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

ALL PROJECTS Very Small Feelings Co-curated by Diana Campbell and Akansha Rastogi with Ruxmini Choudhury Very Small Feelings Co-curated by Diana Campbell (Artistic Director, Samdani Art Foundation) and Akansha Rastogi (Senior Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art) with Ruxmini Choudhury (Curator, Samdani Art Foundation) This exhibition is a collaboration between Samdani Art Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, and has traveled to KNMA in July 2023. Curatorial Text Going completely blind in 1956 did not keep the Indian modern artist Benodebehari Mukherjee from teaching art in Santiniketan. Students recall his lessons in sensing space when he would lead the class to observe trees and particular spots on campus, elaborately describing how light must be falling and casting shadows and other minor events, as if he had observed and sensed this rhythmic relationship in nature a zillion times. Very Small Feelings (VSF) invites us to tap into our memories as Benodebehari did, continuing to feel, experience, and believe in the world beyond what we see with our eyes, beyond linear, sequential time. To feel the far away as near, the near as far, the minute as monumental, the monumental as minute, all with a sense of magic and awe. Playful and anecdotal stories change as they travel from mouth to ear and to mouth again, animating the uneventful repetition of daily rituals into something profound, amplifying the thud of a falling jackfruit that stuns two siblings, wafting smells of disappeared places, raising a swell of questions around gender that prod a young mind, amongst many other things. The exhibition seeks to encounter the eternal ‘inner child,’ and bind us to it strongly. Interested in the spoken word, and the generative space of orality built through the telling and retelling of stories, VSF gently holds and hosts the figure of the child and childhood play as a stage. Play in formative years where the self begins, and transforms. VSF approaches childhood as a place that we can enter and exit at will, examining it through our lived experiences and biases. While there is much that is hard to remember and to reconcile, we must return to our inner child to heal traumas we may carry as adults. Loving, permeable, ambiguous, and dazed; full of stories and fables, rituals and folklore, characters, popular cartoons, children's books and illustrations, memories, and actions that produce many kinds of surfaces, we call this hard-to-define space for intergenerational conversations and entanglements a ‘Spread’. One end of the Spread highlights pedagogical experiments and creative collaborations between artists and young learners, historically looking at children’s culture and practices of select South Asian modernists as illustrators and initiators of platforms for learning and arts mediation. The other end deeply engages with idea of ‘a child’ as instinct, curiosity, play, imagination, innocence, language, future, past, and much more – a whole person with emotions, germs, feelings, pursuits, questions, silliness, joyous wonderment, inheritance, memories, and innumerable things passed down genetically and culturally. Artists in the Spread appear as storytellers, researchers, provocateurs, educators, prisms, and makers developing different methods in their unique environments. We—the curators, mediators, and visitors—build further on that Spread and turn VSF into a playground and a generative space for learning and exchange. It is here that Who the Baer, Sambras, Bonna, Tokai, Meena, Bon Bibi, a stag, crows, two not-named siblings, a young boy, a mother with her toddler, and countless other characters who are real in the imaginations of many, tease out tales, histories, emotions, big and small, through their relationships with other bodies, with family, community, and the world around them. And also in relation to our own bodies as participants inside the exhibition. So, let’s enter gently, in pairs or with a chosen group. To play, to be the play, to do what we like. There are many rituals to choose from, stories to listen to, many ears to which to tell yours, too. It is all the rhythm of a day. Night shall bring its own hum. Location: First Floor Lobby and South Plaza Ahmet Öğüt Jump Up!, 2022 Audience-activated trampolines installed with Benodebehari Mukherjee’s works from the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Collection hung above eye-level Exhibited with the support of SAHA Audiences encounter works by the Indian modernist master Benodebehari Mukherjee that were created in the final years of his life, after he had gone blind. Rather than being hung at eye-level, the artist Ahmet Öğüt placed these works above eye-level - just outside of reach to fully take in - even with functional eyesight. Museums and galleries assume an average height of a viewer to determine how they hang things, making many works out of viewing range for children, people in wheelchairs, etc. The way that Öğüt chose to hang these works of art contributes to a sense of a distorted horizon in the room, which refers not only to the balance shifted during the earth’s displacement, but also tо the disturbances that result from political shifts and their interconnections. Viewers become performers while their history-related memories that they collectively experience through their own physical experience is activated in a jump. Öğüt is a sociocultural initiator, artist, and lecturer. Working across a variety of media, including photography, video, and installation, the artist often uses humor and small gestures to offer his commentary on serious and/or pressing social and political issues. Öğüt is regularly collaborating with people from outside of the art world to create shifts in collective perception of society. b. 1981, Diyarbakır; lives and works in Istanbul, Amsterdam and Berlin David Horvitz Change the Name of Days , 2021/2023 Poster Edition of Artist Book published by Jean Boîte Éditions & Yvon Lambert Seventeen prompts to imagine the world differently pop up across the museum – on the glass facades, windows, restrooms, near the escalator and many unexpected places in the mall. These prompts are a selection from thirty-two lessons and short teaching units developed by David Horvitz, an artist and a father, with the help of his then 5-year-old daughter, originally published in an artist book entitled Change the Name of the Days . Each prompt provides DAS visitors with an opportunity to develop performative actions, and to build new personal collections of poetic instruments and thoughts. From instructions such as "welcome the night into your house" to “exchange breaths with a plant,” this artistic intervention invites reflection on the immateriality of the world surrounding us, unlearning what we know and have been taught and, instead, learning something else, something new. We invite all museum visitors to choose any prompt and perform. Performance, the idea of the game, and exchange with the public are central to Horvitz’s practice. The concept of time in relation to the body and to paired relationships, is found in most of his work, spanning art books, photography, performance art, and mail art as well as new media, often exploring the relationship between man-made systems and natural phenomena. b. 1982, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles Ade Dianita and Aditya Novali Significant Other , 2022-2023 Interactive installation with drawings on canvas, overhead projectors, and transparencies Commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation with the support of Roh projects Ade Dianita and Aditya Novali’s Significant Other is the newest iteration of an ongoing project inspired by the exchange between two artists, a sister and a brother. Ade is the younger sister of Aditya and lives with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) as well as Down’s Syndrome, which impacts how she communicates and interacts socially with her family and wider society. Ade is a full-grown woman with the mental age of a 5-year-old and, through the development of their lifelong relationship, Aditya observed that Ade finds comfort in obsessively making drawings on a daily basis at home, drawings which bear a strikingly similar visual language and orderliness to his own abstract compositions exhibited at museums and galleries around the world. This work expresses a certain communication and bond between the two in a way that goes beyond words and intellect, a deep connection between siblings. This site-specific installation brings the brother and sister pair together where Ade’s drawings, translated into overhead transparencies, are projected over Aditya’s 365 permutations of identical-sized canvases containing complex abstractions that are almost counterintuitively based on the way both Ade and Aditya were taught to draw in school, following the most basic structures of colonial-influenced Mooi Indie paintings— the sun, two mountains, and paddy fields. The images represented on each panel recall a time in Aditya’s childhood that thereafter informs the current mental state of Ade, who in the (mis)perception of society, will forever be a child. Occupying the walls of an enclosed space, these canvases are interpolated with scans of Ade’s drawings printed on transparent paper, which are projected upon the canvases through a number of overhead projectors, establishing a contextual interrelationship between the works of both Ade and Aditya Novali. Novali makes sculptures and installations using complex methods of production as well as commercial materials. Influenced by his background in architecture, his work addresses themes such as structure, space, and urban planning. Using audience participation, Novali’s works act as investigations of social issues related to space with the help of methodological techniques and orderly systems. b. 