed objects, revealing the transitory and fragile nature of our natural and built surroundings, signifying and revealing distance, movement and space. She draws the viewer into the curiosity she has for the process of making and reconfiguring, and creates an enhanced sense of suspense relating to the possible changes the work could undergo over time through the hand of the artist or through the hands of time. Key ideas of transience, contact, balance, weight, and collapse manifest in gestural arrangements that Sultana creates with materials such as wood, metal, mylar, fabric, plaster, stone and glass. Sultana is interested in the duality and coexistence of the material and the immaterial. She strives to free her work from its very rooted and specific Bangladeshi context into a fluid and wide-ranging space, where the work can be set loose within its own parameters. For example, a vertical metal form could vaguely refer to early inspiration of viewing classical architectural structures such as columns and ancient obelisks. The individual works can maintain an interest in a nondescript condition even as particular references are apparent. This is a project that needs to be navigated spatially, and experienced in relation to the scale of the body, a space where transformation and understanding happen not from the description, but rather from experience, which the artist creates through the convergence of will and chance as she intervenes with found and made objects using time as a malleable medium. It is a celebration of what is possible when you allow experience to draw your mind to conclusions, rather than relying on the human tendency to come to a situation with preconceived definitions. Through sound, drawing, sculpture and photography, Jessore-born and Dhaka-based artist Ayesha Sultana considers the poetics of space and the relationship between material and process in notions of making. Within the context of drawing, her practice in the recent past has been an investigation into the rudiments of form through architectural constructions, often derivative of the landscape and attempting to peer into what is out of view. Counter tendencies of movement and stability are also evident as an attempt to generate emptiness by filling up the surface. Through other elemental gestures and implications of plotting, measuring and erasure, merging and filling-in, Sultana makes an otherwise fractured image. Sultana was the winner of the 2014 Samdani Art Award and was featured as one of ArtReview’s “Future Greats” in 2015. She is a member of the Britto Arts Trust and a graduate of Beaconhouse National University in Lahore. Christopher Kulendran Thomas (b. 1979, London, UK, lives and works in London, UK) (featuring drawings by Kavinda Silva & Prageeth Manohansa) When Platitude Become Form, 2016 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and the Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Jenni Carter Christopher Kulendran Thomas is an artist who manipulates the processes through which art is distributed. He takes as his materials some of the cultural consequences of the economic liberalisation that followed the end of Sri Lanka’s 25-year civil war in 2009. Through what is now called terrorism and genocide, this civil war was waged between Hindu Tamil separatists (popularly known as Tamil Tigers) who wanted to establish a homeland called Tamil Eelam in the Northeast of the Island and the Buddhist Sinhalese Majority Sri Lankan government. ‘Peacetime’allows for tourism and aspirations of a comfortable future to flourish, and art galleries and design shops have been opening over the past six years and the cultural industries are growing with fashion weeks, biennales, and other festivals. Thomas purchases artworks from the island’s contemporary art scene and reconfigures or reframes them for international circulation. Incorporating these original artworks into his own compositions, Thomas exploits the gap between what's considered contemporary in two different art markets and the gap between his family's own origins and his current context as a London based artist with access to the global networks of the contemporary art world. Taking this idea a step further, the artist is launching a brand called New Eelam that imagines the future of citizenship in an age of technologically accelerated globalisation. It is a speculative proposal based on a reinterpretation of the political philosophies of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. How would history have unfolded if the Tigers had manipulated the mechanics of global capital better than their enemy? This proximal sci-fi proposition speculates on how a nation might be reimagined without a territory and on how a corporation might be constituted as a state. Dayanita Singh (b.1961, New Delhi) Museum of Chance, 2014 Book object, edition of 352 Courtesy of the artist. Photographer: Noor Photoface 'While I was in London I dreamed that I was on a boat on the Thames, which took me to the Anandmayee Ma ashram in Varanasi. I climbed the stairs and found I had entered the hotel in Devigarh. At a certain time I tried to leave the fort but could not find a door. Finally I climbed out through a window and I was in the moss garden in Kyoto." Dayanita Singh's Musuem of Chance is a book about how life unfolds, and asks to be recorded and edited, along and off the axis of time. The inscrutably woven photographic sequence of Singh's Go Away Closer has now grown into a labyrinth of connections and correspondences. The thread through this novel like web of happenings is that elusive entity called Chance. It is Chance that seems to disperse as well as gather fragments or clusters of experience, creating a form of simultaneity that is realised in the idea and matter of the book, with its interlaced or parallel timeless and patterns of recurrence and return. Haroon Mirza (b. 1977, London) The National Apavilion of Then and Now, 2011 LED, foam and sound Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London. Photographer: Noor Photoface Haroon Mirza asks us to reconsider the perceptual distinctions between noise, sound and music, and draws into question the categorisation of cultural forms. The National Apavilion of Then and Now , 2011 lined with dark grey sound-insulating pyramidal foam, is an anechoic chamber in which neither light nor sounds is reflected. At the centre, hanging from the ceiling, there is a ring of white LED lights, reminiscent of nimbus effects. After a period of total darkness, the LEDs grow progressively brighter, accompanied by an also ever more enhancing buzzing sound, which abruptly stop, plunging the room in darkness once more, until the cycle starts again. The work evokes intense physical experiences of the perception of sound, light, space and time that seem to echo across the past and future of the universe. The light in this work is reminiscent of a halo, a form used to connote being outside or above the physical human realm. Like many of the other works in the exhibition, Mirza's work rejects recording or representation that limits its complexity; it must be physically felt to be experienced. The work draws parallels between the electrical wiring of circuits and the body; Mirza proposes a third space between seeing and hearing. where imperceptible waves of sound and light draw attention to the role of perception in shaping our view of reality and how we access knowledge. Lynda Benglis (b. 1941, Lake Charles, USA, lives and works in Santa Fe, USA, New York, USA, Kastelorizo, Greece, and Ahmedabad, India) Wire, Kozo paper, phosphorescent pigments and acrylic Courtesy of the artist and VAGA, New Work. Photographer: Jenni Carter Over the past fifty years, Lynda Benglis has divided her time between studios in New York and Santa Fe in the United States of America, Ahmedabad in India and Kastelorizo in Greece, with each diverse location having subtle, yet discernible, influences on her work. Reflecting on her over thirty year experience in India, Benglis shares that she was always exploring “how form is discovered through texture, through movement; form is movement… I felt very much at home [in India]… because there is a sense of the “spirit” of natural form and inspired texture, and it occurs in art, architecture, music and dance.” Benglis is known for her radical re-visioning of painting and sculpture in her innovative and prolific practice, seeking a more sensuous kind of surface. Benglis explores how what we see influences our body, a concept known as “proprioception”. “We experience something in our bodies that is proprioceptic; we experience it in our whole body – you feel what you see and you are ‘charged.’ It’s an exchange of energy.”2 Benglis presents seven new cast paper sculptures created especially for the Dhaka Art Summit, reference her wax and glitter works from the 1960s and 1970s. These handmade paper forms are sculpted over chicken wire, a common element in the visual landscape of South Asia, with glimpses of colour and sparkle that are informed by the artist’s formative years in Louisiana and her life in India: each with their rich festival cultures, such as Mardi Gras and Holi. Chicken wire has allowed Benglis to co-opt the grid harnessed by modernism and minimalism and transform it into a fluid and amorphous form that is fully her own. Walking further into the project, seven similar forms emerge from the dark in a second room, glowing from Benglis’s painterly work with phosphorescent materials. Through these fourteen works, Benglis creates a physical moment in a space, and writer Marina Cashdan draws connections between the phosphorescent work and the colours that people often experience in deep meditation, connecting physical movements of breath that become visual forms inside the body. Lynda Benglis is recognised as one of the most important living North-American artists. A pioneer of a form of abstraction in which each work is the result of materials in action — poured latex and foam, cinched metal, dripped wax — Benglis has created sculptures that eschew minimalist reserve in favour of bold colours, sensual lines, and lyrical references to the human body. But her invention of new forms with unorthodox techniques also displays a reverence for cultural references tracing back to antiquity. Benglis has received numerous awards and her works are held in leading institutional collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Tate, London and the Guggenheim, New York and she has recently exhibited in major career survey exhibitions at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the New Museum, New York; Storm King, New York and the Hepworth Wakefield, UK. Munem Wasif (b. 1983, Comilla lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Land of the Undefined Territory, 2015 26 Digital Photographs and three channel HD black and white video with stereo sound, 20min 16 sec Project debut at the Dhaka Art Summit 2016 with partial production support from Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Munem Wasif’s haunting series of photographs and three-channel video of an undefined land elucidates the dialectic relationship between a land and its identity, an identity at risk given the relatively new concept of the nation state and of the environmental effects of man’s “progress” post the industrial revolution. Situated on the edge of a blurred boundary of Bangladesh and India, the mundane, almost extra-terrestrial land hides human interaction with its surface and exposes ever-changing curves with Wasif’s repetitive frames. It seems that frames rarely move from each other, slowing down time and motion and blurring the character of a land, disassociating it from its political and geographical identity. This Solo Project, entitled Land of the Undefined Territory questions the identity of a land that is tied to a specific political and geographic context, but which could also be anywhere, as Wasif displaces the viewer from space and time. Wasif’s dispassionate and systematic approach in this series mimics that of an investigation, topographic study, geological survey or a mere aesthetic query, however his technique of using look-alike frames and ambient sounds overcomes the optical unconscious of the camera and evokes elusive feelings and absurd sensitivity in the viewer. The chosen area of land in this series is a mere observer of nearly a hundred years of land disputes, which saw colonization, 1947’s divide of the Indian subcontinent and mass-migration with Partition, and 1971’s liberation war of Bangladesh which created the current border tension with the neighbouring country, India. Absence of any profound identity for its existence never diminishes its presence, and its body carries the wound of aggressive industrial acts, such as stone collection and crushing. This land belongs to no one, and is thus exploitable by anyone motivated to avail of the land’s unlikely riches. As hills and mountains are cut away to mine the material needed to build Bangladesh’s roads, the communities who have lived on the land for thousands of years become alien to it, as they can no longer identify their community by natural markers. In his video, Wasif captures suspended motions by not moving the camera and by recording predominantly still objects, enhancing the sense of timeless limbo that has now come to define this land, and potentially elsewhere in the future. Mustafa Zaman (b. 1968, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Lost Memory Eternalised, 2015-2016 Digital Print on paper Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Exhibit320, New Delhi. Photographer: Jenni Carter Mustafa Zaman’s Solo Project Lost Memory Eternalised is an unauthorised retelling of the past, revealed after readjusting the lens to the events in the lives of human beings on Earth – where the human condition(s) shaped by history leaves us in awe of the events that make up our experiential domains, giving rise to moments of epiphany and other forms of awakening, which cannot be explained away. Images can be read in the context of their time and place and also in their relationship to eternity. The artist emphasises the latter relationship by overlaying found images with honey, enhancing the sense of transcendence/timelessness inherent in each image, but leaving a symbolic residue of dead ants that speaks to a collective disillusionment, citing a sense of loss which often colours our perception of time. With the intrusion of an additional substance (i.e. honey with dead ants), the historicity of the source images is destabilized. They now invite touching and enforce a renewal of vision. Each image serves as a cue to a larger universe or existential realm, consistently changing under the forces of creation and destruction. Each image primes us to look at how individual desire, and resulting disillusionment, shape both individual and collective history. Po Po (b. 1957, Pathien, Myanmar, lives and works in Yangon, Myanmar) VIP Project (Dhaka) 2014-2015 Photographs and video Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photographer: Jenni Carter The self-taught pioneer in Burmese contemporary art, Po Po describes his photography not as a visual record, but as a means to reflect his thoughts regarding political, social and cultural concerns. In 2010, Po Po created his first “VIP Project” in Yangon, placing VIP signs in public bus stops across the city. South Asia has a deeply entrenched “VIP Culture” where certain individuals are given preferential treatment as “Very Important People” – even in the public sector with special entrances in airports, parking spaces, and other basic facets of daily civic life. Standing across the street from bus stops, Po Po took a series of photographs and videos documenting the reactions of people to the signs —in nearly all cases, the commuters