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

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

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

ALL PROJECTS Novera Ahmed's Work from the Samdani Art Foundation Collection Exhibited at The Hepworth Wakefield The Samdani Art Foundation is delighted to support Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms – Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh at The Hepworth Wakefield, an exhibition that brings together key women sculptors whose practices shaped the history of modern sculpture in South Asia. Among the artists featured is pioneering Bangladeshi sculptor Novera Ahmed, whose work continues to be reassessed for its foundational contribution to the region's artistic history. Widely regarded as the pioneer of modern sculpture in Bangladesh, Novera Ahmed helped define a new sculptural language in South Asia. Yet despite her foundational contribution to the country's artistic development, her work remained underappreciated for decades, making the continued reassessment of her legacy especially significant. The Samdani Art Foundation has lent Standing Figure from its collection to the exhibition. Created during Novera's time in Lahore in the early 1960s, the work belongs to a rare body of sculptures produced during a pivotal chapter of her practice outside Bangladesh. Unlike many of the works for which she is best known, Standing Figure emerged from a distinct period of experimentation and artistic exchange across what was then East and West Pakistan. Co-curated by Tarini Malik in partnership with the Royal Academy of Arts, Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms – Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh opened on 3 May 2026 and remains on view at The Hepworth Wakefield until 1 November 2026. The Samdani Art Foundation is a major supporter of the exhibition, along with other institutions.

ALL PROJECTS Tarun Nagesh: the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art: Art and Curating in the Asia Pacific Soni Mongol Adda, Segun Bagicha, 4 April 2017 Dhaka Art Summit 2018 Fellow Tarun Nagesh will talk about his experience as part of curatorial team of the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Shoni Mongol Adda. TARUN NAGESH Tarun Nagesh is Associate Curator, Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery / Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, Australia. Tarun is part of the core curatorial team for the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT) and curated the South Asian and parts of the Southeast Asian components of APT8 (2015-16), including the focus project Kalpa Vriksha: Contemporary Indigenous and Vernacular Art of India. He regularly curates exhibitions from the QAGOMA Collection along with touring exhibitions and working with historical material. Tarun is currently working on the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (2018-19) as well as the exhibition program and development of the QAGOMA Asian Art Collection.

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

ALL PROJECTS La Biennale di Venezia - 56th International Art Exhibition 9th May - 22nd November 2015 Dhaka Art Summit 2014 Solo Project Bangladeshi artist Naeem Mohaiemen and Indian artist group Raqs Media Collective were selected to show their works in the centre pavilion, supported by the Samdani Art Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS Today Will End 21 May – 12 Sept 2021, M HKA Antwerp Shilpa Gupta work on the Chitmahals of Bangladesh-India border, previously shown at DAS 2014 was part of her solo exhibition Today Will End at MHKA.

ALL PROJECTS 55th CIMAM Annual Conference Museo Moderno in Buenos Aires At CIMAM’s annual conferences, professionals from various institutions around the world meet to discuss the challenges and priorities of museums, exchange information, projects, and best practices, and strengthen the international network of museums and contemporary art. Last year's theme was “The Co-Creative Museum: Social Agency, Ethics, and Heritage”. 56 modern and contemporary art curators, museum directors, and researchers were awarded support to attend the CIMAM 2023 Annual Conference. Samdani Art Foundation was one of the supporters for the Travel Grant Beneficiaries.