1978, Surakarta; lives and works in Surakarta Afra Eisma Poke Press Squeeze Clasp , 2021-23 Yarn, ceramics, and textiles Organized with the support of Mondriaan Funds and Kunstinstituut Melly with curatorial contributions of Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy and Rosa de Graaf Courtesy of the artist and No Man’s Art Gallery Drawing on literature by influential female authors from across cultures such as Begum Rokeya, Audre Lorde and Ursula K. Le Guin, Eisma interweaves characters from her imagination with ideas provoked by the work of the writers that she reads. Eisma creates a welcoming and lively gathering space where we can intertwine our limbs with those of the otherworldly and alien beings, taking delight in physical proximity, assembly, and embrace, core elements to our human experience. Gathered around a floor tapestry, these figures invite us to become entangled in their embrace and engage in conversation with their worlds and the worlds of other visitors, and to imagine new worlds altogether. Responding to an increasing experience of uneasiness, isolation, and uncertainty towards anything deemed extraneous to our familial environment, Eisma seeks to appease these maladies by fostering mutual understanding and shared experience through art. Using craft techniques in novel ways, Eisma explores and manifests personal stories through immersive and intimate installations of textiles, sculptures, and ceramics. Inspiring her works are characters or imaginary friends that interweave sensuality with lightheartedness. b.1993 the Hague; lives and works in the Hague Afrah Shafiq Nobody Knows for Certain , 2021-2022 Interactive Fiction and Archival Game This project was created with the support of the Garage Field Research program of Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow for the Garage Digital platform Nobody Knows for Certain is an online narrative video game and an invitation to submerge oneself in a sea of stories. The project’s point of departure was an artistic inquiry into cultural exchange between the USSR and South Asia during the Cold War, and particularly into the phenomenon of Soviet children’s books translated into major Indian languages. Decades of intense Soviet diplomacy between South Asia and the USSR in the postwar period have led to the formation of a common space where culture was shared by South Asian and Soviet peoples— translated literature, bilateral film distribution, tours by ballet companies and circus troupes saturated the collective imagination and offered mutual insights for people living in a vast geographical expanse stretching “from the Volga to the Ganges” (to borrow from the title of Rahul Sankrityayan’s collection of historical fiction short stories.) In particular, Slavic fairytales and Soviet stories formed a significant part of the childhood memories of those who grew up in the Indian subcontinent from the 1960s to the mid-1980s. Today, in a number of South Asian countries, there is a thriving subculture of collectors of these now out-of-print books, holding onto a childhood nostalgia and a deep affection for a nation that was never theirs and which no longer exists. Going beyond the imagery associated with Communist propaganda, Shafiq draws from a variety of sources such as Eastern Slavic mythology and folk traditions, book illustrations, children’s letters to editors, sound archives, lacquer miniatures, textiles, and decorative arts. She melds these characters, fragments, and disjointed elements to make an interactive game. The unique blended narrative is enriched with the presence of original characters invented by the artist such as a cat without a tail and a matryoshka doll who is empty inside. Tapping into the emancipatory potential of a storytelling unloosed, Shafiq critically revisits the morphology of the folk tale and brings essential philosophical and political updates into the narrative, inviting audiences to dive into, play, make choices, and explore. Shafiq adapts the process of research as an artistic playground. She intertwines archival findings, history, memory, folklore, and fantasy to create a speculative world born of remixed cultures. Her work moves across various mediums, drawing from the handmade language of traditional folk forms and connecting them to the digital language of the Internet and video games. When she is not glued to her computer, she makes glass mosaics. b. 1989, Bangalore; lives and works in Goa Research, Script, Animation and Art: Afrah Shafiq Lead Programmer: Kushal Neil Lead Animator: Piyush Verma Additional Animation: Eeshani Mitra Original Score and Music Production: Rushad Mistry and Zohran Miranda Sound Design & Game Audio Implementation: Horacio Valdiveso Project curators : Iaroslav Volovod and Valentin Diaconov Garage Field Research Team: Oxana Polyakova, Daria Bobrenko and Ivan Yarygin Amitav Ghosh, Salman Toor, and Ali Sethi Jungle Nama, 2021 A book and audiobook imagined as an installation with scenography by GOLEM, 2023 Courtesy of artists and Harper Collins India They say when you retell a legend or listen to one, new voices come to it to haunt the narrative. The Sundarbans—where story, myth and reality meet—earned its name from the Sundari tree, and is the planet’s largest delta and mangrove forest. It spreads across the western coast of Bangladesh and the southern shore of West Bengal in India. The Bengali story-in-verse of the guardian of this forest is the legend of Bon Bibi and her fight with Dakshin Rai , a spirit who appears as a tiger to the natives. It is popular in the villages of the Sundarbans and often enacted in Pala or Jatragaan (local epic storytelling performances), and it erases religious boundaries between Hindus and Muslims as both venerate the forest and its goddess. The Sundari trees are known for their high-value wood and are at the brink of extinction. Jungle Nama, an adaptation of one episode of the legend by author Amitav Ghosh, was published in book form with illustrations by artist Salman Toor, and narrated by musician Ali Sethi. The verse is an allegorical exploration of human greed, ecological escapades, the relationship of a people with their forest and the resources around them, together resulting in the real crisis of climate change. Ghosh’s English-language, interpretation is told entirely in the poyar -like meter of twenty-four syllable couplets replicating the cadence of the original Bengali version. Within the story, the rhyme and meter of speaking out the words has a spell-like effect of invoking the goddess. This sound and visual installation reimagine the book as an immersive space for DAS visitors to access the world of mangroves, wetlands, alligators, the mighty spirit of Dakshin Rai , the avaricious rich merchant Dhona, the poor lad Dukhey. Salman Toor’s black and white drawings are haunting images that travel with you, along with pairs of eyes of creatures and beings, gleaming through the darkness of the mangroves. Amitav Ghosh is an award-winning author of historical fiction and non-fiction books that address colonialism and climate change, particularly how they affect the people of South Asia. Salman Toor is a painter known for his small-scale figurative works that combine academic technique and a quick, sketch-like style. Recurring color palettes and references to art history heighten the emotional impact of Toor’s paintings and add a fantastical element to his narratives drawn from lived experience, as well as the imagined lives of young, queer Brown men residing between New York City and South Asia. Ali Sethi is a singer, songwriter, composer, and author noted for his ability to blend Hindustani classical ragas with contemporary Western arrangements, combining live musical performances with historical narratives, cultural context, and critical commentary. Together, these collaborators have brought words, sounds, and images together to evoke a story experienced in public space, with scenography by GOLEM, an international architecture, art, and design studio based in Paris. Amitav Ghosh b. 1956, Kolkata; lives and works in New York Salman Toor b. 1983, Lahore; lives and works in New York Ali Sethi b. 1984, Lahore; lives and works in New York GOLEM design team: Ariel Claudet and Sara Layoun Anpu Varkey Summer’s Children , 2017-19 Selected drawings from the set of 92 works made for the graphic novel Felt tip pen and brush pen on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Set inside a rubber plantation in Kerala , Summer’s Children resides in the memory of a lost place and childhood seen through the eyes of two siblings as they traverse the day. Both run across the field, through ant trails, and rubber trees. They run to the river and to the rain, curious and observant, and looking alike. They pick leaves, wander into thickets, chase animals, swim and catch fish in the village pond, crane their necks to look up to the sky, trees, and adults. Dot by dot, episodic memory, plays, sounds and landscape of childhood come to touch and visit us. Childhood here is a new place of observation and inquiry, of nostalgia, smells, and stories. Made for a self-published artist book, reading these monochromatic drawings is to attune yourself to a slow, joyful, sensorial looking and passing of a day where many delicate, minor events happen around us. Up on the tree, a nutmeg pod pops. A jackfruit falls on the ground. Fire ants make a leaf-house on guava trees. Varkey took two years to complete this silent graphic novel, which is partly autobiographical and based on time spent in her grandmother’s ancestral village in rural Kerala. With each drawing, she creates a space she didn’t know she inhabited or still carries within her. Known for distinct graffiti and public murals in different cities of India, Anpu Varkey’s practice pulses with attitude: unapologetic, experimental, and not afraid to share her vulnerabilities. Over the years, she has contributed immensely