saw the sign as more important than them, yielding their seats to the signs, demonstrating their thoughts of their place in society as not as important as anonymous and invisible others who may or may not arrive. Politics play a key role in shaping one’s view of their place in the world. Five years after his first VIP project, Po Po created the second chapter in Dhaka, a city with a similar social VIP culture and historically under the same British rule as Yangon, but with a different political history of over forty years of democracy as opposed to Myanmar’s over five decades of military rule. While the reactions of the public seem similar in the video and photographic documentation across Yangon and Dhaka, the Bangladesh political scenario opened up the possibility for a few members of the public to think of Po Po’s intervention as a joke. This reaction never occurred in the Myanmar intervention, as choice of interpretation of public signage was not an option. Prabhavathi Meppayil (b. 1965, lives and works in Bangalore, India) Dp/Sixteen/Part One,2015-2016 Wood, copper and gesso Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation and PACE, London Photographer: Jenni Carter Entering the central hall of the Dhaka Art Summit, Prabhavathi Meppayil unsettles the viewer by turning the room upside down, creating an immersive installation which displaces the negative space of the coffered ceiling outside the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy and placing it inside the floor of the building. Meppayil’s art practice draws on traditional cra and values the truth of materials and tools as well as simple forms, colours and shapes. Coffered ceilings are an ancient and universal element of architecture. In her installation dp sixteen (2015-2016) Meppayil creates movement between the floor and ceiling, outside and inside. She creates a subtle phenomenological experience of an architecture connected to an infinite grid of cubes. In his analysis of Meppayil’s work, Benjamin Buchloh points out that grids are possibly the most basic principle of modernist abstraction, and also panels for tantric meditation. He continues that “Meppayil’s paintings seem to be driven by a latent desire to leave behind the parameters of pictorial space and its supporting surfaces, reaching for an ultimate sublimation of the painterly rectangle in a numinous architectural space.” Meppayil transforms her “painterly rectangles” through meditatively applying white gesso, a material used in most of her work since 2009 that is traditionally used to prime wooden surfaces for later layers of paint. Through her choice of materials, the artist extends painting into the space of architecture, where wood, grids, layers, wiring, and primed surfaces create environments for us to inhabit. Her intervention simultaneously creates order and disorder in the exhibition space, and reminds the viewer to consider the seen and unseen elements creating our sense of being in the world. Sandeep Mukherjee (b. 1964, Pune, India, lives and works in Los Angeles, USA) The Sky Remains, 2015-2016 14 panels of acrylic ink and embossed drawing on duralene (wall) 1000 panels of acrylic ink and carved drawing on plywood (floor) Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Project 88, Mumbai. Photographer: Jenni Carter Possession and dispossession, displacement and debt—it seems that the stories that condition our present are inextricably born out of the stories that conditioned our past. The first of four special issues of South as a State of Mind, temporarily reconfigured as the documenta 14 journal, examines forms and figures of displacement and dispossession, and the modes of resistance—aesthetic, political, literary, biological—found within them. In essays, both literary and visual, as well as poems, speeches, diaries, conversations, and specially commissioned artist projects, the first issue of the d14 South considers dispossession as a historical and contemporary condition along with its connections to archaeology and the city, coloniality and performativity, debt and imperialism, provenance and repatriation, feminism and protest. To launch the inaugural issue of the d14 South, documenta 14 has organized a series of public events—in Athens, Kassel, Berlin, Dhaka, and Kolkata—that bring the disparate voices of the journal, as well as those outside of it, into conversation in cities across the world. This February, South goes to Bangladesh and India for two launch events. The first will be held in Dhaka on February 6, the second in Kolkata on February 10. For the Dhaka launch at the Dhaka Art Summit, in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, documenta 14 Artistic Director Adam Szymczyk and Editor-in-Chief of Publications Quinn Latimer will present the first issue of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind, reading from and expanding on its diverse explorations of both contemporary and historical forms of displacement and dispossession. In addition, they will elaborate on forthcoming issues of the d14 South, which are variously devoted to ideas of language and ecology, post-colonialism and neoclassicism, and the rich relationship among pedagogical, performative, and political processes. South as a State of Mind is a magazine founded by Marina Fokidis in Athens in 2012. Beginning in 2015, the magazine temporarily became the documenta 14 journal and will publish four semiannual special issues until the opening of the exhibition in Athens and Kassel in 2017. These special issues are edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk. The documenta 14 South is conceived as a medium for research, criticism, art, and literature that parallels the years of work on the d14 exhibition overall, one that helps define and frame its concerns and aims. As such, the journal is a manifestation of documenta 14 rather than a discursive lens through which to merely presage the topics to be addressed in the eventual exhibition. Writing and publishing, in all their forms, are an integral part of documenta 14, and the journal heralds that process. Through this collaboration with documenta 14, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts continues its multi-faceted role in actively supporting and disseminating arts and culture publishing, as well as critical theory. This launch event is hosted at Harrington Street Arts Centre, where Seagull has previously organized several events and exhibitions, including a forthcoming solo show by K. G. Subramanyan, titled Sketches, Scribbles, Drawings. Shakuntala Kulkarni (b.1950, Dharwad) Of Body, Armour and Cages, 2012-2015 Cane and four channel video with sound (Julus) Courtesy of the artist and Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai. Photo credit: Jenni Carter and Noor Photoface Walking into Shakuntala Kulkarni’s solo project, the viewer is confronted with an army of five figures sculpted from traditional cane weaving practices from the eastern part of South Asia. On closer inspection, references of Xi An Terracotta Warriors, Bollywood superheroes, hairstyles from Roman and Hellenic times, and Viking warrior plaits harness the imagination away from any one particular time and place to address the timeless issue of how to exist as an individual in a world that encroaches on individual rights, especially the individual rights of a women. These sculptures come to life through kulkarni’s newest work Julus, an immersive four channel video work where a procession of the multiple selves of the artist storm the space and demand attention, freedom, and respect. Shakuntala Kulkarni is a Bombay based multidisciplinary artist and activist whose work is primarily concerned with the plights of urban women who are often held back due to patriarchal expectations. By placing her sculptures over her body, the artist dictates where the viewer’s gaze will lie, reclaiming power away from the viewer and allowing herself to be looked at on her own terms. “The bodied self can be insulted, subjugated, incarcerated, curbed by religious decree, dictatorial whim or popular sentiment. It can be deprived of the rights of mobility and expression… An armoured body can extend its capabilities through the mailed fist, the spiked helmet, the radiation-proof bodysuit, or heightened fight/flight reflexes. But the body pays for this protection with its freedom. The armour becomes a cage. The self becomes prosthetic: protected by, yet trapped within, an exoskeleton,” writes Ranjit Hoskote. This tension between the power and the vulnerability of the body creates a powerful artistic statement, as does the social commentary when the artist takes her armour out into public space in india. If she can choose to wear a dress of velvet, why can she not choose to wear a dress. Shumon Ahmed (b. 1977, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Land of the Free, 2009-2016 Video (looped), photographic print on archival paer, 30 sec VR goggles with extreme isolation headphones with sound and video, 1 min 30 sec Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Project 88, Mumbai. Photographer: Jenni Carter Shumon Ahmed’s Solo Project builds upon a prior body of work, Land of the Free, which immerses the viewer into the delicate continuum between sanity and madness that shapes an individual from within. “Reason, or the ratio of all that we have already known,” wrote William Blake in 1788, “is not the same that it shall be when we know more.” This ratio is delicate, and our minds naturally fight to keep equilibrium that anchors us to a sense of reality. Mubarak Hussain Bin Abul Hashem, or ‘enemy combatant number 151’, was flown back home to Dhaka in 2006 after having endured five years of torture and imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay. Through processes of humiliation, sensory overload and deprivation, Mubarak’s sense of self was broken down in an attempt to harvest information against his will, to sever his mind from reason. Ahmed’s project thrusts visitors into the grey spaces of the mind through harnessing torture techniques within the artworks, employing stereoscopic goggles, headphones, and powerful imagery and sound to transform his photographs into a physical experience for the viewer. This project investigates trauma that leads to insanity, and reveals processes designed to crack the human soul. It draws inspiration from W.J.T. Mitchell’s work on “Seeing Madness,” as Ahmed’s images draw us into Mubarak’s compromised senses. The idea of the ‘Land of the Free’ takes on a new meaning as viewers confront an aged Mubarak whose physical body finally finds freedom, but not without permanent mental fog and a lingering sense of displacement resulting from five long years of trauma. Simryn Gill (b. 1959, Singapore, lives and works in Sydney, Australia and Port Dickson, Malaysia) Ground, 2016 Thread and Paper Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artist, Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Art Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Photographer: Jenni Carter Simryn Gill makes poetic links between art, paper, books, and nature in her work; all begin with seeds that grow roots. The idea of roots can be abstracted into square roots in mathematics, roots of language, roots of belonging, and seeds to seeding ideas and to the ability to traverse manmade ideas of border. Gill shares, “for me, plants and the plant work offer a powerful way to think about where we find ourselves now and how we grow into and adapt to our sense of place. There is a line from one of [William] Blake's poems in his Songs of Innocence, ‘and we are put on earth a little space'. That little space is not a bit of geography anymore, but it seems to be literally the physical room we occupy with our bodies as we carry ourselves around trying to make sense of how to stake claims on constantly shiing grounds.” Reflecting on the slippery concept of place years later, Gill elaborated that “I came to understand place as a verb rather than a noun, which exists in our doings: walking, taking, living.” In an unpublished text in 2012, she continues this train of thought, “If you are empty, nothing, you only exist through the things around you, and if these things shift in their qualities and values, in relation to you, each other and other things, then the sense of self is always moving too. And the other way around: when I am the vector that is moving, then the things around me change, and my relationship to them too, how I do or don't connect, comprehend, sympathise. These are the un-static beacons we use to navigate through daily being.” Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu (b. 1975, Ywalut, Myanmar, b. 1977, Yangon, Myanmar, live and work in Yangon, Myanmar) Ipso Facto, 2011-2013 6 paintings (emulsion on linen, net, 275 x 580cm each) and video (colour, with sound, 20 min. 54 sec.), approximately 7 x 16 x 3m overall. Work realised within the framework of the exhibition at the Atelier Hermès thanks to the support of the Fondation d’entreprise Hermès. Courtesy of the artists. Photographer: Noor Photoface In traditional theatre in Myanmar, a simple twig on stage signified a forest scene; this idea was so recognisable that it could not possibly suggest anything else. Myanmar is rich with natural resources, and as the country was closed off to the rest of the world for over fifty years, there is little documentation of the vast changes in the natural landscape that occurred during this time as different parties in favour with the government devastated the land and amassed great riches. In their solo project Ipso Facto, Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu collaborated with traditional theatre backdrop makers (with Tun Win Aung as the painter) to set the stage to discuss the dramatic environmental changes that have dislocated national identity from the land. For example, the natural mud volcanoes that once existed both physically and as part of local myth are now almost entirely dry, and the next generation will no longer be able to relate their imaginations to the landscape. The UN has recognised Myanmar as one of the countries with the highest rate of forest loss on Earth (the total forest coverage area dropped from 51% in 2005 to 24% in 2008), and soon the next generation might not recognise the dramaturgical stick as the site of a lush forest. In theatre and in domestic life, curtains suggest a portal to another space. The world of theatre uses artifice to show the real, and excess to accentuates parts of reality that might otherwise be overlooked. Here, the viewer walks through a jungle of six backdrop paintings while confronting a seven channel video work that accentuating the sense of loss of the thought of losing one’s landscape. In addition to working individually as visual artists, this Yangon-based husband and wife duo Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu work collaboratively in a range of media including painting, video, performance, and installation. In 2009, the artists began the multicomponent work 1000 Pieces (of White), gathering and producing objects and images to assemble a portrait of their shared life. Their work often reflects politically inflected experiences and through their Museum Project, they collaborate with artists all over Myanmar and exhibit their work in rural contexts, imagining possibilities of what a museum in Myanmar might be. While Tun Win Aung’s practice frequently focuses on local histories and environments, Wah Nu is inspired by her interest in psychological states. They have showcased their work in international venues such as the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, the Singapore Art Museum and Guggenheim, as well as at art festivals including the Asia Pacific Triennial, the Asian Art Biennale, and the Guangzhou Triennial.