ALL PROJECTS Monika Sosnowska at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art 24 July - 25 Oct 2020, Warsaw, Poland Monika Sosnowska's first extensive monographic exhibition in Poland at Zachęta – National Gallery of Art in Warsaw includes works inspired by her multiple visits to Bangladesh from 2017-2020, contextualized within her ongoing interest in deconstructing and reconstructing diverse histories of architecture across the world. We facilitated her research visit for the Dhaka Art Summit 2020 and her commission 'Concrete River' 2020 at the Srihatta: Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park which encouraged her to create new works for the summit as well as her solo exhibition at Zachęta. Monika Sosnowska's sculpture draws from the modernist architecture of Dhaka, in that particular case the inspiration comes from Muzharul Islam’s faculty of Fine Arts and the spiral staircase that he designed. Sosnowska transforms, modifies and distorts basic architectural elements. She deforms metal constructions, guardrails, staircases, beams and angle profiles, giving them unusual shapes. Deprives them of their original function and rescales them, creating expressive sculptures. These architectonic installations are meant to affect our senses, distort our sense of gravity, weight and hardness of matter, and instill anxiety with their rescaled forms, unnatural deformation. Image: Monika Sosnowska, Stairs, concrete and painted steel, 110 x 185 x 150 cm, 2020. Courtesy of the Foksal Gallery Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS Illustrated Lectures | Imagery, Ideas, Personae, And Sites Across South Asia Curated by Beth Citron And Diana Campbell Betancourt Artists Lucy Raven, The Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun), Matti Braun, and Amie Siegel presented illustrated lectures concerning the contemporary circulation of traditional and modernist imagery, ideas, personae, and sites across South Asia. Specifically, and respectively, these included sculptural reliefs at Ellora, Rabindranath Tagore’s art school at Santiniketan, the vision of physicist Vikram Sarabhai, and the global circulation of modernist furniture from Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. Building on their individual presentations, the artists gathered with curators Beth Citron and Diana Campbell Betancourt in the Education Pavilion on February 4th for a critical discussion of the form of the ‘illustrated lecture’ or ‘lecture performance.’ As an artistic discipline that has often seemed to blur boundaries among art, research, and discourse, the workshop examined different approaches to the lecture performance, as well as the limits of this form and the language used to circumscribe it. Taking historical examples of lecture performances by Chris Burden, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Morris, and Joseph Beuys into consideration, one question this workshop hoped to answer was how the ‘lecture performance’ differs from other types of live works and talks delivered by artists today. This form has been defined rather loosely globally, and comparatively been less studied and practiced in South Asia. This programme sought to address both the global, and local implications of this form. THE OTOLITH GROUP NOTES TOWARDS A FILM ON SANTINIKETAN “Trees are the earth’s endless effort to speak to the listening cosmos.”Rabindranath Tagore, Fireflies, 1928 Since 2012, The Otolith Group have been developing a work that engages with what Gayatri Spivak calls the ‘aesthetic education’ of Visva Bharati University, Shantineketan. This lecture performance presented scenes from the aesthetic sociality engendered in, and by, Kala Bhavana at Visva Bharati. The Otolith Group’s encounters with the pedagogy of ‘tree schooling’ developed by Tagore at Visva Bharati opens onto an engagement with improvisational practices of desegregation and dealienation. The encounters with these practices subtend the ongoing implications of Tagore’s aesthetico-political ecology of nature into a rethinking of the shape of learning in the future of the present. Such a rethinking feeds into an improvisation in and with cinema. What emerges from these experiments with aesthetic education are a series of scenes from a Neo-Tagorean cinema. A cinema conceived as a practice of image making that is shaped by the multiple frames and links of network realism and the geography of the hyperlocal. MATTI BRAUN VIKRAM SARABHAI This illustrated lecture took its point of departure from the biography of Vikram Sarabhai (1919-1971), father of the Indian space programme. It showed how his work intersected major cultural developments in 20th century India and revealed interactions with international modernist figures including Le Corbusier, John Cage, and Henri Cartier-Bresson as they engaged with him and members of his influential family of patrons in their home city of Ahmedabad.This lecture was supported by the Goethe-Institut. AMIE SIEGEL BACKSTORY An associative talk on the speculative, imitative and extractive actions within design, art and auctions in connection to India— on Chandigarh and Le Corbusier, on Pierre Jeanneret, John Pawson and Donald Judd, on modernism, minimalism and marketing—how these iconographies, and the behaviours of design and art markets, both mask and disclose the flow of capital. This talk accompanied the artist’s film presentation in the exhibition Planetary Planning. LUCY RAVEN LOW RELIEF Low Relief connected research into bas-relief sculpture in both India and the United States to the illusion of depth created in stereoscopic 3D lms, and the globally-connected, labour-intensive processes of post-production involved.

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.