to the vibrant growing street art scene in India. Graphic novels and bookmaking are another aspect of her practice. b. 1980, Bangalore; lives and works in Bangalore Anga Art Collective Khaal Gaaon , 2022-2023 Audio visual installation with bamboo, clay, earth, and jute elements Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art with additional support from the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Contributors: Jugal Kumar, Anup Let, Devadeep Gupta, Gyanwant Yadav and Umesh Singh Cluster of different materials, interactive vehicles, seeds, books and intimate play spaces welcome you to Anga Art Collective’s new iteration of their installation Khaal Gaon, further evolved from its first occurrence in the Dhaka edition of the exhibition. They are inspired by sutal which in Assamese means a play-area that has multiple entry points. Creating a dense interlinkages of visual and sensory stories they have conceptually developed Khaal Gaon as a laboratory space where individual practices, observations and thoughts of members of the collective are in conversation with each other. With this evolving vocabulary of their collective kNOw school, they invite visitors to engage in the indigenous ways of knowing and further stretching the contours of Khaal Gaon. This project is derived from two Assamese words: Khaal, meaning low land or a small water body in and around a village settlement, and Gaaon, meaning village. Since the 1970s, regular floods and river erosion in the Rahmariya region of upper Assam (located in what is now India) have gradually erased water bodies, fertile fields, wetlands, vegetation, and a cluster of 35 villages, leading to villagers’ displacement and resettlement in distant villages. Submerged under the endless flow of the river Brahmaputra, Khal Gaaon disappeared from the physical geography and settled into the oral history of its people and their descendants. Remembered as an arena of community feasts, fishing festivals full of life and rural energies, as well as a music and performative space, the Khaal Gaon is now only present in stories of the elderly generation who once inhabited the land as young adults. It emerges in the exhibition as a place conjured from the collective memories of its displaced inhabitants. Members of Anga Art Collective take this invisible village and the childhood memories of its inhabitants as a lens to rethink the figure of the child as part of a depleting landscape in an ecologically and politically turbulent context. From their field trips near the site of this invisible village and conversations with the elderly generation, they invoke an immersive place loaded with the barter system practice, the playfulness associated with materials, architectures, and performances. Climate migration and seasonal displacements are common in this flood-prone region, and have altered the occupations, site, stories, and memories of the community. This installation navigates the collective psyche of a displaced community, and explores relationships connecting age and ecology, artistic language and memory, playfulness, and elderliness. Initiated in 2010 by a group of friends, Anga Art Collective came together with the vision to engage with the contemporary and the layered history of Assam in Northeast India through art. With 13 current members, Anga fosters a creative and collaborative space for practice, which is developed by sharing knowledge with other artists, village communities, ecologists, academics, and activists. Know School and the Granary are two such initiatives that are site-specific as well as pedagogical exercises in community-based learning and re-learning. For Anga, a collective is a growing process rather than a closed ensemble. Ashfika Rahman The Paper Box Gallery , 2023 Handmade paper from waste Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art The Paper Box Gallery is a futurist model idea of waste turning into an eco-friendly pop-up community gallery, where the structure of the makeshift gallery is made of small paper bricks created from underwater garbage. Every year, one-third of Bangladesh experiences floods during the monsoon season. The growing amount of garbage in the water choking drainage systems is a main cause. In collaboration with invited artist Mahmuda Siddika, architect Ar. Sayon Sur and the children from the artist’s grandmother’s neighborhood—the biggest wetland in Bangladesh known as Chalan Beel—the artist and her collaborators initiate a process of taking back garbage from the water. Waste transformed into usable handmade paper becomes both material for art and an exhibition space. The pop-up gallery is inspired by traditional installations that travel around different villages and exhibit household stories, part of vernacular Bangladeshi culture, but instead exhibited here in the middle of Dhaka Art Summit. The entire process explores questions of community collaboration, representation, community access in an exhibition, consent, and inclusive and sustainable ecosystems. Ashfika Rahman is a Bangladeshi visual artist, teacher, and art initiator, who explores systemic social issues in her home country through her work. Her practice straddles art and documentary. In each of her works, she tries to challenge mainstream perspectives on complex systemic social issues, especially the unequal treatment of minority communities in the periphery of Bangladesh, raising awareness globally about these alarming threats to humanity. B 1988, Dhaka; lives and works in Bangladesh. Blaise Joseph, Atreyee Day and New Education Group - Foundation for Innovative Research in Education (NEG-FIRE) Multilingual Education Material - Books & Charts in indigenous languages, 2014 – 2015 Handmade paper from wasteBooks in indigenous languages of Konda Dhoras, Kui and Adivasi Odia, Baigani, Poraja and Gadaba Inside the Belly of the Strange, oral traditions meet pedagogy playfully via the book-form and large wordless picture charts about seasons, rural ecology and rituals. With the intention of rethinking what ‘resource’ in education means, particularly for children belonging to indigenous communities whose access to books are always in not-their-own-spoken-language, a group of artist-educators, and grassroots organizations like Neg-Fire came together to develop and publish stories and poems for children in their mother tongues. They worked with tribal elders, government schools, primary teachers, drop-out youth, as well as students and program animators to make books that attempt to honor the spoken differences in each dialect and retain the earthiness of language of daily use rather than a codified grammar-bound singular language. Blaise Joseph and Atreyee Day present a cross-section from the set of nineteen books and seven charts they developed in collaboration with communities of Araku (Andhra Pradesh) and Koraput (Odisha). These multi-use materials cover a range of everyday encounters and stories that are centuries old as well as match the current realities of the inhabitants that speak the language – ranging from a good hunt story, the beauty of changing seasons, village festivals and community celebrations, daily chores and routines at home/school/field/forest, to personal joys, losses of the child, and animal-human encounters. Very Small Feelings exhibition and its expanded platform - Transnational Folklore Research Forum - intends a slow reflection of the collaborative spirit and journey of this multilingual book project, and a process of writing and illustrating which is not antithetical to the power of the oral but a fluid tool to connect and start conversations. Process: In 2014, Blaise Joseph and Atreyee Day were invited as art facilitators and consultants to the Bhopal Chapter of NEG-FIRE, with whom they had lead community workshops on art and education since 2009 with Bhil, Gond and Biaga tribes in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh in Central India. Atreyee and Blaise approached indigenous communities via the workshop model to work with over a hundred participants from six tribal groups from the Araku and Koraput area. The first step was listening and gathering narratives and songs, local folklore, and versions important to each community. The next step progressed to editing, visualizing and storyboarding, transcribing, loosely translating, making rough drafts, cut-outs and collaging – again with the involvement of children and community members – in Telugu, Odia, Gadaba, Paraja, Adibasi/ Desiya Odia, Kondadora and Kui. This process helped the participants in this experiment reclaim their personal voice in retelling their brief human tales with humor and lightness. The freedom to express becomes primary motivation, winning over one’s oppressive situation or life conditions. Blaise Joseph is an artist, art educator, and a farmer. He has been facilitating art workshops, community-based projects, developing art based curricula for educational institutions and various social organizations for the past 12 years. He has been leading the Kochi Biennale Foundation’s Art By Children Programme since 2018. Atreyee Day is an artist educator and illustrator who draws for and publishes with independent alternate publishers in India . She was part of a small school where art was the main medium of teaching and taught in semi-rural towns in the foothills of the Himalayas, and led collaborative workshops with Blaise on art pedagogy from 2012 to 2018. Benodebehari Mukherjee Collages , 1957 – late 1960s Graphite, colored paper, newspaper and jute thread, pasted on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art ‘A man who has the power of sight need not be told what light is. And where there is light there is color.' - Benodebehari Mukherjee The sensory agility of these colorful collages draws one into the vision fields of Benodebehari Mukherjee. Made after he lost his vision at the age of 53, each collage was his attempt at