ALL PROJECTS To Enter The Sky Curated by Sean Anderson To Enter The Sky Curated by Sean Anderson (Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture) Weather, when visualized, relies on the interaction of multiple forces enacting potential acts of benefit as well as destruction. Sometimes predictable, and even mapped, more often, spaces inherit weather in unpredictable patterns that suggest tumult, a conjuring or a question, in defiance of the unknown. For example, airplane pilots depend on degrees of turbulence to achieve lift, to enter the sky. Likewise, for architects and builders, turbulence presents a manifold of acts for the body and the landscape to confront, with which to bend and flex, and from which one may achieve improbable balance. With sea level rise and the increased intensity of unprecedented weather systems, the world has witnessed recent devastating floods in Northern Pakistan and Bangladesh, the ongoing strengthening of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, and the anticipated disappearance of Maldivian atolls as well as those throughout the South Pacific. The invention of land for real estate development adjacent to the oceans and seas simultaneously destroys sensitive ecosystems while displacing vulnerable human and non-human settlements. A perpetuation of cataclysmic events tear at the definitions of geography, of fixed temporalities, for an architecture and urbanism subject to extremes continually redefined on the ground, in the water and the air. Recent years have also shown us that a global pandemic can challenge nearly every aspect of humanity and expressions of collectivity. Refugees and asylum seekers traverse the planet while confronting the fixity of imposed boundaries. Architecture can be reimagined to consider how and with whom we seek common grounds among spaces of repair, comfort and joy. With livelihoods unfolding over screens large and small, and those landless and nationless continue to seek refuge, the built environment presents itself as a backdrop, stage and as an agent for change. We all share one sky. Drawings by children situate both the vulnerability and strength of future selves who, in a spirited display of potential, of beauty, of imagined spaces and buildings, can also aspire to elevate and share possible futures. Just as we navigate the unknown, architecture must activate new encounters with economies of materiality, ecology, community, sovereignty, and citizenship. How do we design and build for the inevitability of conflicts, past and future? How does architecture establish belonging in landscapes of devastation and transit? This exhibition responds to those insecure conditions that allow architects, artists and designers to engage with the dimensioning of turbulence as a catalyst for addressing how we encounter each other. To Enter the Sky brings together examples of architectures and artworks of resilience, of trust, while not discounting fear, entropy, and destruction. The exhibition centers Bangladesh as part of a broader reckoning of what it means to be human in and of the built environment today. We know that various turbulences will persist. Architecture need not be resistant. Rather, the exhibition asserts how a spatial medium, with its multitudes of hope and chance, can begin to disseminate radical stories of becoming to help us understand our own fragile inheritances as individuals, communities, nations. LOCATION: FIRST FLOOR SOUTH PLAZA Sumayya Vally 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” and “Bonna” Pavilion and performance conceptualisation by Sumayya Vally Sound in collaboration with Shoummo SahaChoreography in collaboration with Arpita Singha Lopa 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 Ali Kazim Untitled (Cloud Series) 2018 In his 1949 novel, A Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles writes about the precarities of individuals: “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.” The sky, that which envelops us, is an arbiter of all life on the planet. It is that which comforts or destroys and always reminds us of where we are and where we can be. While the horizon is a measure of the sky, clouds, as condensations of molecules, are signs of life and its potentials; they signal transformations. The cloud is a sky’s signature. Detached from the ground and horizon, the clouds presented in these drawings suggest both movement and stasis. Caught in a moment of change, the clouds are suggestive of temporary presence, just as the weather conditions that they indicate and the individual lives that may be affected among spaces below. What may be discovered behind these scaleless formations? They are emboldened by forces large and small while also having the capacity to reveal new worlds. The works of Ali Kazim are embedded in the spatial histories of Pakistan’s landscapes and the civilizations that once inhabited the region. In works that use a variety of materials and techniques to evoke bodily and emotional experiences, Kazim’s work reimagines multiple narratives that are at once metaphors for human connectivities that may be hidden among unexcavated remains, long-abandoned cities, and the spaces that may be exposed or still buried. Ali Kazim b.1979, Pakistan Agnieszka Kurant Risk Management Commissioned for the New York Times 2020 Post-Fordite Fossilized automotive paint, epoxy resin, powdered stone, steel 2021-22 Sentimentite Digital NFT and physical sculpture Various pulverized objects, powdered granite stone, resin 2022 How can we redefine methods for understanding and responding to precarity at multiple scales throughout the world today? Materials extracted from the ground are but one illustration of how natural resources are continually pillaged in order to support unsustainable population growth and unfair labor practices, which is coupled with environmental devastation. The works in this exhibition speculate about the consequences of economies in parallel with digital capitalism, in which entire societies have become distributed factories of data production and exploitation, where everyone is a worker producing digital and carbon footprints. Risk Management presents a geographical map of a history of outbreaks of social contagions based on fictions spanning the last thousand years. The work draws on the inability of risk-prediction models to consider irrational human behavior and other largely impactful social phenomena. Post-Fordite takes up a recently discovered hybrid, quasi-geological formation created as a natural-artificial byproduct, through fossilization of thousands of layers of automotive paint accumulated and congealed on production lines at automobile factories since the opening of the Henry Ford Motor Company manufacturing plants in the early 20th century. Recently, these fossilized-paint configurations , named Fordite or Detroit Agate, by the former workers of now defunct factories, began circulating online and accruing value. Since Fordite can be cut and polished, it is often used like precious stones to produce jewelry. Post-Fordite embodies more than 100 years of amalgamated human labor and the collective footprints of workers, past and present, translated into geology. S entimentite is a speculative mineral-currency investigating the relationship between digital capitalism and geology in which a future mineral could become more precious than gold and become a currency. Kurant collaborated with computational social scientists who used Artificial Intelligence sentiment-analysis algorithms to harvest data from hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Reddit posts related to recent historic seismic events, including the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Brexit, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic global lockdown, and Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. These aggregated emotions of millions of people shaped the forms of 100 sculptures, which were cast in a new mineral created by pulverizing 60 objects used as official and informal currencies throughout the history of humanity: shells, Rai stones, whale teeth, corn, Tide detergent, electronic waste, soap, beads, mirrors, batteries, playing cards, phone cards, stamps, tea, and cocoa pods. Invested in exploring how “economies of the invisible” bolster fictions about humanity’s survival in the face of such destructive socio-political and economic processes, Agnieszka Kurant’s sculptural and mapping works speculate on how value is translated and can transgress conventional definitions. Her work challenges how objects today are mutated through their global circulation and production while also questioning modernist conceptions of aura, authorship, production, and hybridity. Many of her works emulate nature and behave like living organisms and self-organized complex systems. b.1978 Łódź; lives and works in New York Aziza Chaouni Projects Rehabilitation of Modern Public Buildings in Africa Sidi Harazem, Morocco Old Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone (1827) CICES, Dakar, Senegal (1974) Throughout the world today, modern architecture, especially those examples in rapidly developing areas of the Global South, remains at risk of demolition due to economic, political, and societal forces that consider its buildings not worthy of preservation. Modern buildings are often judged unattractive, too far removed from “traditional” architecture and building types while overlaid with memories of a traumatic colonial past. How do contemporary architects reimagine the ways in which modernism is understood today? How can spaces imbued with societal traumas be rewritten with the goal of transforming their value to communities and publics? These three rehabilitation projects are actively engaging with and responding to the design of community-centered spaces that are envisaged as cooperative, reparative and responsive for all that participate in their making. In Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal, like in other areas subject to the simultaneity of post-colonial transition meeting neoliberal economic drivers, buildings and landscapes are continually being questioned as productive zones for living today. Designed between 1959 and 1975 by prominent Moroccan architect of Corsican origin, Jean-François Zevaco, the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex, located near the city of Fez, is the first example of public post-independence leisure architecture designed for Moroccan inhabitants. Unfortunately, villagers whose ancestors had lived on the same land for generations were forcibly moved several miles away to accommodate the new tourist destination.Deploying a long-term phased masterplan that accounted for the memory of these historical events while also attending to environmental sensitivities with the use of water in a drought-prone area of the country, the Complex moves beyond the rehabilitation of the buildings themselves to adaptively reuse the spaces for the local population. Since 1827, Old Fourah Bay College was a laboratory and educational setting in which western ideas of governance, political organization and public service were shared as experiments with populations across Sierra Leone and West Africa. The onset of conflict throughout the 1990s radically altered this building and it was occupied by displaced families fleeing a brutal ground war. Working with local school and university groups to rethink what a “dream school” might look like, new methods of design centered in active conversations and designed interactive spatial exercises have established new shared narratives from which the College can once again return to being a space of civic and educational learning. Designed by the architects, Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin, the CICES was commissioned by the first president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor, who sought a universal African architectural language, shed from Western referents. The CICES complex uses Modernist principles in its circulation and layout, and simultaneously embraces Senghor’s ‘asymmetric parallelism’ theory, that he defines as "a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space,” which allows for unique spatial experiences. Working with local stakeholders to reconsider what a “masterplan” for such an iconic complex affected by environmental and economic issues will be, ensures its continued use as a productive site for international exchange and commerce into the future. Aziza Chaouni was born and raised in Fez, Morocco and is trained both as a structural engineer and as an architect. Through the integration of users and stakeholders across the design process, Chaouni’s office, Aziza Chaouni Projects, offers alternative processes for imagining and designing empathetic spaces that move past staid aesthetics to articulate human and material-centered approaches to sensitive areas throughout North and West Africa. b.1977 Fez; lives and works in Fez and Toronto Coral Mosques of Maldives Mauroof Jameel and Hamsha Hussain Among the Maldivian atolls and islands, there are at least 26 documented mosques and compounds that have been constructed using coral stone. Assembled from porite coral stone ( hirigaa ) hewn from the reefs and integrated with interior structures fashioned from timber and crafted by lacquer work, itself a unique Maldivian artform, these buildings represent an architecture of resilience found nowhere else on the planet. Akin to other monumental structures found in India and Southeast Asia, the mosques coalesce building, material and artistic practices that point to the transit of ideas and typologies. While historical uses of coral in building construction have been discovered among the Mayan communities of Central America between 900-1500 BCE and among the coastal communities of the Red Sea between 146-323 BCE, among the Maldives, the coral used is both unique to the islands while the building conveys spatial and spiritual resonances found across the Indian Ocean and its sub-continent. These buildings illustrate how the use of localized materials at any scale can maintain long standing spaces for communities. The continued use of the coral mosques today is emblematic of a nation’s peoples and their unwavering faith in the face of environmental calamity. The images of six primary coral mosque compounds included in this exhibition are in use across the islands today and were nominated for UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2013. Each example embodies architectural forms that are both specific to their island location while also expressing discrete art practices including exterior coral carving, calligraphy, and lacquer work that speak to the movement of Islamic artistic practices across the ocean. With carpentry techniques in the mosques no longer extant and coral mining forbidden for environmental sensitivities, these buildings are recognized for their integration of construction techniques and artforms that speak to the Indian Ocean realm as a space for visual, material, and spatial exchange. Ihavandhoo Old Friday Mosque Miskiy Magu, Ihavandhoo, Haa Alifu Atoll6º 57' 17.33" N and 72º 55' 38.33" EIhavandhoo Old Friday Mosque was completed in 16 December 1701 CE (15 Rajab 1113 A. H.) during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Muzhiruddin (1701-1705). Meedhoo Old Friday Mosque Hiyfaseyha Magu, Meedhoo, Raa Atoll5º 27' 27.80" N, 72º 57' 16.41"EAccording to local oral history, the mosque was probably built during the reign of Sultan Muzaffar Mohamed Imaduddin around 1705. It is the only surviving coral stone mosque with Indian clay roofing tiles. Malé Friday Mosque Medhuziyaaraiy Magu, Henveiru, Malé, Kaafu Atoll4º 10' 40.77" N, 73º 30' 44.57" EMalé Old Friday Mosque and its compound comprise one of the most important heritage sites in the country. It is also the biggest and one of the finest coral stone buildings in the world. The present mosque was built in 1658 during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Iskandhar I, replacing the original mosque built in 1153 by the first Muslim sultan of the Maldives. Fenfushi Old Friday Mosque Hiriga Goalhi, Fenfushi, Alifu Dhaalu Atoll3°45′15″N 72°58′35″EFenfushi Friday Mosque was built during the reign of Sultan Mohamed of Dhevvadhu (1692-1701) on the site of an earlier mosque. It is a well-preserved compound with a unique coral stone bathing tank, coral stone wells, a sundial, and a large cemetery with grave markers of fine quality. Isdhoo Old Mosque Isdhoo, Laamu Atoll2° 7′ 10″ N, 73° 34′ 10″ EIsdhoo Old Mosque was built prior to a renovation in 1701 during the reign of Sultan Mohamed of Dhevvadhoo (1692-1701). This is the mosque where the 12th century royal copper chronicles 'Isdhoo Loamaafaanu' was kept in a special chamber. The mosque is built on a pre-Islamic site and analysis of the architectural details of the mosque indicates that the stonework could be even older. Hulhumeedhoo Fandiyaaru Mosque Koagannu, Hulhumeedhoo, Addu City0º 34' 51.6" S and 73º 13' 42" EHulhumeedhoo Fandiyaaru Mosque located in the Koagannu area in the island of Hulhumeedhoo (Addu City) was probably built around 1586 during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim III. The Koagannu area is the largest and the oldest cemetery in the Maldives with more than 500 coral grave markers, a sheltered mausoleum and 15 open mausoleums. It had six small mosques but now four small mosques remain. They are Koagannu Miskiy c.1397, Boadhaa Miskiy c.1403, Athara Miskiy c.1417 and Fandiyaru Miskiy c.1586. Felecia Davis and Delia Dumitrescu Computational textiles are textiles that are responsive to cues found in the environment using sensors and microcontrollers for the making of a textile that uses shape-shifting properties of the material itself to communicate information to people. In architecture, these responsive textiles are transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. For instance, they can be used in making temporary and more permanent manifestations of shelter in conflict and environmentally devastated areas. Davis, a trained engineer and architect, with Dumitrescu, a textile designer, asked with this project, ‘How can we design lightweight textiles for use in architecture that can translate responses to their environment? Further, how might we make textiles that dilate if the temperature surrounding the textile becomes hot, or if one wants more transparency in that textile to see the view?’ With her experimental lab, SOFTLAB@PSU, Davis creates responsive textiles that defy conventional structural and representational modes for the material itself and its applications. At the Smart Textiles Lab in Sweden, Dumitrescu has been developing responsive artistic effects in textile design that reshape an understanding of textile as a material that operates at different scales. In this project they consider ‘how’ and ‘what’ textiles can be ‘when’—much like individuals and communities. The first typology of material developed for this work was pixelated, designed with yarn that melts at high temperature; accordingly, the fabric opens or breaks when it receives current. Openings allowed the designers to ‘write’ upon the fabric making apertures, collecting foreground and background through the qualities of the material. The second material has been designed with yarn that shrinks or closes into solid lines in the fabric when it receives current. Shrinking is activated by the material while also revealing more opaque patterning in the textile closing parts of that textile off, transforming the material and the quality of space framed by that material. Davis’ work bio responsive textiles questions how we live while she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Davis and her lab are interested in developing computational methods and design in relation to bodies in locations that simultaneously engage specific social, cultural and political constructions. Her collaborative lab is dedicated to developing soft computational materials and textiles alongside industry and community partners to establish a culture of hands-on making and thinking through computational materials not only as a future but also as a holistic approach to living within uncertain circumstances. Central to Dumitrescu’s research is the topic of material and textile design, focusing on new materials expanding from computational textiles to biodesign and biofabrication. Through the notion of textile design thinking, her research expands the textile methodology; it includes systematic work with: colour, materials, texture, structure, pattern, and function to explore and propose new design futures for sustainable living from material to spatial design. b. United States and Romania; Lives and works in State College, Pennsylvania and Borås Marshall Islands Navigation Charts Beijok Kaious The Marshall Islands in eastern Micronesia of the Southern Pacific Ocean consists of thirty-four coral atolls composed of more than one thousand islands and islets spread out across an area of several hundred miles. The islanders have mastered an ability to navigate between and among the almost-invisible islands—since the land masses are all so low that none can be seen except from a short distance away. In addition to closely observing wave and swell patterns, the Marshallese used the celestial constellations to navigate the ocean. They also determined the locations of the islands by observing the flight of the birds that nested on them. Song was also used to estimate the distance that the navigators traveled. Navigation is a form of storytelling and placemaking. For thousands of years Marshall Islanders used complex navigation techniques with charts made from coconut midribs and seashells. There are three kinds of Marshall Island “stick charts”: the Mattang , the Rebbelib , and the Meddo . The mattang was specifically designed to train individuals in the art of navigation while the Rebbelib covered a large section or the entirety of the islands. The charts consisted of curved and straight sticks. The curved sticks represented ocean swells and the straight sticks represented the currents and waves around the islands. The seashells represented the locations of the islands. Marshallese navigators memorized the charts and did not take them with them on their canoes. Each chart was unique and could only be interpreted by the person who made it. Today, different configurations of the charts are still being produced across the islands and used by young navigators learning to “read” the ocean. Beyond maps, the charts are thus built stories that speak to the past, present and future simultaneously. The examples of charts ( meddo ) presented in the exhibition, while made as souvenirs on the island of Majuro by Beijok Kaious and facilitated by others, still speak to the continuities and difficulties of navigating across oceans and territories that are rapidly disappearing with the onset of global climate crises. Olalekan Jeyifous How can one envision and design potential? Rather than observing historically overlooked areas of cities such as Crown Heights, Brooklyn or within megacities such as Lagos, Nigeria as impoverished, exclusionary, and open to demolition, as is commonly depicted for underserved areas throughout the world, Jeyifous’s immersive images and spaces speak to the potential for questioning present conditions and future possibilities. Many of the spaces in such locations are also subject to the extremes brought about by environmental instability. Such alternative futuristic visions are simultaneously based in real spaces and conditions while also shifting the gaze of top-down “development” efforts in the same cities that gentrify, displace and erase. These works recenter individuals and collectives as plural complex communities understood as fundamental contributors to the forging of the built environment. The politics of architecture is presented as an extension of how people build themselves as much as their communities. Recognizing that architecture can be built and imagined by these communities, buildings and infrastructures are configured not in opposition to each other but appended to and effectively built among existing real estate projects, socially-constructed spaces and historical monuments. Trained as an architect, and now working at the intersection of art, spatial practices, and public art, Nigerian-born Olalekan Jeyifous explores how the conventions of immersive digital renderings, collages and videos open spaces for critique and revelation of the contemporary built environment. b.1977 Lagos; lives and works in New York Rizvi Hassan Collaborators: Minhajul Abedin, Khwaja Fatmi, Prokolpo Shonapahar, Rohingya Artisans: Kamrunnesa & Jaber, Khairul Amin, Aminullah, Hosna Akhter & Shofiq, Nurul Islam, Shahabuddin, Imam Hossain, Ali Johor, Faruk, Artisans from Sylhet & Shonapahar: Rehana Akhter, Khatun begum, Rita akther, Nikhil Architecture, for Rizvi Hassan, has the capacity “to connect life, to strengthen mental health, to enhance culture, to mitigate conflicts, to enrich the ground, or just to ensure the basic but very important needs to have a better quality of life.” Among the sustainable structures constructed in the world’s largest refugee camps housing Rohingya refugees in and around Cox’s Bazar, Hassan approached these community-centered designs that amplify quality of life for both non-human and human beings. Each of the buildings is responsive to regional climate and environmental precarities, including cyclones, while also establishing safe spaces for vulnerable women and children. Collaborating with members of these communities as well as those building the structures often without the aid of technical drawings, Hassan deploys tools and processes that may be considered antithetical to conventional Western-based architecture practices. His work is as much a facilitator as a designer. Rather, utilizing regenerative materials such as bamboo and thatch, but also overlooked products including mattresses for insulation, Hassan’s buildings emphasize how the use of non-extractive materials alongside minimal industrial intervention encourages sympathetic design processes, dynamic interior spaces, and much-needed shelter and respite for countless individuals. Rizvi Hassan and his collaborators established their practice to work in precarious zones including camps as well as flood-prone districts in Bangladesh. He has stated that “the nation didn’t prepare me to be just an architect, but to be an educated person who can contribute to society. For that, it is important even just to be present, in places where people will need us.” His work reimagines buildings and spaces that empower all community stakeholders while also creating inclusive spaces for the perpetuation of beauty, belonging and survival. b. 1993 Dhaka; Office based in Dhaka and Cox’s Bazar Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) Camp Life, 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestry with stories of Rohingya refugee camp in BD. Participating Artisans: Yasmin, Shobika, Shomima, Roshida Facilitator: Sadya Mizan, Khurshida Permanent collection of RCMC Future Life, 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestry with dream of future life of Rohingya refugee’s in BD Participating Artisans: Yasmin, Shobika, Showmima, Fatema, Ajida, Hosne Ara, Setara, Shamsunahar, Rokeya Facilitator: Rowson Akter, Asma Permanent collection of RCMC British physician and geographer, Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, published an article in 1799 that states, “the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, call themselves ‘Rooinga’, or natives of Arakan… the other are Rakhing … who adhere to the tenets of Buddha.” This early description not only establishes that there was an indigenous Muslim minority in the Arakan province of present-day Myanmar with the name Rohingya, but it further distinguishes them from the majority Rakhine Buddhist population. In 1982, the Burmese government enacted the 1982 Citizenship Law with a document that identifies 135 ethnic groups, which the government asserts had settled in Burma prior to 1823. The Rohingya, however, are not included as one of them. Subsequent decades of displacement and discriminatory policies incited by military coups and political brinkmanship has led to more than a million Rohingya refugees settling across numerous camps in Cox’s Bazar. Underlying their mass exodus into a country and spaces that are not their own, is the risk of negative psychosocial impacts stemming from, among other factors, a loss of cultural identity. Rohingya people have many stories, knowledge and wisdom that are rooted in mutual cooperation and care. “There is a dominant narrative that the Rohingya are poor and simple village people who don’t really have art or a developed material culture, and we want to show the world that this is not true,” describes Shahirah Majumdar. In 2022, the estab lishment of the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) in Camp 18 was designed in tandem with extensive community participation and led by architect Rizvi Hassan. The RCMC is a Rohingya-led institution that collects, preserves, and disseminates the importance that knowledge narratives create goodwill among displaced communities. Even in the most unsettled conditions, cultural practice expressed through art is a significant mode through which generations of displaced communities can maintain their identity. The RCMC encourages empowerment across gender and social lines. Embroidery workshops provide an essential outlet for women artists, who gather to share personal experiences that are subsequently then stitched into tapestries. These are stories of being and becoming that further confer Rohingya histories into tangible forms. Women are trained by Bangladeshi artists who have helped them expand their artistic repertoire beyond traditional floral and faunal motifs, to even include human depictions. The embroidered tapestries presented here are powerful evocations that move past fear, anguish, and insecurity to illustrate stories of building that cannot be erased or forgotten. Sarker Protick jxb, OF RIVER AND LOST LANDS 2011 – 2023 [Ongoing] Inkjet Prints on Archival Paper ‘Of River and Lost lands’ is a series of photographs that surveys the River Padma (Ganges) and the waterborne land of Bangladesh. Made over a period of 12 years and continuing, the series describes a complex relationship of intimacy and ruthlessness between nature and humans on the margins. The life and ecology of rural Bengal, like much of both non-urban and urban worlds, have seen a continuous slow decay. It is a story of loss which begins with a hostile river resulting in devastating frequent erosion. With these occurrences, the landscape disappears and along with it, its many ways of life. Residents witness the river making abrupt changes in its course, drowning their villages, and resulting in forced migrations to other parts of the banks which too can erode without warning. Overnight, a stretch of land, and with it houses, farmlands, and livestock, will collapse and flow off in different directions. As uncontrolled sand mining proliferates, erosion increases at a fast pace. Now the River is not only a potential source of hostility, but also of casualty. Masses of land vanish and the river’s ecosystem changes in ways that cannot be undone. Shallow mud banks (chars) will emerge along with the influx of new sediments. The shore forms new land with the possibility to restart and build new communities for environmental and ecological refugees. Most places seen in these photographs have ceased to exist. As a result, the photographs survive as visual documents of these vanished and vanishing lands. Protick's works are built on long-term surveys rooted in Bangladesh. To make decaying memory tangible, to define the disappearance of a place without confining it, Protick’s often minimal, suspended, and atmospheric photography, video, and sound, explore how form and materiality often morph into the physicality of time. Accompanying its raptures and our inability to grasp or hold time, the process of image-making is a way to expand time, to make space for more subdued moments, or hint at the possibility of an embodied life. b. 1986, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Storia Na Lugar / [un]Grounding NarrativesPatti Anahory and César Schofield Cardoso Among the islands that comprise the nation of Cabo Verde in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, increasing territorial segregation, socioeconomic disparities, a general lack of quality of the built environment, are all present despite development indices for the country indicating one of the best performances in Africa. Ongoing phenomena including the rapid and asymmetrical growth of cities, large investments in mass tourism, the lack of alternatives of materials and construction techniques, are having an irreversible effect on people’s lives throughout the world. Coupled with an increasing desire to build tourist resorts on already environmentally sensitive areas of the archipelago, this video work explores how both sea and sky are becoming compromised in the pursuit of unsustainable, destructive economies. Given this, [un]Grounding Narratives focuses on communities facing exclusion, insecurity, or marginalization, while engaged with various forms of negotiation that reflect how social and natural environments can be repaired through cultural practices of affirmation and belonging. Storia Na Lugar merges the analytical visual languages of an architect and a visual artist alongside a joint pursuit of social and environmental ethics with multidisciplinary art and architectural works that explore forms of environmental and structural precarity in West Africa. Through engaging an international network of researchers, social activists, artists and professionals to engender action, Anahory and Schofield Cardoso seek to influence policy makers and promote a more inclusive development approach for the world’s cities and islands. Patti Anahory b. 1969 aboard a ship at Latitude 26o 50’ N Longitude 17o 05’ W; Based in New York City and Praia César Schofield Cardoso b. 1973 Mindelo; Based in Praia, Cabo Verde Suchi Reddy Reddymade Architects Between Earth and Sky Experiences found within architecture and the (built) environment play an essential role in shaping our capacity to engage with agency, equity, and empathy. Suchi Reddy’s guiding principle is “form follows feeling,” privileging human engagement as a mode for conceiving, designing, and building architectures that invite wonder and discovery. While working toward broader yet critical notions of “design justice,” alongside investigations of machine learning, the holistic design of spaces is recognized as an asset for the benefit of all and not just for some. Reddy considers how we, as individuals and collectives, encounter space as both a constructed and imagined phenomenon. The “mirages” installed as part of this exhibition are an exploration of how belief and the reimagining of boundaries through architectural intervention may contain limitless possibilities. Mirages become metaphors for societal rupture and repair. What is a building or space but an extension of who we are and who we wish to become? Uniting the architect’s wide-ranging portfolio of architecture and artistic work is a multidisciplinary approach guided by a belief in the power of architecture and spatial experience to impact how we feel, how we shape society, and the positive contribution we can offer through design. Interested in the complexities of uniting scientific studies of neuroaesthetics with overt spatial and haptic experiences found in building, the experiential works of Suchi Reddy and her office Reddymade, are at once built manifestations of extensive research of the interplay of human behavior with the material, metaphysical and structural forms that build us. b. Chennai; lives and works in New York We Are From Here Collective Conceived with the collective We Are From Here based in the Slave Island (Kompannaveediya) area of Colombo, Sri Lanka, this work highlights how deeply interconnected communities continually find their homes threatened by gentrification for State and corporate interests. Focused on Slave Island, a rapidly developing location in the center of Colombo where Rahman grew up and now resides, the ongoing project explores the threat of socio-political intersections that are gradually being erased for inequitable economic and political drivers that subsequently are displacing residents. While many residents are of Malay origin, the suburb has been home to multiple cultures, languages, and religions for generations. The area was first described under British Colonial rule as a holding area created by the Portuguese to hold slaves from the African continent. Such historically rich yet seemingly overlooked areas are not only disappearing throughout Colombo but also across cities throughout the world due to the misalignment of definitions of value based on land and property and not for humans. The collective’s multi-media work spotlights how entangled threads of multiple narratives that offer both sources for and representations of intimacy, precarity and memory. The project focuses on mobilising a creative peace-making movement that would help participants and beneficiaries alike to socially engage in their own unique realities through artistic and spatial production. We Are From Here is a multidisciplinary artist’s collective formed by Firi Rahman in 2018 including Parilojithan Ramanathan, Manash Badurdeen (and earlier including Vicky Shahjahan) whose work includes drawing, photography and sculpture, considers the threatened codependent relationships that people and endangered species have with their natural, lived and built environments. Their work has questioned the rise of endangered species in Sri Lanka. The collective and Rahman are particularly interested in the interactions between animals and urban environments, and the responsibility societies share in protecting biodiversity. b. 1990(Firi Rahman), Colombo; Collective established in 2018; lives and works in Slave Island (Kompannaveediya), Colombo Jaago Foundation One Thousand Futures Drawing has been a universal language that both children and adults share since time immemorial. From one’s first attempts at drawing, including the random marking with lines and scratches, and even after the first representations of the world around them, individuals are communicating to establish reciprocal meanings through images. Children of all ages use drawing to express their individual interpretations of experiences near and far. Yet, drawings, as language, can also be “read” and translated. For architects in particular, drawings are tools with which to imagine, capture and define ways of inhabitation. They possess scale, contain volumes, indicate varying temporalities, relay environmental considerations and “speak” to multiple audiences through commonly accepted forms. Our eyes and bodies can occupy the spaces found in a drawing. The project at the heart of this exhibition relies on drawing, as both an artform and as perhaps the most widespread language in the world, to transcend age, gender, background, culture, and other markers of identity. One thousand school-age children from schools across Bangladesh were asked by the Curator to respond to one question with their drawings: What might the future look like? According to governmental agencies in 2022, with around 98% of Bangladeshi “children of primary school age” enrolled in school, many students still have difficulty with basic reading skills. While education is essential to improving the economy of any nation, many people lack foundational lessons for living if they do not receive proper schooling. But all children, when provided with the materials, can draw—or at least create a visual means by which to communicate and thus establish complex meanings for both themselves and others. The drawings presented here are not fictional as they are responsive to an individual’s personal experience and vision while also sharing in multiple images of hope, of joy, of the possibility for becoming and living without the fear of environmental catastrophe. The drawings are active reminders that beyond the structures and boundaries that continually define us, we can draw a future for and about ourselves. JAAGO Foundation began in a single room in the Rayer Bazar slum area of Dhaka. In April 2007, Korvi Rakshand and a group of friends rented a room in Rayer Bazar, with a vision of improving the lives of the local youth. Rakshand and his friends began teaching 17 local children from the area. The first project of the JAAGO Foundation was born from providing relief supplies in response to a flood that destroyed part of the Rayer Bazar in 2007. Since then, the JAAGO Foundation has expanded to actively work toward the integration and participation of all youth in nation building through activities that support inclusion, transparency, and accountability. More than 50,000 volunteers today are working across the country in 11 schools and other sectors to ensure the participation of youth to support and ensure equitable access to education, environmental stability, and women’s rights throughout Bangladesh. Neha Choksi Sky Fold 2, 2013 Sky Fold 8, 2013 Folded paper and light cyanogram Collection of the Samdani Art Foundation What might be the dimensioning of the sky? Across time and geography, the sky has been both a backdrop and a foreground for countless civilizations. Centuries of song and poem have accessed the sky as an arbiter for the faithful and is never complete. It can be made invisible and while at other times, it is a preface for events to come. For some, the sky is a limitless expanse, continuous, open. And yet, for many others, the sky cannot be accessed, it is felt as the origin of sorrow, or even imminent danger. These works at once suggest the fragility and difficulty to contain the sky, its temporalities, and its power. While the grid may be understood as an ordering system, a mathematical invention that is supposed to relay equanimity while also potentially demarcating both economic and political conditions upon the ground; when imposed upon the sky, one is confronted with the possibility of its boundaries, both real and imagined. Choksi’s interest in forging temporary presence is, for the artist, “an affirmative act of destruction.” The Sky Fold cyanograms are photographic works that are embodiments of the means of their own production, folded paper, and light. Like a blueprint of the sky, these photographic prints capture those creases in time—perhaps moments of rupture—when the sky which we all share is made a reflection of the multiple worlds in which we live and dream. Neha Choksi deploys interdisciplinary approaches including performance, video, installation, and sculpture to redefine the poetics and transience of everyday life. Often reflecting on absence, her works employ an uncertain gravity that suggests an uneasy groundedness. Centered among logics that respond to the dialectics of socio-cultural contexts and their variable scales, Choski’s interdisciplinary multi-format works are both interventions into and responses to intersections of time, consciousness, and context. b.1973, USA and India

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, a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council 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. Iftekhar Noor Shaon COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST Iftekhar Noor Shaon is the Communications Specialist at the Samdani Art Foundation. Previously, he worked as an art mediator during the Dhaka Art Summit 2023. Iftekhar holds the Excellence scholarship from IFA Paris and is currently pursuing a BA in Fashion Design. With a keen interest in fashion extending beyond mere aesthetics, he aspires to create garments that resonate not only with the body but also with the mind. Known for his multilingual proficiency, Iftekhar effortlessly communicates in Bangla, English, French, Hindi, and his dialect, Sylheti. Meet The Team

ALL PROJECTS Jothashilpa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Jothashilpa is a centre for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself ‘a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language.’ The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society that emerges from everyday life. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. Through their research and making processes, they collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary and Master Artist of Cinema Banner Painting Mohammad Shoaib and his disciples to realize a timeline that contains exhibitions about collectivity within, grounding us in solidarities of the past and imagining solidarities of the future. Artists involved in this project: Mohammad Shoaib, Shawon Akand, Didarul Dipu, S. M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Hamayet Himu, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim.