re-constructing the world as he remembered it, re-building a visual language after a descent into complete blindness that he described as a “new feeling, new experience, and a new state of being.” Drawing from memory, sensing colors and textures, he pieced together scenes from the rural topography of Santiniketan, experiences of Jatra performances (a folk theater form of Bengal) and, responding to his environment and everyday stimuli, he created tactile surfaces with different materials like jute thread, newspaper, and smooth colored paper. With a child-like curiosity and playfulness, his inspiring daily practice of making and thinking visually, framed and re-framed the figure and its surroundings. Like the animated body of the Boy with Shell Nose, we see the fullness of the artist and what he was touching, feeling and imagining, an invitation for us to join in the act of sensing the artist’s world as well as our own worlds. An important modernist figure of pre-Independent India, Mukherjee was one of the earliest artists in modern India to use murals as a mode of artistic expression. He studied at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan in 1919, with Nandalal Bose and Rabindranath Tagore as his teachers, later becoming an art teacher there himself in 1925 and spending his most creative phase in Santiniketan until 1949. Like many of his peers, he was influenced by art from East Asia, and visited China and Japan between 1936-37 to learn different brush and ink techniques. In 1948, he traveled to Nepal as the Curator of the Nepal Government Museum, Kathmandu, and also spent several years in Mussorie and Dehradun training artist-teachers. As a pedagogue, he has influenced generations of students in Santiniketan and wrote critical and insightful reflections on pedagogy and arts education. b. 1904, Behala; d. 1980, New Delhi Chittaprosad Angels Without Fairy Tales , 1952 Linocut on paper Collection: DAG Modern and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Chittaprosad’s humanism makes us actors and witnesses to his questioning of unequal social relationships and ideas of progress in post-independent India. His figure of the child-worker undercuts the glorious image of childhood innocence. Angels Without Fairy Tales is an important linocut series that he first made in 1952, and later published by Danish UNICEF committee and dedicated it to the International Conference in Defence of Children . These tales of lost childhood highlight the atrocity of the daily labor of children from poor families or those orphaned and forced to share age-inappropriate responsibilities with adults. They speak of survival, deprivation, child abuse and premature adulthood: a boy-performer on the streets with a monkey, a kid with his box of shoe polish asleep on the pavement, a child rowing a boat to earn a living, another engaged in hard domestic chores of adults. Throughout his life, Chittaprosad remained an advocate of children’s rights. During his historically seminal reportage of the Bengal Famine of 1943, he documented the plight of children suffering from acute starvation, abandonment, abuse, and separation from family members, becoming beggars in order to survive. He visited orphanages that opened during the famine and reported on the conditions of children and the lack of medical supplies and relief for them. In his brush and ink famine drawings, he provocatively uses the gaze of famine-affected children with bloated stomachs, exhausted faces, malnourished bodies marked with wounds and disease to agitate the viewer into feeling empathy and taking action. Tell Me a Story Please!, 1960s Illustrations Made for Children’s Books, 1960s Kingdom of Rasagolla, Bengali Folktales Retold and Illustrated by Chittaprosad The Little Mermaid, Nov 27, 1968 The Angel, Nov 28, 1968 Holger and Dane, 1960s Linocut on paper Collection: DAG Modern Very Small Feelings exhibition literally and conceptually follows Chittaprosad’s prompt to “Tell me a story!”—inviting its artists and visitors to find spaces to tell, retell and listen to stories that are crucial to them. Chittaprosad created joyous and playful illustrations and prints for children’s books picturing a utopian and animated world of birds and animals, a stark contrast to his grim depictions of the ‘real world’ through images of child labor also present in the exhibition. Known for his socialist conviction, political fervor, and agitation, after his disassociation from the Communist Party in 1949, Chittaprosad spent most of his time in Bombay, expressing himself mostly in the medium of prints as well as making and experimenting with puppets and puppet theater. In Khelaghar (Playhouse) , he wrote, directed, and designed costumes for plays and comedy shows for children of the informal settlements around his Andheri residence, which witnesses describe as being full of hope and laughter. Whether working with Bengali folk tales or the stories of famous western authors like Hans Christian Andersen, Chittaprosad’s illustrations were designed and approached with a folk-like simplicity, carrying the rhythm of nursery rhymes, while weaving in aspects of village life to evoke immediate familiarity and intimacy. Chittaprosad was a radical artist from undivided Bengal, who spent his early years in Chattagram, Bangladesh, formerly known as Chittagong. He was greatly inspired by the Chittagong Uprising of the 1930s. His visual accounts of death, illness, poverty, and strife in pre-independent India remain relevant even today. His iconic sketches of famine-stricken children, families, and dispensaries from the Bengal Famine series (1944-45) became eye-witness accounts disseminated through communist newspapers. He was a member of the undivided Communist Party of India until 1949 and contributed immensely to its cultural wing which involved many iconic writers, poets and artists. b. 1915; Naihati; d. 1978, Bombay Driant Zeneli No wise fish would escape without flying 2019, HD Video, color, sound, 07’10” How deep can a dragonfly swim under the ocean? 2021, 4K film, color, sound,12’23’’ The firefly keeps falling and the snake keeps growing 2022, color, sound, 11′46” Courtesy of the artist and Giorgio Persano Gallery In this trilogy of films, Zeneli harnesses a narrative structure, following the model of the contemporary fairytale, to amplify human feelings such as fear, failure, isolation, and envy. These internal feelings impact how humans form the external world through politics and architecture. The chapters are developed and filmed in iconic architectural spaces of Brutalist origin in three capitals of the Balkan Peninsula: The National Library in Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo, The Pyramid in Tirana, Albania, and the Post Office in Skopje, North Macedonia. In the first film, a fish is trapped in a net, part of the architecture of the façade of the National Library of Kosovo, trying to escape from a shark. A group of children who worked with the non-profit institution Bonevet—which considers technology as a method to learn science, understand life, and increase imagination—played a game with Zeneli to imagine a solution to release the fish from the net to escape the shark. Together, they composed a narrative that portrays the Brutalist architecture of the National Library as something transformable into malleable matter, and the nature of the fish as being like a bird that can float in the sky. The film offers us a story where the art of being wise is entrusted to children and the architecture of the National Library in Kosovo becomes a network of possibilities which are there for all of us to imagine. The second film tells the story of a dragonfly that, despite being able to move its wings, is condemned to never fly, thus failing to get away from the ocean. The dragonfly, a symbol of spiritual depth, power, change of perspective, and adaptation recalls the real experience of Rilond Risto, who spent 21 years of isolation in Albanian prisons, creating mechanical insects capable of flight from various circumstantial tools during his last period of imprisonment. The dragonfly moves inside the Pyramid of Tirana, a memorial monument to the Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha built in late 1980s, and is held by it without the possibility to fly and escape from the Pyramid, a metaphor for the existential quest to escape the confines of externally imposed rules. The third film is set in the Post Office of Skopje, Macedonia, whose concrete structure, modeled in the shape of a lotus flower and completed in 1974, became the symbol of the reconstruction of the city after the devastating earthquake of 1963.The film is inspired by the fairytale of the firefly and the snake in which the snake, struck by the brightness of the firefly, tries at all costs to eat it, and reacts to that feeling of powerlessness in front of its bright glow— an allegory for the senseless, often ego-driven violence we experience in the world today. Zeneli’s work challenges physical and intellectual limits by staging and performing ironic and dreamlike situations, which are often absurd. His performative approach makes us question how we experience time and identify with dreams, playing with reason while utilizing the wider public’s participation in the creation of his work. At the core of Zeneli’s performative actions, as well his films, is the redefinition of ideas of failure, utopia, and dream that open up possible alternative readings of the world. b. 1983, Shkoder; lives and works in Turin Ganesh Pyne 10 Illustrations from Shataborsher Roopkatha/Hundred Years of Fairy Tales , 1983 Pen and ink on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Saat Bhai Champa Rajkumari Poncho Pushpa Mone Mone Maniraj Ramdhanur Golpo Chandrachur Rajputra Pori-r-Golpo Buro Angul Kheede Untitled Well-known as the master of tempera technique, Ganesh Pyne’s painterly world full of dreamscapes, mysterious figures, and motifs emerges from the fairytales of Thakurmar Jhuli and similar sources.* Pyne’s childhood was spent in a crumbling mansion in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), listening to his grandmother’s make-believe world of fairytales, folklore, and mythical stories from epics and witnessing jatra performances that sparked his imagination. He passionately drew animated illustrations and picture books for young children, a strong aspect of his practice which is only now gaining art-historical attention. He worked in an animation studio as an illustrator for almost two decades. His inclination for drawing and re-drawing figures from popular stories and mythology, rendering them into philosophical and vulnerable caveats, comes across in this unique suite of illustrations. These drawings were made for an anthology celebrating fairytales by iconic Bengali writers, from Sukumar Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and many others. Each illustration captures a poetic moment from the tales: the lonely woman at the window in Kheede , the queen nursing the ill in Rajkumari Poncho Pushpa , the prince smelling the flowers Mone Mone , or the king encountering seven of his children who turned into champa flowers in Saat Bhai Champa . By creating visual parables, Pyne creates spaces for the reader to enter the stories and build their own joy, grief, and intimacy with these timeless tales. His larger body of work reflects upon the magical, mysterious world which is poetic and equally full of fear, death, darkness, and the unknown. As fellow artist Paritosh Sen beautifully observes, Pyne’s world is “where feeling becomes more important than seeing.” * Thakumar Jhuli (1907) was one of the earliest published collections of indigenous Bengali folk and fairytales, edited and compiled by Dakhinaranjan Mitra Majumdar. It was one of the earliest attempts to document and publish the indigenous folklore of Bengal to reclaim the space encroached upon by the rise of popular English fairytale books. Dakhinaranjan traveled across many villages recording verbal narrations of the folktales with his phonograph, and later edited and published them in several books. b.1937, Calcutta; d. 2013, Kolkata Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts Bonna , 2022 Video, loop. Duration: 5 minutes Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and World Weather Network Bangladesh is a place where girls named Bonna live, play, and grow with living and non-living beings of every gender orientation. Bonna literally translates to flood, but not all floods are bad. Many storms are named after people but, here, a person is named after a weather pattern. Bonna is a free spirit, and she brings chaos to the world. Sometimes chaos enables new possibilities to emerge as it breaks apart rigid structures. Violent destructive flooding in Bangladesh and other South Asian countries, due to climate change and man-made structures, is now a pressing concern and we can learn from stories that have been floating around for thousands of years in this land of rivers. The Bonna character encountered in this video was imagined by a group of children in Bangladesh whose community elders are climate migrants, many of whom have never left Bangladesh, but who acutely feel the impact of the world's carbon emissions while contributing very little to them. The children’s lives are intertwined with the community elders and their journeys of environmental migration to Thakurgaon, Bangladesh. They wrote the script for this video work interpreting the theme of the 2023 Dhaka Art Summit, re-contextualizing what it means to live with extreme weather. As a conceptual carryover from the Dhaka Art Summit 2023, Bonna joins many other characters that activate and anchor Very Small Feelings exhibition. Ghazaleh Avarzamani Stuck-in-time Time Wall , 2022-2023 Soap installation, Commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation. Project supported by Canada Council for the Arts. Stuck-in-time Time Wall uses soap as a tool for both agency and discomfort. Exploring the political and domestic associations of soap as a material turned art object, this project examines the politics of education, the process of colonizing the mind and cleaning the body. It is triggered by the Point Four Program, a colonial post-war educational program to help developing nations “help themselves.” In 1949, as part of Cold War policies to combat the influence of the USSR, the Truman administration came up with the idea for a technical assistance program as a means to win the "hearts and minds" of countries “in the developing world,” sharing American know-how in various fields, especially agriculture, industry, and health. This program introduced a variety of materials, machines, and ideas through documentaries etc. Avarzamani’s intervention responds to the propaganda of the program and offers ever-changing blocks of soap as a quiet meditation on the human condition. The soaps were sourced from Cosco, one of the oldest soap-making companies in Bangladesh, and the production of this project was realized in collaboration with the organization TransEnd which supports the diverse transgender, non-binary and queer community in Bangladesh, and with further support from the team in India. Avarzamani’s practice is committed to challenging hegemonic and epistemological structures by investigating the rules and methodologies used to shape power in society. Grounded in ideas of deconstruction, replication, and transformation, her research examines how education shapes psychosocial constructions of knowledge and cultural practices. Primarily working in sculpture and installation, she often explores games and play as tools to understand power dynamics and systems that are inherent but often hidden within our shared relationships. b.1980, Tehran; lives and works between Toronto and Margate 14a Guam Bus The Guam Bus is run by brothers Michael and Jack Lujan Bevacqua from the Kabesa and Bittot clans of Guam. When both were children growing up in the 1980s and 1990s in Guam, there was very little media related to being Chamoru, or telling the stories of their people and teaching them their language. In 2015, after Michael had become a university professor and teacher of Chamoru and Jack had started a career as an artist, they decided to use their talents to create books, flashcards, comics, and games telling Chamoru stories and teaching the Chamoru language. Their initial inspiration was to create for Chamoru children today resources reflecting their heritage. To date, they have published three bilingual Chamoru-English children’s books, three comic books, produced three sets of flashcards for young learners of Chamoru, and released a Chamoru language bingo game in 2021. Today, the mission of the Guam Bus is to revitalize the Chamoru language and empower the Chamoru people. They aim to do this primarily through the production of creative and academic works designed to inspire and educate the Chamoru people about their heritage and future possibilities as a people. Irushi Tennekoon Animated Films Studying Blue Whales (featuring Asha de Vos, Marine Biologist), 2019, 3 minutes The Umbrella Thief (featuring Sybil Wettasinghe, Children's author and illustrator), 2020, 3 minutes Colombo Wetlands and the Urban Fishing Cat (featuring Anya Ratnayaka), 2022, 6 minutes Irushi Tennekon’s ongoing series Animate Her interviews a group of exceptional women living and working in Sri Lanka, sharing their paths of work and life, to lay out alternatives to patriarchal structures created (primarily by men) for women to fall into. Through modes of stop-motion and experimental animation, the series brings to life the stories of a marine biologist, a children’s author and illustrator, a wildlife conservationist, a lawyer and activist, a traditional dancer, an architect, and an ICT entrepreneur. Responding to the invisibility of working women in public spaces and the idea of future heroines and role models with brown skin and dark hair, Tennekon’s heroines come from diverse fields in the arts, sciences and technology who challenge the norms and biases of their fields. As they share their journeys, risks taken, challenges embraced, the larger social and environmental ecospheres that govern one’s life choices become apparent, along with other topics including how Colombo wetlands prevent floods and disease. Working as an artist, experimental animator, and storyteller, Tennekon strives to inspire more open-ended futures for women in Sri Lanka. While she has a background in English studies, her work seeks to bring visibility to heroines indigenous to Sri Lanka rather than imported from Euro-centric colonial traditions. b.1989, Sri Lanka; lives and works in Colombo and London Jani Ruscica Not-knot (to stain), 2023 Wood cut and mixed printing techniques The inked and their Incandescent Irreverence (New Delhi) Site-specific mural, 2023 Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art with support from the Finnish Cultural Institute Potentially familiar, yet only provisional, symbols, stretch, twist and contort themselves towards the very limits of recognition, extending themselves across the gallery space, almost holding it in an embrace. Like tattoos or graffiti on the skin of a building, appropriated linguistic signs start to take on human, animal, and plant-like qualities, seemingly performing for an audience as they turn and stretch. Refusing their intended meaning and gesturing towards new, freer ways of existing, through illegibility, fragmentation and incoherence, these signs and symbols playfully embody the slippery nature of language and its codifications. Jani’s site-specific mural playfully responds to the architectural spaces of the museum and other installed artworks in the exhibition. Ruscica’s work spans a variety of mediums, using not only video, sound, and performance, but also