ALL PROJECTS Then | Why Not? -Solo Art Projects Curated by Diana Campbell Then | Why Not? The Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation endeavor to transform the city of Dhaka into a hub for South Asian art and its excellence breaking conventional ideas about where the region’s centre lies. It has been important to reject logistical restrictions and reasoning to present this free three day art festival, that spans not only the 120,000 square feet of the Shilpakala Academy, but also the entire city with New Delhi based Raqs Media Collective’s 160 road-sign and billboard project, Meanwhile, Elsewhere. The lexical patterns produced by Raqs’s ticking Bangla clocks registers a “deeply felt, subjective experience of time and duration” that gives people the freedom to escape from what they imagine “real time” to be. One of the clocks strikes at Then | Why Not? It is possible that this exhibition was born at this “time” of openness to possibility. These Solo Projects are fourteen monographic exhibitions by South Asian artists from around the world, without a central unifying theme. One characteristic that all of these projects and artists have in common is that they demand the impossible. This is not in terms of the clichéd slogan for anarchism, but rather in their defiance of constraints that are imposed on creativity, their fearless approach to expressing themselves in the context of South Asia, and their daring acceptance of an unprecedented challenge of being part of a South Asia dedicated event within South Asia, in the midst of its current political realities. It is important to note that the artistic infrastructure that is widely established in the West is not available in this part of the world, and the Pioneer Panel on the 8th of February will delve into the current realities for contemporary art making in the region. There is no representation concept in Bangladesh, where galleries can support artists to develop their careers and help artists realise their ambitious ideas. Bangladesh is a developing country, and most artists cannot afford to have studios in which to work. One cannot just take an artwork and ship it to Bangladesh for an exhibition. The import tax on art is prohibitively high, and the expertise to handle this art does not exist; we have had to train and develop this skill-set locally. The simplest materials such as helium, wall washers, and acrylic sheets cannot be sourced domestically. The situation is slightly better in India and Pakistan, however the movement of people and goods between these countries and Bangladesh, is extremely restricted, especially during the political events that plagued the country in 2012 and 2013 at a time when this exhibition was being organised. Given the circumstances, logic (and border politics) would suggest that this type of South Asia focused exhibition could not happen. We cannot paint on or drill into the walls of this government building, so even the walls you see here were specifically constructed for this exhibition.0 The artists and organisers demanded the impossible, and this is what we now present to you. We all stepped up to take on the difficulties and the demands that were needed to put together what you see - yet fortuitous connections were forged across cultures and the projects evolved in ways that the artists might not have originally expected. There has been a steep learning curve for all involved, but sparks of creativity flew when the artists and production team found innovative solutions to present their works in this new context, embracing the local, even in terms of the Bangla language. The mediums represented in these projects show the wide breadth of practices existing in the region, and performance, sculpture, painting, drawing, video, photography are all represented here. The work that the artists and I chose to exhibit all have subtle but direct connections to the context of Bangladesh, and it is our honour and pleasure to share them with local and international artists during the Dhaka Art Summit. This is just the start of a much longer journey, and several artists are among us now who are embarking on their research for the next Dhaka Art Summit in 2016. --Diana Campbell Betancourt, Dhaka, 2014 Asim Waqif (b. 1978) Control, 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Asim Waqif has been interested in different forms of protest in his work, and he challenges the public to question the often-ridiculous rules imposed by societies and governments. For Waqif, how it is, is not how it has to be, and he is constantly challenging the ideas of the impossible, merging high-tech systems with the genius found in low-tech vernacular solutions. Waqif pushes the boundaries between humor and artistic practice with a uniquely critical edge and aims to bring art to the public in the widest sense of the word. Hyderabad-born Waqif has exhibited extensively internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo and at Mumbai’s Dr. Bhau Daji Lad Museum in their project space, and will be a part of the 5th Marrakech Biennale. He has been receiving international acclaim for his work that pushes materials past the surface potential they are thought to possess. Bamboo becomes a channel for sound, left-over exhibition materials en masse become material for an entirely new exhibition, decaying dog carcasses become muses, and crumpled water bottles and LED lights floated in water to become beacons for environmental awareness. These examples are but a few of the artist’s fascinating choice and manipulation of materials that many people would simply overlook. Waqif is not interested in creating works that are technologically superior and immune to nature. His poetic work often documents the ways in which weather and time affect his work and almost collaborate with his sculptural structures. “Decay and destruction have an important role to play in adapting to the dynamism of society” shares Waqif. Like his talent for finding potential in everyday materials, Waqif also finds humor in the serious. In his 2012 public intervention in New Delhi entitled Lavaris Vastu, Waqif subtly transformed a common police announcement (which droned fear of “the other” into public spaces) into a jest-filled instructional audio piece that prompted the public with alternative ways to deal with unattended objects and unknown people, using a voice that sounded exactly like one in the police announcement. This intervention cleverly encouraged healthy curiosity in “the other” rather than the usual paranoid suspicion, and the work suggested that the Lavaris Vastu, or unidentified object, had the potential to be a treasure to be discovered and cherished. Waqif collected objects and baggage from the community, and created a pile of them that evoked curiosity and welcomed the public to engage with the objects and even take them home if they wished. In this, and many of his works, the artist rebels against the thought of the commercial value of experience of art eclipsing experimentation. Following the rabble-rousing spirit of his previous works, Waqif decided to make his message fly in his new commission for the Dhaka Art Summit, Control, 2014. This work is inspired by the intense protests that have been happening all over the world for the last few years, and specifically those in Dhaka, which Waqif has been following closely, seeing them as almost a continuous series. Last year, there were limited protests in New Delhi (where Waqif lives), but the police and security apparatus managed to suppress them through strong-arm tactics like water-cannons and tear gas. Large parts of New Delhi were shut down and people were not allowed to go near the India Gate, and nine metro stations were temporarily shut down. This made the artist think about police tactics in crowd control, and their manipulation of infrastructure and public space. Control is a continuation of Waqif’s humorous finesse in questioning “systems.” Using cane, rope, and thousands of helium-filled balloons, Waqif creates a levitating sculpture that upon closer view, reads “No Fly Zone.” Waqif’s choice of material, one of the most basic elements of furniture in South Asia (cane) and one of the most basic2adornments to a child’s birthday party (helium filled balloons), is interesting when juxtaposed with the charged phrase of “No Fly Zone,” a phrase that carries serious mortal weight during displays of political might. Waqif reflects “It is indeed ironic that the public cannot do much in a public space except leisure. In fact the really iconic public spaces are the most controlled. But what about the sky, does it belong to the public or the police-state? There are already a lot of controls on private aerial vehicles in most cities in the world, but there seems to be ambiguity about flying balloons in the sky and this is what I am trying to exploit. The text itself is ironic, like pasting a ‘Stick no Bills’ sign on a wall.” Waqif will set this work loose to fly across Dhaka on the first day of the Dhaka Art Summit (February 7th), subverting the control that the sculpture, and political forces, attempt to assert over the public. Adding more irony to the work, the artist and public will cease to have full “control” over the work once it is let loose in the sky. Volunteers and visitors who arrive to the venue on motor bikes will be instructed to draw attention to the floating installation by blowing their horns in unison, pointing toward the sky, an asking passer-bys to see what is in the sky. “It’s a bird…it’s a plane…no, it’s an artwork!”Viewers will be requested to take photos and videos and to upload them online, extending the life of the work past the Shilpakala Academy and into the city of Dhaka and the global world of the Internet. Jitish Kallat Event Horizon, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Samdani Art Foundation and the Dhaka Art Summit. Jitish Kallat is one of the most exciting and dynamic Indian artists to have received international recognition in recent years. Kallat’s works have often been described as distilled, poetic investigations of the cycle of life, interlacing several autobiographical, art-historical, political and celestial references. His work has been exhibited widely at museums and institutions including National Gallery of Modern Art (Mumbai), Tate Modern and Tate Britain (London), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Serpentine Gallery (London), Mori Art Museum (Tokyo), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Art Institute of Chicago. While most widely known for his paintings, Kallat’s work extends far beyond this medium, and in recent years, he has been celebrated for the scale of his sculpture, installation and new media projects both in terms of their size, but also in terms of their research. Kallat hit a seminal point in his career with a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. It was here that he created the monumental installation Public Notice 3, a text-based work illuminated in the bright colors of US Homeland Security threat alert system, recalling Vivekanada’s speech delivered on September 11th 1893 at the Art Institute of Chicago building. Text has a long history in Kallat’s works, from the painted titles on his early paintings to his more recent installations that often use text as form. At the first Kiev Biennale in 2012, Kallat created another critically acclaimed work entitled Covering Letter, a freestanding fog screen projection that revisits a 1939 letter from Gandhi to Hitler, allowing viewers to physically traverse a piece of correspondence from one of the world’s greatest advocates of peace, who addresses Hitler as a “friend” under the ideology of universal friendship. Several of Kallat’s recent works take on a more personal mode of address, and call upon viewers to find themselves in the work. In a haunting untitled work in Sculpture at Pilane, Sweden from 2010, Kallat created a 100 foot long sculpture of cast resin fossils that spell the phrase “When Will You Be Happy” in a historical burial ground in Sweden, putting desires that are often driven by consumerism into the important context of our human mortality. Jitish Kallat’s recent work has focused on the idea of time and life-cycles and at the Dhaka Art Summit, Kallat invites viewers to find themselves within the work, placing the viewer between night and day, and between immediate and eternal. His internationally acclaimed 2011 work Epilogue explores the 753 moon cycles that Kallat’s father experienced in his lifetime using 22,500 photographs of moons that were made of roti (the most basic form of Indian bread) in various states of being eaten. Moon cycles are endless, and in the seven channel animated video Breath, presented here, the viewer can think of themselves within the infinite cycles that comprise the universe through the waxing and waning roti “moons.” Breath contextualises viewers within the universe and compels them think about time, life, death, and the relationships forged during one’s lifespan. Turning the corner from Breath, the viewer is returned to the immediate demands of daily life routines in the seven-panel rainbow-hued lenticular photograph Event Horizon (The Hour of the Day of the Month of the Season) that was commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation for this exhibition. Kallat began using this medium around 2006 in a multi-part text based installation titled ‘Death of Distance’ and photo-pieces such as ‘Cenotaph (A Deed of Transfer). Lenticular prints are a succession of images within a single frame, and a change of the viewing angle creates the illusion of three- dimensionality with a heightened sense of animation. The timeless dilemma of the collective versus the individual manifests itself in Kallat’s work, and leaves viewers with a sense of responsibility to instigate positive change before history repeats itself. In this work, several of the figures appear in multiple panels of the panorama (such as the nuns and the group of young men), invoking notions of recurrence and recursion, an experience that is often part of Kallat’s oeuvre. We do not experience the universe alone. In this mysterious cycle of life, you never know who you may meet in the hour of the day of the month of the season from the moments just gone past. The past awaits our arrival in the future. Mahbubur Rahman (b. 1969) A Space For Rainbow, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. The Bangladeshi artist Mahbubur Rahman has been instrumental in the development of contemporary art in Bangladesh both through his personal experimental practice, his activism, and also his work developing the Britto Arts Trust, which he co-founded with his wife Tayeba Begum Lipi in 2002. Rahman’s paintings and performances have been widely exhibited in solo and group shows in Bangladesh and internationally in several renowned institutions including the Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale and the 14th Asian Art Biennale. In many of his performance works, the body plays a key role in the artist’s journey for knowledge. In his powerful and ongoing performance Transformation, Rahman wears a faceless hood with attached buffalo horns, and walks around the streets of Dhaka. The performance refers to local lore of the farmer Nuruldunner Sarajiban, whose resistance to British colonial forces ruined him and resulted in having to pull his own plough in the place of buffalo, crippling him to a point where he is left powerless and braying like a cow. The Triangle Arts Trust has remarked, “Rahman's perfor- mance plays with a sense of impotence, contrasting the symbolic value of the horns with his blind and helpless wanderings.” Rahman is interested in how norms in society are created, and what forces cause certain acts to be forbidden. Rahman opines, “The norms in the diverse culture of societies are usually created according to the local atmosphere, weather and time. Many illogical norms coexist bringing about conflict and compelling us to decide how we ought to act. The larger part of the community chooses the social norms.”Gender norms are something that have interested Rahman from a young age. The artist is one of 8 siblings, and the first male born after his 5 elder sisters. He was always curious why he was the one that was always doted upon even though he wasn’t the youngest child. He grew up in old Dhaka, and in the early stages of his career, his early interest in gender politics extended to the lives of sex workers and cross-gendered people he encountered around the neighbourhood. The tragic rapes during the war in 1971 also keep popping to the forefront of his mind, and looking at how gender norms can lead to violence. Rahman has recently become extremely interested in the treatment of the minority LGBT communities both at home, and abroad. The repeal of Section 377 in India in December 2013 repealed a 2009 ruling that decriminalized same-sex marriage in the country. This highly publicized ruling provided yet another example of the barriers to gay marriage and gender equality that are rampant in South Asia, and the rest of the world. In Bangladesh, LGBT people face extreme discrimination and verbal and physical abuse, and same-sex intimate relationships are illegal. People who support the change of these restrictive rules are battling a powerful system, and Rahman sees these peace lovers as a kind of warrior. In his solo project, A Space for Rainbow, the artist provides a space for warriors to become lovers, and to think about a covenant of peace and happiness, reflecting on the multiple meanings of the symbol of the rainbow from Christianity to gender equality. Rahman designed a common washroom on the third floor for warriors in which he projects videos depicting scenes of masculinity on urinals made of surgical scissors, a medium which has threatening undertones to virility. Washrooms are places where people are their most vulnerable, and by looking at this shared vulnerability, perhaps prejudices could be diminished. Sounds of singing bowls and bells create a sense of calm and safety in this charged space. The artist shares that the “intention of this rainbow room is for the public to disconnect from their regular destructive life and rather give them a breathing space to convene and think about peace and happiness.”The artist believes that people lose identity in a washroom because it is a space where one tries to become comfortable and cleanse them self. Common warriors can join forces here with peace lovers to fight for equality. The artist has also curated an exhibition around the same theme at Britto Arts Trust. Mithu Sen (b. 1971) Batil Kobitaboli (Poems Declined), 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artists, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. In addition to being internationally acclaimed as one of India’s best visual artists, and winning the country’s inaugural Skoda Prize in 2010, Mithu Sen) is also recognized among connoisseurs as one of the finest Bengali Poets. Sen’s visual art practice stems from a strong drawing background that has extended into video, sculpture, installations, and sound works that further draw the viewer into her psyche. Sen has been invited for numerous international residencies and exhibitions, and as the artist travels, she attempts to draw in new publics to her work that often reflects how these new locations have affected her psyche.Sen has been returning to poetry in her recent work. In 2013 she realized a project entitled I am a Poet at the Tate Modern project space and at Khoj, where she invited viewers “to embrace ‘nonsense’ as resistance and comb out utterances from [their] subconscious; thereby, giving voice to all those moments that exist but are not realised or lived.” Many of Sen’s works aim to give glimpses at secret psychological moments, and to debunk ideas about hierarchies that exist in the creative world. In one such project, Free Mithu (2007 onwards), the artist offered free artworks to anyone who would write her a personal letter, making direct connection with the public without an intermediary such as a private dealer or an art gallery and using her artwork as an emotional response to correspondence from strangers. In another work, she took up a very prominent wall and filled it with the text that read “Artist – Unknown, Medium – Life,” celebrating works of unsung creative individuals whose names might have never made it into the consciousness of the art world. This desire to give importance to marginalized people, emotions, and ideas is a common thread in her work.Rather than celebrate her success or importance as a South Asian artist, Mithu Sen created a project that celebrates the work and efforts of poets whose work was not previously given prominence or attention, to those whose work was actually declined or rejected. In her experience in Dhaka, Sen realized that poetry was not limited to poets, the Bangla language itself was poetry, and poetry itself is a language in Bangladesh, sharing that “In Bangladesh, the language is not Bengali but Poetry.” In the process of creating the multi-media installation Batil-Kobitaboli (Poems Declined), Mithu Sen traveled to Dhaka to impulsively meet, collect, read, and study unpublished/rejected works by aspiring Bangladeshi poets, trying to recover the marginalized emotions of poets whose words could not cross institutional barriers. The artist personally met about 30-40 poets, but corresponded with over 100 poets who gave her more than 1,000 poems. Sharing rejection requires relinquishing one’s ego, and through her research and communication and artistic prowess, Sen has smashed traditional psychological and systematic barriers to these poets’ works and is presenting them in a prominent space in Dhaka in the Shilpakala Academy, and binding them in a nearly two foot thick book elevated on a golden pedestal. Rather than keeping the marked up manuscripts tucked away in a drawer or closet, Sen treasured these self-edits and suggestions of inadequacy and struggles to find one’s voice (which were given to her by the poets, even from their personal diaries), and elevated these corrective markings and psychological symbols of the creative process (doodles, etc.) into the realm of drawing. Placing a spotlight on these annotations, Sen projects their shadow into the space. Behind every successful project is another that failed, and we grow from these failures. These moments of feeling inadequate or grappling to find oneself fuel our growth, and at times, they may be something to celebrate. These self-corrections can also show a sense of self-reliance as they were corrected by the author, rather than by an institutional hierarchy. The sound element of this project is a poetic expression of Sen’s, which invites anyone to stand on a dedicated pedestal and read their poetry aloud. Through this gesture, Sen is attempting to transform her project into a space where creative people are encouraged to think past fears of rejection. Naeem Mohaiemen Shokol Choritro Kalponik, 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, theDhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Since 2006, the London born, New York and Dhaka based Bangladeshi artist and writer Naaem Mohaiemen has worked on a series called The Young Man Was, a long-form project in multiple chapters that traces the history of the “ultra left,” and its complicated legacy of disappointment and failure in Bangladesh. Using a mixture of whimsy and actual events, he has also linked these histories to that of the radical left in other countries, especially Germany and Japan. Each chapter has been in a different medium, and published in heterogeneous platforms. Some of the chapters are Guerillas in the Mist [Maoist underground in Dhaka], Sartre comes to Stammheim [Andreas Baader meets Jean Paul Sartre], Live True Life or Die Trying [dueling leftist-Islamism rallies], and War of 666 against six million [kidnapping of Hanns Martinn Schleyer]. The two latest chapters are the films United Red Army (The Young Man Was, Part 1) [hijack of Japan Airlines], which was recently acquired by the Tate Modern, and Afsan’s Long Day (The Young Man Was Part 2), which is scheduled to premiere in MoMA’s New Directors New Films series in the Spring of 2014. The language of these projects are somewhere between research, whimsy, and humour. Because of the ironic tone, the projects have sometimes been read in Bangladesh as “overly critical” of the left, including people Mohaiemen considers allies in the search for left alternatives. In discussions about the projects, Mohaiemen has stressed that he makes work as a believer in left futures, but with the understanding that tracing where things went wrong in the part of the process of building such futures. As he writes in the text for Live True Life or Die Trying: “A lover tries again, flower in hand.” Yet he also acknowledges that irony and distance are complicated devices to use in the context of Bangla- desh, where history is never past and things continue to matter. The pressure for creating what Naaem has elsewhere called “shothik itihash (correct history)” is immense, and he considers the visual arts a space where ambiguous, open- ended conversations have more space. Parallel to his interest in conducting research, Naaem has been investigating a minimal aesthetic that often veers towards the non-image. Thus United Red Army is a film where a majority of the story takes place in darkness, forcing the audience to replace the expected image with their own imaginary about what may be there. Sinking Polaroids into resin until they explode from heat, running VHS tapes through a VCR until on-screen snow appears, enlarging flip phone photos until the grain is the whole image (a project done before the advent of smart phone cameras)– all these techniques have produced works where the image refuses to give visual pleasure to the audience. Since (or even before) the time of Duchamp's intervention, the idea of the "everyday” inside the gallery has blended with other ideas of arte útil. Many decades later, so much sediment has gathered over the original provocation, that bringing an everyday object into a gallery or a museum would have no transformative valence. The commoditization of this gesture can be seen in recent museum projects where the "R. Mutt" signature was attached to an actual museum urinal (instead of bringing it into the white box. Mohaiemen writes that “at a time when art education, international interest, and media linkages, are commodifying, commercializing, and flattening art practices in Bangla- desh, there is a useful space for the idea that "everyone is an artist," most importantly the audience in their reading (or rejection) of the object on the floor, wall, or atrium.” The artist continues, stating, “The ultimate everyday object is the daily vernacular newspaper (not the English edition, within which my own writing has been trapped for many years), distributed, sold, shared, pasted, and finally recycled.” At the Dhaka Art Summit, Mohaeimen has married his writing and recent minimalist artistic leanings into a single- issue newspaper with the full title of "Shokol Choritro Kalponik,”– "Jodi shone polao khai, tobe ghee diyei khabi" (If I eat pulau in my dreams, I may as well eat it with ghee). This 8-page issue includes imagery reminiscent of the style of newsprint in the 1970s. The newspaper presents fictional news items, along the lines of news that many people would wish to see: the news that would have been the everyday if the ultra left had come to power in the 1970s and built a different utopia. These stories are so far outside the realm of the possible that they fall into the category of "I wish, but I know this is not possible in this world." A Sample Headline includes: Indians Protest Smuggling of Cows from Bangladesh. Rana Begum No. 473, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit, the Samdani Art Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Belonging to the second generation of artists who turned Minimalism into something completely theirs, Rana Begum claims Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, sacred geometry in Sufism, and Islamic art and architecture as her influences. To this, she adds cues gathered from built and urban environments – from noticing patterns of colour, line and form as they collide in a city. A relatively new influence to her work was visiting the Cathedral-Mosque in Cordoba, Spain in 2008/2009. The spiritual experience from the repetition of arches and domes has been an inspiration for her recent work. Begum’s work becomes something new with every shift of light. Reflecting on the work, the artist shares that “My hope is that the work can almost be viewed as a lesson in seeing, because upon leaving the work, perhaps the viewer starts to see these moments around them, and notices anew the odd and often uncharacteristic glimpses of beauty that living in a city can provide.” The bright colour palette that is characteristic of Begum’s work reflects the rich visual culture of South Asia, and these colours blend into one another in unique ways through the folds and shadows that the artist creates with her sculptures. While many female artists in the region are known for their use of organic materials and feminine craft, Begum masters the “masculine art” of working with metal, defying the norms that her conservative Islamic background imparted on her. However, the geometric lines and repletion used in traditional Islamic arts have influenced the precision and purity of Begum’s practice. Folds and bending are important facets of Begum’s works. She folds paper and even thin aluminium sheets into forms that are reminiscent of kites, with a sense of lightness that gives the feeling that a gust of wind could blow the sculptures away. Her recent body of work blends into the wall with the new use of white as a base, with glowing colours in the background that seem to radiate in the space between the sculpture and the wall. The illusion that light can create is something Begum has mastered over the years with increasing sophistication. Elaborating on her current work, Begum shares that it “is mainly fabricated from powder-coated and painted metal extruded sections. The language these materials use is at first inspection one of mass production. But then as the complexity of pattern that flows across these linear hard-edged forms is made visible, something far subtler is revealed.” In her first major exhibition in Dhaka, Begum moves away from surface ideas of mass-production and brings focus to the handmade. Begum revisits her childhood fascination with basket weaving, an activity she enjoyed when growing up in Bangladesh, and which also uses a similar process of bending and folding that she is known for. For Begum, the idea of architecture evokes memories of reading the Koran in Bangladesh and watching simple streams of light seeping in through the windows of the mosque. Using these vivid childhood memories as inspiration, Begum transforms the Shilpakala Academy with over a thousand locally woven baskets, which she weaves together to create a monumental sculptural dome that references light in the Koran. The work immerses the viewer in an innovative play between light and shadow. The complex intricate pattern creates a weightless and contemplative space through repetition. Begum was born in Sylhet, Bangladesh in 1977 and moved to England in 1985. The artist studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London where she currently lives and works. She has exhibited extensively internationally including exhibitions in the UK, the USA, Mumbai, Beirut, and Dubai, and she was the recipient of the 2012 Jack Goldhill Award for Sculpture at the Royal Academy of Arts and nominated for the Jameel Prize at the V&A in 2010. She has created numerous public art interventions all over the globe, transforming cityscapes with her unique use of colour and light. She was also a past Delfina Foundation resident artist. Rashid Rana A Room From Tate Modern, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Rashid Rana is one of the most important Pakistani artists of his generation. Rana’s work deals with everyday images drawn from pop culture, art history and urban surroundings, as well as more abstract themes of faith and religion. He is known for his style of constructing large images out of “pixels” of other smaller images. In addition to his own work as a visual artist, he is the head of Fine Art Department and one of the founding faculty members of the School of Visual Arts and Design (SVAD) at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. His work is in the permanent collections of the Asia Society, Devi Art Foundation, the Queensland Art Museum, the Fukuoka Museum of Asian Art, and many other distinguished public and private collections around the world. He recently completed a mid-career retrospective at the Mohatta Palace Museum in Karachi, a ground-breaking exhibition in the history of contemporary art in Pakistan. The artist contextualises his interest in Western art history by negotiating it with his time and location. Fellow artist and critic Quddus Mirza wrote, “Rana’s work deals with globalisation, reflects on its