sculpture, murals, and woodcuts. Looking for common ground between different and seemingly disparate art forms, their practice explores the mutability of meaning, the ties and slippages between interpretation and representation, questioning categories and binaries, and playfully collapsing boundaries of language, animacy and meaning. b. 1978 Savonlinna; Lives and works in Helsinki Jessy Razafimandimby Si Seulement les souvenirs parvenaient du futur , 2022 Found object, bed sheet, pencil on paper Courtesy of the artist and Sans Titre, Paris Chants hirsutes , 2022 Found objects, woven straw, acrylic on bed sheet Courtesy of the artist, private collection, Paris and Sans Titre, ParisPresentation supported by Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Jessy Razafimandimby is interested in the stories behind objects and what they have to say about human behavior. He employs notions of the household as a metaphorical framework to question notions of taste, belonging, and power. An avid collector of domestic objects, his work has been described as an “archive of anecdotes,” where the rituals and traditions (of making) of their previous owners meet the personal history of the artist, coming alive in gestural, hybrid works that carry with them the artist’s childhood memories growing up Madagascar. Textiles are a common motif in the artist’s work; they link ornamental practices from paintings to bedsheets and play a role in concealing and revealing fictions and truths in theater and in life. These works are inspired by the artist’s childhood experience as an altar boy in Madagascar as well as his contemporary experience in Geneva. His mother continues to enact imported Christian rituals in her adopted home today when decorating altars for family ceremonies. The act of transmission fascinates the artist; many religious ceremonies use white cloth as part of rituals to purify and seal commitments to higher spiritual powers and to other human beings, as in the act of marriage. Transmission is also part of our hope for transformation, and the artist interprets ritual objects in straw, a kind of alchemy where “poor materials” can become precious through the act of belief. Razafimandimby’s multidisciplinary production encompasses painting, drawing, installations, and performance. Often, these practices converge, finding the artist manipulating fragmented decorative objects and textiles, which extend the work beyond its frame. These extensions reveal a clash between sculpture and painting, staged by the artist, as well as clashes of culture. He pays particular attention to the history of interior decoration and ornamentation, as well as social conventions of “good manners” that are traditionally linked to a conservative way of life and promoted by a classist bourgeois system. b. 1995, Madagascar; lives and works in Geneva Joydeb Roaja প্রজন্ম কল্পদ্রুম ও অনু দ্রুম, Generation-wish-yielding trees and atomic tree , 2009-ongoing Photo-drawing collage print Courtesy of the artist তরল শিকড়, Liquid roots , 2022 Pen and color pencil on paper Collection: Samdani Art Foundation Go Back to Roots 39, 2022 Go Back to Roots 43 , 2022 Ink pen on paper Collection: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Belonging to the Tripura community from the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Joydeb Roaja’s childhood was not like that of most Bangladeshi artists. He grew up seeing army boot prints on the hills, and tanks haunted his dreams. Generation-wish-yielding trees is a response to his traumatic memories, a series which began as a performance with his daughter in 2009. His performances turned into drawings and his drawings turned into performances. These photo-drawing collage prints are mainly made from the desire to see performance documentation and drawings side-by-side as one work. The only source of water in the hilly area of Roaja’s village in Rangamati is a small stream running between two hills but, for the sake of development, the natural forest was cut down and re-planted with teak plantations. As a result, many streams in the hilly areas are drying up. The stream Roaja used to bathe in as a child now has no water except during the rainy season. This is the reason why this jhiri (stream) in Liquid roots transforms into ever-running roots in his drawings, flowing with hope for more autonomous futures. Roaja has an interconnected performance, painting, and drawing practice that highlights the challenging social and political landscape of Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts. His works are tied to the experiences of indigeneity, often emphasizing the deep and symbiotic connection of indigenous people with their land as well as the fight for recognition and rights. His work is an empowering call to demand autonomy and ensure preservation of minority cultures. b.1973, Khagrachari; lives and works in Khagrachari Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty The Story of Water and Labor Pain , 2022-2023 Charcoal and watercolor on paper, performance Collection: Samdani Art FoundationCommissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation Through drawings and body movement, Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty explores a story of the flood created at the confluence of the Padma and Brahmaputra rivers. People living on the banks of the hundreds of rivers in Bangladesh and India have always depended on the sediments that come with the river, traveling all the way from the Himalayas. Combining mythological events and characters from the region, Chisty created his own narrative of the delta and its natural phenomena of flooding. Chisty works with performance, poetry, drawing, and animation. Based in Narayanganj and Dhaka, he explores through his art the depths of the human psyche. Often working through the intricate meshwork of the relationships between mind and body, body and matter, myth and reality, time and space, his practice attempts to install in everyday surroundings a window into imaginary spaces, dreamscapes, and parallel realities. b. 1976, Narayanganj; lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh Kelly Sinnaphah Mary Notebook 12: the Fables of Sanbras , 2022 Acrylic on paper Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Courtesy of the artist and Aicon Gallery Notebook (2) of No Return , 2018 Acrylic on paper From the Collection of Albertine Kopp Through the lens of science fiction, Kelly Sinnapah Mary often explores the so-called feminine universe; working with floral themes, soft materials, and fairytales, she uses techniques contrasting with her poignant and politically charged subject matter. From this friction, Sinnapah Mary traces her ethnic heritage, while questioning her roots as someone caught in two nested worlds— confronting concepts of ‘negritude’ and ‘coolitude’. ‘Coolie’, an expression coined by Caribbean poet Khal Torabully, is a pejorative name given to Indians who migrated to the Caribbean. Sinnapah Mary invented a character named ‘Sanbras’, a young girl who perhaps stands in for the artist as a young girl, and tries to connect the past, present, and future as a protagonist with agency over her life’s direction. Sometimes she is a schoolgirl on the run who takes a critical look at society and dreams of creating an alternative community with other children. She questions the relationship between human and animal, and thinks of the animal as an ally to build and remake the world she wants to live in the future. Sinnapah Mary creates images through drawing, painting, sculpture, and tapestry-making that refer to the tales and biblical stories of her childhood, mixing cruelty and enchantment, while exploring postcolonial dilemmas and resistance to self-invention. She embraces her own ethnic heritage as a descendant of Indian indentured laborers, and draws in sexuality, a love of craft, and the social injustice she perceives around her to create mini-worlds with science fiction and fairytale undertones. b. 1981, Guadeloupe; lives and works in Guadeloupe Lapdiang Syiem Laitïam , 2022-2023 Video and Performance Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum and Art Dubai This body-based performance by Lapdiang Syiem, which visitors can experience as a video, explores the Khasi folktale U Sier Lapalang , a story of the stag who climbs up from the plains of what we know as present-day Bangladesh into the Khasi Hills of Meghalaya to find the wild herb U Jangew Jathang , only to be captured and killed by hunters. His mother also ascends in search of her son and encounters the kill. She releases a dirge, a lamentation which is said to be a sound that has taught the Khasi people how to mourn and grieve. The work focuses on memory and retelling, landscape, and grief as an emotion that drives the narrative of border-crossing and how it resonates in the Khasi community. Syiem’s embodiment of the innocent and adventurous spirit of U Lapalang and his journey to the frontiers beyond his learned geography, speaks to us on multiple levels. The performance-video made on site captures the landscape of Sohra, Sohbar (the village between Sohra and the Bangladesh border), and Wahrew (the river flowing between Meghalaya and Bangladesh) which are undergoing a process of tremendous change and erasure with aggressive urbanization, mining, and other interventions. Syiem’s practice is deeply physical, drawing on techniques from her diverse training in theatrical arts. She presents and revives indigenous Khasi folktales with a contemporary vision, engaging with questions of gender and identity. She locates her theatrical expression in her minority matrilineal community’s oral traditions, using folk as a resource and performance as a form toward the expression of the oral— where the act of performing means taking part in the passage of those traditions from one generation to the next. b. 1988, Shillong; lives and works in Shillong Leela Mukherjee