impact, as well as serves as a critique of it. His use of digital media signifies the altered fabric of our societies, which function on the pattern and necessity of transnational operations. Here a work is conceived in Lahore, produced in Düsseldorf, displayed in Cairo and is collected in Chicago; spreading across four corners of the world.”1 One of Rana’s most talked about recent works that speaks to the global nature of his practice is A Plinth from a Gallery in Lahore (2010-2011), a photo sculpture that he exhibited at his first solo exhibition at Lisson Gallery in London in 2011. The artist took photographs of a pedestal at a gallery in Lahore and transformed this documentation into an impactful sculpture. “I wanted to extend the historical journey of this object as a work of mine,” reflects Rana, “historically a plinth has been used as an object to place figurative sculptures, until it became so close to becoming an art object itself as part of the minimalist movement of the 1960s and white cube gallery aesthetics. These aesthetics and their manifestations have travelled to other parts of the world…I wanted to photographically document a plinth from a gallery in Lahore and produce it as a three-dimensional object (print on aluminium) and take it back to the white cube gallery place to symbolise my own journey as an artist.” A Plinth from a Gallery in Lahore can also be read as the rendering of a Western idea of an exhibition model placed in the context of South Asia, where it has not been fully downloaded and remains pixelated. Another work which speaks to the artist’s mental space, that is found between the hallowed halls of international museums and the local buzz of the rapidly developing city of Lahore, is the 2010-2011 photo sculpture The Step. The geometric arrangement of a group of bricks outside of a small village grocery shop (selling only five to six essential items) reminded the artist of Carl Andre’s work, inspiring him to record and dislocate this experience in his work using the same photo sculpture technique as A Plinth from a Gallery in Lahore. Rashid Rana’s solo project A Room from TATE Modern (2013-2014) extends Rana’s practice from three-dimensional photo sculptures into the scale of architecture, something that Rana had wanted to do for many years, and that he mentioned in an interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist. Resulting from a discussion with curator Diana Campbell Betancourt over a long distance call from rural Sweden to Lahore, the artist decided to realise this longstanding dream for his solo project at the Dhaka Art Summit. The work is based on photo documentation of a room at Tate Modern, made to look empty with the works of art eliminated, but with spotlight effects and remnants of labels and wall-texts of works that make the viewer imagine what could have previously hung there. Rana elaborates that, “essentially, the work is a portrait (always an illusion) of a place which itself is used for the exhibition of art.” “My work is often a three-way negotiation between myself, my immediate physical surroundings and what I receive – whether through the internet, books, history, or collective knowledge,” Rashid Rana recently shared in an interview with Art Review. The artist exists in a current reality of being an artist from Pakistan, but integrated into the Western exhibition model of the white cube. As a teacher and as an artist, Rana is one of the pioneers in building artistic infrastructure in Pakistan. The fact that he is injecting a Western exhibition model into the central atrium of the government property of the National Academy of Fine Arts of Bangladesh, while appropriating the model into his own work, speaks to the larger needs and potential for the region. The work also opens up interesting questions about experiencing art virtually. In this project, viewers will be looking at a three-dimensional photograph of a room at Tate Modern. While looking straight at the blank wall (which contains an image of a wall), viewers won’t necessarily question it as an illusion. When looking at the other walls, however, the view of doors that open into adjacent gallery spaces will create an illusion that the walls extend into new dimensions. At its formal core, this work is about the conflict between the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional. To enhance this “dimensional conflict” and heighten the sense of a space in between truth and fiction, the photos on the wall and ceiling (pasted onto the walls and ceiling) are pixelated; something that we normally associate with two-dimensionality. The exterior of this work is a temporary structure that reveals the methods of the project’s construction: MDF joined with a wooden-frame to form a grid-like structure that references the work of Sol Lewitt. The grid has played an important part in Rana’s larger body of work, which evolved from grid paintings to painting pixel and matrix-based digital prints. Reflecting on his earlier works, Rana shared with Obrist, “It’s ironic though, that my fascination with formal concerns to do with two dimensionality are manifesting in three-dimensional works.” The artist collaborated with Dhaka architects to create a photo sculpture of a room at Tate nearly to-scale. The artist dislocated his project from the grid of the South Plaza’s geometric layout, tilting it in a manner that the audience must walk around the structure, to discover a hidden door at the back of the outer MDF structure. Rana draws viewers into his work, forcing them to look past the surface, and rewarding them if they take the time to fully take in and understand the rich illusions and allusions in his work. Rathin Barman (b.1981) Landscape From Memory (Situation 1), 2014. Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Indian artist Rathin Barman was born in 1981 surrounded by Bangladesh on three sides. Tripura, India’s third smallest state, shares close historical ties with Bangladesh. These close ties cause strife between the regions, and trade was recently suspended due to protests against tariff hikes. Barman’s parents, as well as many other people he grew up around, are originally from Bangladesh and fled the country post the riots of the 1950s and 1960s. When thinking about the relationship between India and Bangladesh, the artist reflects that “people in my village can speak several Bangladeshi languages. Apart from political issues things are almost same. So, I assume, it’s the same land which is just politically divided.” Tripura is geographically cut off from the rest of India, and due to the economic disadvantages of its isolation, many youth people from Tripura such as Barman have to migrate to cities like Kolkata to make their way in the world. The artist has experienced first hand the transforming effects of globalisation, and looks at it with a close lens in his work, which while seemingly contradictory is both site-specific and universal. Despite his young age, Barman likes to look deep into present realities, shifting his gaze to the foundations for the issues we experience today. Rathin Barman had initially been trained to become mechanical engineer, but soon with the help of his brother, abandoned his courses to join the University’s Fine Arts department. Barman has used his engineering knowledge how to create ambitious structures that break moulds and force the audience to look at the world in new ways. He creates new structures, but ones that are primarily based on structures that had been put together in different ways by someone else. His practice has focused on this fascination with old buildings, and their fate after their redevelopment,in rapidly changing urban spaces in the subcontinent and other parts of the developing world. Similar to building new structures, Barman explores building a new mold out of a material that once had a different use, such as his corrugated paper works employing removal boxes, now re-assigned to creating entire living rooms to illustrate the ideas of quick and mobile living which forgets roots. This lifestyle often comes at the expense of historical buildings and Barman tasks himself with documenting the old buildings of Kolkata, imagining what will become of them after their scheduled demolition. One body of work which has earned Barman international acclaim is his series of sculptures transforming iron reinforcement bars and found rubble into structures which comment on the constant pressure for urban development - rural areas are transforming into urban centres, much like his own. Barman made his international debut at the Frieze New York Sculpture Park in 2012, curated by Tom Eccles, with Untitled, currently on view at the DeCordova Sculpture Park, Massachussets, USA, making Barman the first sculptor of Asian origin to exhibit at the park. DeCordova describes Barman’s work as both universal and site specific. While the iron reinforcement bar structures travelled from India, the rubble that fills the sculpture must be collected from the local area where the work is being exhibited. When the work was shown at Frieze New York, the rubble came from New York City, when the work was shown again at DeCordova, the rubble was collected from Lincoln, MA. Urbanisation is a universal and increasingly homogeneous issue, but the crumbled residue beneath new developments shows the breadth of history that developers are paving over. While previous works highlighted the distinctions between different urban centres through the physicality of the wreckage filling his structures, for his commission for the Dhaka Art Summit, Barman expects the rubble he finds in Dhaka to be strikingly similar to that which he finds around his studio in Kolkata, pointing to shared history between the two Bengals and paving over the differences in between, which become fewer and fewer through globalisation’s effects on both urban India and Bangladesh. The form of this work draws the viewer into the sad reality of many cities in urban South Asia. The desire to expand and grow overrides the need for adequate urban planning and building codes; entire cities are being built in ways that defy any idea of a sustainable urban landscape. Recent disasters, such as the highly publicised Rana Plaza incident, as well as other incidents with less media attention in Mumbai, Kolkata and elsewhere, speak of the high human cost of industrialisation gone wrong. Methods and planning behind many new buildings in the region are questionable and Barman’s work uses the language of development and the debris of its past, to raise these questions. In Landscape From Memory (Situation 1), the mammoth iron and rubble structure stands as a monument that bears the memories of several tragedies that are marked by architectural evidence of poor urban planning and civil negligence. It is a tragically ordinary urban visual of failed dreams of transforming space. While the way in which this work pierces space and calls to mind Chris Burden’s Beam Drop, Landscape from Memory (Situation 1) critiques the liberties that builders subject the public to, rather than celebrating freedom from the modern urban grid. Many developers in South Asia want the look of the grid without properly planning for it, and this is where many of the region’s problems arise. Like the work of Lida Abdul, Barman’s work provides hope that we can rebuild from the crumbling ruins around us, and heal and progress without repeating history’s tragic mistakes. Shahzia Sikander Parallax, 2013 Courtesy of the artist, Sharjah Art Foundation The Dhaka Art Summit is pleased to exhibit Shahzia Sikander’s incredible three channel high-definition animation Parallax (2013), which will be the first work of Sikander’s exhibited in Bangladesh. This work was commissioned for the Sharjah Biennale, and as Sharjah’s labor force is comprised of a significant population of Bangladeshis, a large portion of the audience in Dhaka will have a connection to Sharjah through the migration patterns of their relatives. Focusing on Sharjah’s unique location at the Strait of Hormuz, and the area’s historical power tensions Parallax is inspired by the idea of conflict and control. Visual vocabulary is culled from drawings and paintings to construct the animation, giving the motifs and symbols a shifting identity as they come together to cultivate new associations within the digital space. The soundtrack was composed by Sikander’s frequent collaborator, Du Yun. Exhibiting this work in Dhaka is made possible in part by the Sharjah Art Foundation. Shilpa Gupta (b. 1976) Untitled, 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Shilpa Gupta is a Bombay based artist who uses facets of everyday life to create artworks that ask questions about methods of control and the ideas behind boundaries and borders that shape our perception of world order. While these works are deeply rooted in the Indian context where the artist lives and works, they grapple with universal issues such as freedom and security, and Gupta’s work is enjoyed and exhibited all over the world, in important exhibitions such as the New Museum Triennial, Yokohama Triennale, Lyon Biennale, Sharjah Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Shanghai Biennale, and Sydney Biennale. Her works are also part of prestigious institutional collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, and the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi. Soap, microphones, sign hoardings, books – these are some of the familiar materials that the artist uses to engage audiences with wider and deeper issues. The artist studied sculpture and worked part time in graphic design and she has a remarkable ability to transform mundane imagery into something profound. In her 2009 work Threat, Gupta created a sculpture with 4,500 bars of soap, engraved with the word ‘Threat.’The audience is invited to take a bar of soap away and use it if they wish, washing away any trace of any imagined threat by the end of the exhibition. Fear is a tool often used to manipulate groups of people in power struggles, and Gupta’s works, often harnessing participation and interactivity, shake up our ideas about why we are asked to act the way we do. Those in authority are able to control the media and what information gets disseminated to the public. What if the microphones that pundits speak into were able to speak truth and drone out lies? Gupta created a body of work of ‘singing microphones,’ which use Gupta’s voice to amplify issues that are often silenced. In 5 Singing Microphones from 2009, Gupta attempts to count the countless number of individuals who disappeared during times of political unrest such as Partition, creating a sense of urgency to remember those who transformed from people into mere numbers. In the same year, she also created a series of works using chalkboards, conventional tools to teach children about counting, and these chalkboards show the sign of countless markings, complete with accumulated chalk dust from writing and erasing, demonstrating the Sisyphean task of trying to count the people that governments want you to forget about. The phrase “Will we ever be able to mark enough?” leaves lingering questions in the minds of her audience. Stimulating memories, on both an individual and a collective basis, is an important part of Gupta’s practice. In her 2008-2009 work 100 Hand Drawn Maps of India, Gupta asked a different person each day to draw a map of their country, and none of the drawings matched. Gupta’s works shed light on the problem of imposing borders on groups of people whose history on the land is much older than that of new nation-states. In her 2011-2012 work 1:14.9 which is part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum collection in New York, Gupta wound the idea of the 1188.5 meter long fence between India and Pakistan by manipulating thread into an elegant ball at a 14.9 to 1 ratio, nimbly caging this 1947 imposed border which symbol of violence and religious prejudice. Interested in the formation of territories under the project of nationhood, the artist traveled to chhitmahal, Indo-Bangladeshi enclaves with a combined estimated population of 51,000 people who are technically foreigners in another country. In other words, there are landlocked islands of India within Bangladesh, and Bangladesh within India. In her poignant floor-based sculpture, Gupta describes the situation poignantly with the use of a mark on carved stone. Depending on which side of this marking you may now be, you may or may not have an identity card, you may or may not need to take a fake name to enroll into a school, you may or may not be able to deliver