Recalling Leela Organized with the support of Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation ‘The Peacock Stage’ mural at Welhams Boy’s School, 1968. Photograph taken in 2023. Courtesy Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Archival material from the Mrinalini Mukherjee Foundation Archive Set of six wood sculptures, 1950s - 1970s From the Collection of Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Very Small Feelings creates a space to grasp, position and reflect on the life-long work of a pioneering sculptor and educator, Leela Mukherjee. Her art-making practice and contribution to arts pedagogy remains under-researched and overshadowed by the grand gestures of male-centric modernism; her works and her shifts were small, intimate, irregular, and in constant dialogue with her environment. Her career marks a shifting register of practice that liaises between her domestic life, her dedicated teaching practice, and her artistic journey as a life-long learner. Her bold personality, directness, and her dedication to her art—which we only know of anecdotally—becomes a starting point to recall Leela Mukherjee today. As an artist whose practice, ideas, and work are only now being archived and researched, Recalling Leela is set as a proposition inviting you to think with us on ways of approaching her practice, work, and ideas. As we continue to imagine this space in different iterations of VSF , we follow the anecdotal, incline towards the referenced, and all that can be pieced together from the memories of Leela Mukherjee’s students, colleagues, and friends, to gather details of her influence as a teacher and person of immense resource. It is a real yet conceptual leap that we take to imagine ways of approaching an artist’s body of work about which history knows very little. Recalling Leela first dives into Mukherjee’s idea of the Art Room that she instituted at the Welham Boy’s School in Dehradun, at the Himalayan foothills, upon joining the institution as an arts teacher in 1953. She is credited to have modeled the art room similar to art studios of practicing artists, accessible to students at all times including late hours, and with access to a variety of mediums. Embedding such an open invitation into a school curriculum, she shifted arts from a hobby class to a life pursuit for many of her students, filled with discovery, experiences of looking and learning together, and of course the discipline for which she is well remembered. Recalling Leela recognizes the simplicity and impact of such pedagogical efforts and gestures that move arts beyond the rigidity of class hours, percolating into life; and of art as a central motif to engagement with the world, especially for early learners. While her classes in the Art Room often spilled outdoors, having her students repeatedly sketch the hills surrounding the school, her art practice which occupied the same spaces as her students came to find permanent residence on the walls of the school. VSF anchors this reimagined space for Leela via one such work, The Peacock Stage , an onsite mural made by her in 1968 at the Welhams Boy’s School at the behest of Ms. Oliphant, the founder of the institution. The alumni, her students and the school remember it as an iconic space of “memorable gatherings, assemblies and speeches,” where “the peacock waits silently and patiently, in all its grandeur, with its wings spread wide to welcome all.” This sets the stage, both literally and figuratively, for the presentation of her archive and her work for us to ponder. Dotting this Peacock Stage in the exhibition are photographs of her students holding their drawings, school notice-board exhibitions, and figurines made from soap and wood, and her own documentation of her works. Six wood sculptures by Leela Mukherjee animate this backdrop, with animal figures complimenting the soap sculptures that one sees in the photographs. In these sculptures she draws references from the toy-making tradition and culture of rural artisans of South Asia, and her dedicated study of nature and bodies imbibed during her education at Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan. Mukherjee learned the skill of wood carving from the famous master artisan Sri Kulsunder during her stay in Kathmandu, Nepal from 1948 to 1950, and became one of the few female sculptors of her time to actively work with wood, and later with bronze. Together this assemblage of a presentation blurs the line between her practice as an artist and as an educator. She approached teaching art to children not as an isolated classroom exercise but as a laboratory for experimenting with learning methodologies and structures, from passing of skills and techniques to attitudes of engaging with the world through art. Leela Mukherjee started working at the Welham Preparatory School in Dehradun in 1953, and continued to create her own work in the same studio as her students until 1974. A graduate of Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, she took in early on the Tagorean philosophy of the study of nature and life, and later extended this attitude into the development of her arts curriculum and classes. She was a student of Nandalal Bose and Ramkinkar Baij. She married artist Benode Behari Mukherjee in 1944 and assisted him to create the famous mural based on the life of medieval Indian saints at the Hindi Bhavan, Santiniketan in 1947. b. 1916, Hyderabad, Sindh Province; d. 2002, New Delhi Lokesh Khodke Selected pages from Comic Series The Speaking Mountain , 2022-2023 With research inputs and materials from Asia Art Archive (AAA) Co-commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Samdani Art Foundation and AAA Khodke’s imaginative leaps into the archive and interest in storytelling is part of a cluster of works that explores different children’s art practices, highlighting local art teachers’ life-long work and institutional histories focused on children’s arts and education. Khodke shares selected pages from his ongoing fictional comic series conjuring, through the artist’s use of humor, a rich ground for exploring different artistic practices and dialogues across geographies. He entangles Hong Kong, Bhopal, and the landscape of the children’s literary world of comics from India in the 1990s with personal insights and episodes that pull in his own earliest memories of the art scene in his native city of Bhopal. The protagonist of the comic, a young boy from Bhopal, travels through time and space, meeting real and imagined characters. He meets artist Ha Bik Chuen in Hong Kong in the early 1990s, and also Nagraj and other popular characters from the comic worlds of India, Hong Kong, and America, traveling onward into the current moment. These encounters spark many ideas and questions in the young boy’s imagination. This comic series was developed from Khodke’s online artist-educator research residency at Asia Art Archive in 2021, where he was inspired by the photo contact sheets of children's artworks and exhibitions rigorously documented by the artist Ha Bik Chuen in Hong Kong in the 1990s. This visual research material led him to initiate conversations on comics, children, and art with artists Ronnie Wong Lai Keung and Professor Oscar Ho. He also met artist Vinay Sapre who taught and worked at Jawahar Bal Bhavan from the 1980s, teaching aeromodelling and art to children and young adults throughout his life. Engaging with the archival material and stitching his research with popular visual material like children's illustrated magazines, comics, films, news articles, Khodke connects many divergent threads, and plans to further develop the comic and continue his research on Bal Bhavans in India. Khodke has been making illustrations for children’s books and comics for almost two decades. As a practicing comic-book artist and educator in the visual arts, he co-founded Blue Jackal, a platform for creating and publishing visual narratives, comics, picture books and interactive tools and programs for learners of different ages. He is also co-founder and co-editor of Drawing Resistance , a Hindi/English zine reflecting on the current socio-political climate. b. 1979, Bhopal; lives and works in New Delhi Marzia Farhana with 270 young Bangladeshi students The Equilibrium Project , 2022-2023 Video of a multipart project and installation made in collaboration with 270 young students (classes 6, 7, and 9) from Jaago Foundation, Bangladesh Presentation realized with additional support from Unilever, and was commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art The Equilibrium Project began with Marzia Farhana conducting several online workshops with children engaged in Jaago Foundation learning programs living different parts of Bangladesh, including Dhaka, Habiganj, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Teknaf, Bandarban, and Gaibandha. The installation in the Dhaka iteration of ‘Very Small Feelings’ exhibition was a result of a collaborative process developed over several months, and it drew upon historical examples of artist-run pedagogical initiatives in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Reflecting on the figure of artist-educator, and interpreting the relationship between society, art-making and young children, she explored what engaged pedagogy may mean in resource-deprived contexts. Working with underprivileged and hard-to-reach children associated with Jaago, Farhana’s work questions as well as brings into focus aspects of innovative art practice to create a platform of emancipation and resistance for those who are outliers in society. This video documentation captures some aspects of the project as it was showcased in Dhaka Art Summit 2023. 