your child with the real father’s name in the neighborhood hospital, you may or may not still be able to have electricity this evening even though the cable passes through your house, irrespective of the fact that your family may have lived here before countries were formed one night. The people in these enclaves believe that they are there because their communities were part of valued kingdoms, making them special and unique from their neighbors who have access to national public services that are granted from having an identity card. People who live in the chhitmahal do not have identity cards, so in order to give birth to a child in a hospital, or to enroll their children in school, they have to use the identity of someone with an identity card as the father, so there are several children with false identities. One of the works in this solo project obscures the names of a mythical classroom, showing how a name in these regions may likely not be just what it seems. Most of the people in the chhitmahal have been living there for centuries, and can easily ask their close neighbors with identity cards to lend false names as “relatives.” Gupta presents a work reflecting on the longstanding relationship between these “illegal” people and their ancestral land, showing images of feet firmly planted on the ground that they “belonged to” for centuries. Border markers can be anywhere, even floating in water as Gupta shares with us with her photographs. A painted photograph poignantly renders the situation that being born into an enclave makes a night and day difference: electrical lines may run through the enclave, but only certified areas on either side of the chit will have light when they turn on the switch. Tsherin Sherpa The Fifty-Four Views of Wisdom and Compassion (Untitled I), 2014 Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2014. Courtesy of the artist, the Dhaka Art Summit and the Samdani Art Foundation. Historically, Tibetan art only existed in a religious context. Lha dri ba in Tibetan means to draw a deity, and it is the only expression available to describe “art,” as art was often used for meditation or paying tribute. Nepalese Painter Tsherin Sherpa extends this expression into a global contemporary art context, and created three new paintings that explore the relationship between Tibetan tradition and identity in the 21st century for the Dhaka Art Summit. The artist is based between Oakland and Kathmandu, and he created these works in his studio in Nepal. His work has been exhibited extensively internationally, including the landmark exhibition at the Rubin Museum in New York, “Tradition Transformed - Tibetan Artist’s Respond.” Born in Kathmandu to a Tibetan Buddhist family in 1968, Sherpa apprenticed with his father Master Urgen Dorje Sherpa in the thangka painting tradition. Sherpa’s practice has preserved the meticulous detail of the canonical thangka but his figures are distilled from the structured, underlying grid systems and symbols that bring the traditional deity’s form to life. In recent years his emphasis has shifted from traditional subjects to more contemporary concerns, including imagining what traditional Tibetan spirits would now look like if they too had left Tibet and journeyed with him to California (where he now lives). By exporting his figures out of their context Sherpa explains, “[t]hrough centuries of reproduction, the essences of many of these spiritual tools have been lost. Bits and pieces have been chopped away or forgotten to be included due to the patronage of a tourist class that doesn’t know the ritual usage of the painting. By consciously deconstructing and abstracting the deity, I’m interested to see what parts of its essence will be revealed and reinvigorated through the process of exploring meaning, form, and identity.” Bangladesh shares a deep connection with the history of Sherpa’s Tibetan Buddhist faith. The founder of the Kadampa school of Buddhism, Atisha (980-1054 CE) was born in East Bengal (in an area that is now in Bangladesh). Like the Buddha, Atisha is believed to have been born into a royal family and grew to espouse the ways of the cloth than that of the sword. Celebrated for the brilliance of his teachings and his unparalleled abilities in debate, Atisha was soon appointed abbot of Nalanda Monastery, the greatest of all Buddhist monasteries in India. So great was his reach that he was invited to teach in Tibet. There he composed the Lamp for the Path to Enlightenment, a text that distilled all of the Buddha’s eighty four thousand teachings of Dharma into a clear simple guide for practice. Atisha stayed in Tibet for 17 years in total, and his teachings were passed down to subsequent generations, including to the great Je Tsongkhapa, whose Atisha inspired lam-rim texts remain the cornerstone of Tibetan Buddhist teachings to this day. Atisha’s teachings reached Sherpa’s grandparents in Tibet, which were subsequently taught to Sherpa in Nepal, and now travel back to Bangladesh through Sherpa’s technically fascinating and richly colored multi-paneled paintings. Atisa’s legacy has been the driving force behind the three works presented here. As Sherpa points out, “as a person viewing him from a historical vantage point today, we glimpse at different perspectives of him depending on our cultural boundaries. Through globalization, these different boundaries come up next to each other physically and virtually to expose a form that is greater than its individual parts. Through time, countries are always reestablishing new geographic borders which in turn assist cultures to re-invent itself. By seeing the links and gaps between these forms, I hope one can contemplate the whole.” The Fifty-four Views of Wisdom and Compassion (Untitled I) consists of separate pieces (20 x 20 inches each on canvas) that compose the whole. The central deity, Chakrasamvara, exists in fragments throughout the work. These pieces are depicted from different vantage points; some show portions from a zoomed-in perspective while others are from an eagle-eye view. Charkrasamvara, translated in the West as “Highest Bliss,” is one of the principles of istha-devatā, or meditational deities of the Sarma schools of Tibetan Buddhism. Typically depicted with a blue-coloured body, four faces, and twelve arms, the deity is represented embracing his consort Vajravarahi in the yab-yum position. Their divine embrace serves as a metaphor for the union of great bliss and emptiness, perceived as one and the same essence. The other two works on paper are a continuation of Sherpa’s Protector series. As thangkas are either destroyed, lost, or moved away from their natural environment of monasteries and private altars, they begin to take on a new context. As a whole, this series explores how these abstractions of deities will function and be perceived by a new set of viewers in secular space. In the previous series, the individual deity recedes into an elegant swirling form. The familiar structure of a grid system is no longer used to stabilize and support it. At the same moment that the traditional is becoming ungrounded, something new is arising. This is the first time that Sherpa works with multiple intermingling deities, and he wanted to explore how “the energy changes from a single form to that of a space consisting of multiplicity and repetition.”

ALL PROJECTS Workshop and Presentation with Tori Wranes 7 - 8 April 2015 Leading Norwegian artist Tori Wranes, who has performed at the Sydney Biennial and Performa in New York, along with her assistant Gustav Gunvaldsen, conducted one day workshop with the 15 participant artists using 8 rikshaws. Tori and her group created a wonderful ballet riding rikshaws in the South Plaza of Shilpakala Academy. She also gave her artist presentation during the closing ceremony on 8th.

ALL PROJECTS Metropolitan Museum of Art Donation The Met, New York, 2019 An untitled tapestry by Rashid Choudhury (1932–1986), recently gifted to The Met by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, is the first work of art made by a visual artist in independent Bangladesh to join the Museum's collection. While The Met does hold pre-modern works that are attributed to the region of Eastern Bengal, Untitled (1981) is a significant and major addition to the Museum's collection of modern and contemporary art because it broadens the department's remit of collecting and preserving important modern works from South Asia. Untitled, now on view in gallery 399, presents an abstract and multifaceted twist of earth tones, with hints of orange and sections of light blue. I find that there is an arresting dynamism to the central component of the tapestry: it appears as a symphony of elongated and fragmented vertical shapes, which intertwine with each other in a way that is remarkably evocative of a body—or perhaps numerous bodies—in motion. This important work is a telling example of Choudhury's visual language, which is distinctly modernist and aesthetically innovative, but is also situated within a particular historical and cultural context. Choudhury dedicated himself to the modern art movement in his country through his work as a teacher and community facilitator. In his own work he sought expression through a medium that was very demanding in practical terms and that was less-highly regarded as fine art when compared to painting and sculpture at the time. Nevertheless, he developed his own visual idiom, which drew from the rich, historic traditions of South Asian iconography as well as his studies in Europe. As is evident in his three tapestries at The Met, Choudhury distilled these varied pre-modern and modern forms to create works with a phenomenological impact—one that feels not only effortless, but also transportive. The whole text written by DAS 2016 curator Shanay Jhaveri can be found here. This is the second donation from the Foundation's collection, distributing the knowledge of Bangladeshi art history through the research conducted during the Dhaka Art Summit. Image: Installation view of three tapestries by Rashid Choudhury. At center is a recent addition to The Met collection, and at left and right are two loans from The Samdani Art Foundation. Image credit: MET

ALL PROJECTS Education Pavilion Curated by Diana Campbell The Education Pavilion at Dhaka Art Summit, curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, placed learning at the centre of our programme to nurture and challenge the next generation of artists and architects in Bangladesh. These workshops were free and open to Bangladeshi participants who pre-registered. The education pavilion programming can be found here: Education+Pavilion .pdf Download PDF • 4.16MB

ALL PROJECTS Soul Searching Curated by Md. Muniruzzaman “In my youth, I went around the entire (British) India driven by curiosity of imagination and drawn by various attractions and sentiments. I was not contented. So I crossed ‘seven seas and thirteen rivers’, and went around the world led by my whims. Then suddenly on the screen of my mind the beauty and the nature of lovely Chitra (the river) was flashed. ... I was nostalgic. I came back to her.” -SM Sultan To find the artistic sources of the Bangladeshi Modernists one need look no further than the folk life for their inspiration. Even as the urban entity grew prominent in contemporary Bangladesh, the artists of that generation sought their own identity through the vernacular, be it urban or rural. In his quote “The River is my Master”- Shilpacharya Zainul Abedin always identified the river of Brahmaputra as the muse of his artistic exploration. After many experimentations and explorations across South Asia and the globe, he mastered his artistic identity by returning to nature – back to the riverbank where he was born. His painterly lines contain an indirect similarity to the linear characteristics of the common people of Bengal. We can identify two aspects of Abedin’s works that subconsciously draw from the environment around him. These are: 1. Natural surroundings have inspired his work, such as the Brahmaputra River. 2. Folk-art and craft from the region. These two are the common features of other Bangladeshi artists of that time. They were inspired by nature and the simple ways of the common people. The language of Bangladeshi modernism begins with the combination of these two subconscious psychological identities. Needless to say, Zainul Abedin catalysed modernism inspired by the land, river, and culture of Bengal for generations after him. Another legendary contemporary artist of Abedin’s time, himself a reflection of these two identities, was S.M. Sultan. For him, his creation and his identity were intertwined. Sultan travelled around the world, yet settled in the remote village of Narail, where he developed his artistic practice amid folk life which he adapted as his own after traveling the world on various scholarships. Quamrul Hassan, on the other hand, created another visual language where he adopted folk into urban entity. The æsthetics of his works came mainly from Potuas (folk artists) as well as cubism. Folk art, Battala prints and Kalighat patas were the strengths of his works. As a result, he is referred to as a Potua. Brought up in a city, Safiuddin Ahmed explored folk entities through his urban experience.4 As a result of his urban upbringing, Ahmed sought to transform the descriptive language of folk art into a more abstract form. This practice was followed by the next generation of artists who helped develop and mature the movement. These characteristics were the direct or indirect aspirations for the next generation of artists. Considering the factors that define Bangladeshi art, fifty-two artists of Bangladesh are presenting their works in the exhibition Soul Searching to re-discover their artistic sources. The selection consists of prominent artists who were directly involved with developing the described characteristics of Bangladeshi art as well as the subsequent generation of artists who learned from them.

ALL PROJECTS A Time Comes When We Hear Nothing Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) and FICA presented a collaborative online performance, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen" by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman, launching their project, "A time comes when we hear nothing." The artists were awarded a grant for their project through the aegis of Stitching Screens, a platform instituted by FICA and SAF for supporting artistic collaboration across India, Bangladesh and the digital space in 2020 - 2021. Having worked on the project for over a year, Ashfika Rahman and Amol K Patil shared the final iteration of "A time comes when we hear nothing” on November 6, 2022. The project was imagined as a means of solidarity for global working-class people. An expression by two artists across borders reflecting on the collective experience of social divides during lockdown. The projected connected them through common concerns and emotions for people. Common deep pain ran through the veins of Bangladesh to India despite a geographic border. As part of our virtual launch event, we also screened an online performance by Ashfika Rahman and Amol K Patil titled, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen," realized in 2022 as an addition to "A time comes when we hear nothing." The performance is a cross-national conversation between two artists, a conversation symbolic of what might be shared between two laborers from Bangladesh and India. Questions of communication in two different languages. This conversation was inspired by the theatre script of Amol K Patil, referring to a long distance conversation between a migrant labourer and his wife. Here is a mundane conversation people of different nationalities and different genders transcending borders through screens evoking the monotony of a digital life. Getting into the deeper feeling of the working class. A conversation between two digital voices, two screens. The project ‘A time comes when we hear nothing’ is a means of solidarity for global working people. It showcases 1 min videos of artists’ performances across the globe, posted on an Instagram account called @a_time_comes_we_hear_nothing . The project explores the collective experience of social stratification, which was exacerbated by the pandemic. It also reflects on the plight of the migrant labor and the effects of the lockdown on those stranded at home. The videos represent occupying one minute as a means of solidarity. Visit their website to learn more about the project: A time comes when we hear nothing https://www.atimecomes.net/