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 and emancipation. The pedagogical turn of her artistic practice emphasizes fostering social and environmental justice and empowering marginalized vulnerable communities. b. 1985, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka and Richmond Matthew Krishanu Safari , 2012 oil and acrylic on canvas Courtesy of the private collection and Jhaveri Contemporary Playground , 2020 Oil on canvas Courtesy of the private collection and Niru Ratnam Gallery Verandah (Girl and Boy), 2022 Oil on canvas Courtesy of the private collection and Niru Ratnam Gallery Presentation realized with the support of Jhaveri Contemporary While these paintings contain a sense of childlike innocence, they also speak to fraught power dynamics between white children and brown children and their parents. In Playground, the white bodies ascend over the brown ones on the see-saw— perhaps a metaphor for South Asia and other parts of the world as colonial playgrounds. In Safari , also set in Bangladesh, the two brown brothers are placed between an elephant in the distance and their towering white father in the foreground, equally alien to the landscape. Despondent, they seem unsure of who or what to aim their bows and arrows at. Krishanu’s painting practice employs shallow pictorial depth and backgrounds that often veer into abstraction, creating paintings that seem to occupy a liminal zone. His paintings exist somewhere between the precision of a photograph and something looser. He works from his imagination, which he sketches and maps out as preparatory drawings, from photographs given to him from people familiar to these scenes from the past, and from inspirations from the history of painting. This lack of specificity opens up a field “outside of time” and invites viewers to bring their own experience and readings into the work. The institution of Christian-missionary-led education links many present-day and former colonial contexts; reflecting on the indigenous knowledge and systems of producing, preserving and regenerating knowledge, via contemporary artists, scholars and practitioners' work is a noticeable part of Dhaka Art Summit and Very Small Feelings . b.1980, Bradford; lives and works in London Matthew Krishanu Crow (profile), 2018 Crow (Mumbai, green), 2019 Crow (Mumbai, light), 2019 Crow (turning), 2019 Crow (wings), 2019 Crow (Mumbai, purple), 2020 Crow (stance), 2021 oil on board Courtesy the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary Crows are ubiquitous in the South Asian landscape, understandably becoming iconic subjects in the mythology, art history, and literature of the region. Matthew Krishanu paints crows as singular figures which, like two-legged humans, also come together in groups when installed in museums and exhibition spaces, almost like groupings of relatives. These mischievous birds are inspired by the artist’s childhood growing up between the physical landscape of Bangladesh and the educational landscape of England, where Edgar Allan Poe’s raven, Ted Hughes’ crow, and other iconic trickster birds flock together as part of western cultural literacy. These crows flock to us from London, where the artist has been observing and painting this subject for the past eleven years. They are joined by other crows imagined by Joydeb and Ishaan Roaja and Murari Jha in Very Small Feelings. Krishanu’s painting practice employs shallow pictorial depth and backgrounds that often veer into abstraction, creating paintings that seem to occupy a liminal zone. His paintings exist somewhere between the precision of a photograph and something looser. He works from his imagination, which he sketches and maps out as preparatory drawings, from photographs given to him from people familiar to these scenes from the past, and from inspirations from the history of painting. This lack of specificity opens up a field “outside of time” and invites viewers to bring their own experience and readings into the work. b.1980, Bradford; lives and works in London Mong Mong Sho Songs of The Fishermen’s Children , 2022-2023 Ink on rice paper Collection: Samdani Art Foundation Co-commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation Childhood in Moheshkhali is strange. In many cases, children become child laborers to help their fathers and family members earn a living, losing their childhood in the process. They touch money before touching books. They live in conditions of which urban society can never dream. Their lives are intertwined with the fishermen’s boats and the island on which they live. Songs of the Fishermen’s Children depicts the lives of such children who work and live in Moheshkhali, an island in Cox’s Bazar in southern Bangladesh. Born in a Rakhine family, an ethnic group found in Myanmar, South Bangladesh and India, Sho also spent his childhood on the coastal island of Moheshkhali. The sea determines the island people’s future professions. Some grow up to be fishermen, moneylenders, fishmongers, salt gators, tenders, brokers, laborers, boatmen, finding their destiny among hundreds of occupations around the sea. Mong Mong Sho became an artist, studied watercolor techniques in China, and currently makes art and teaches there. b.1989 Moheshkhali; lives and works in Dhaka and Kunming Murari Jha Returning to Earth, A kinder search for home , 2022-2023 Bronze, M-seal, granite, aluminum, wood, water, clay, and mirror Co-commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation Murari Jha stages a seen, felt, and absorbed landscape that we carry within us. Equally, it is an invitation to approach the space around us with an intuitive, symbolic, ecological, linguistic, and psychological understanding. For the artist, landscape and the idea of return become a performative and exploratory form. He developed this work while reflecting on the desperate return of the millions of migrant laborers who started their against-all-odds homeward journeys even at the cost of their lives during India’s first Covid lockdown. Thus, a return to earth is a kinder search for and knowing of home. Jha prompts us to insert our bodies into his scattered arrangement, replenishing the memory of the landscape of one’s growing up, and our relationships with the sun, moon, mountains, earth, trees, water, and animals. Jha’s installation accumulates observations, stories, personal and social associations with each element, colloquial phraseology and idioms used for describing a landscape, such as chanda mama (moon as uncle), billi massi (cat as aunty), samay ka pahad ban jana (an insurmountable sense of time as a huge mountain to cross), zameen ka jamm jaana (sedimentation of soil). Jha works in a range of mediums, including performance, sculpture, and painting. His work opens up aspects of the personal as political, the performativity of objects/body and the psychological processing of everyday occurrences and environments. b. 1988, Darbhanga; lives and works in New Delhi Neha Choksi and Rachelle Rojany Swing for friends (used in Faith in friction), 2017 Silicon rubber and stainless steel Samdani Art Foundation Collection In the spirit of their friendship, Neha Choksi and Rachelle Rojany’s Swing for friends… incorporates 12 swings in a closed circle— as a sacred space, a chora , a well for all to draw from, a drum circle hypnotizing us with its rhythm. It is a prop for harmonizing movement used in Choksi's film Faith in friction, 2017. The circle was inspired by thinking about the self as coming into being through community energy, cooperations and tensions. 12 seats were chosen for the 12 positions of a clock face, 12 months of the lunar and solar cycles, 12 sections of the fingers, the Mesopotamian counting system, and the ancient count of a dozen. The swing has been characterized by Choksi as a baroque kibbutz. This prop evokes and epitomizes the spirit of the many friendships and interpersonal vectors underlying and refreshing Choksi’s ambitious multi-channel work, Faith in friction . Faith in friction features the artist and her friends gathered at the construction site of an expansive and modernizing Jain ashram in India. The swing was installed in the raw concrete shell for the meditation and prayer hall. Even though there are 12 seats on the swing, Choksi always intended less than 12 participants, enjoying the idea of empty spaces waiting to be occupied. With Faith in friction , Choksi tests her conviction that, to learn to be oneself, one always needs others. Working across performance, video, installation, sculpture, and other formats, Neha Choksi disrupts logic by setting up poetic and absurd interventions in the lives of all things— from stone to plant, animal to self, friends to institutions. Embracing a confluence of disciplines, she allows in strands of her intellectual, cultural, and social contexts to revisit entanglements of time, consciousness, and socialization. Trained as a sculptor, Rachelle Rojany has interests in philosophy, text-based arts, sound, and performance. In her work, she explores existential and ethical questions about one’s place in the world, relationships forged with the self and others, and the times and places one inhabits. Neha Choksi b. 1973, Belleville; lives and works in Los Angeles and Mumbai Rachelle Rojany b.1976, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) Raani’r uggo Khowab (A Queen’s Dream) , 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestries based on a Rohingya folk tale shared by Kosar Begum translated by Mohammed Rezuwan Collaborative curatorial support from Sadya Mizan Project realized with the support of IOM and the EMK Center, Bangladesh Participating artists: Roshida, Mobareka, Morijan, Shahnur, Dildar, Shonjida, Yasmin, Rokeya, Sobika, Nurnahar. Nearly a million Rohingya refugees are living in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh after having been violently driven out of Myanmar. While they cannot return to their homeland, the Rohingya are working hard to hold onto their stories and oral traditions through creative interventions by folklorists, artists, designers, and other creative practitioners. The Rohingya language is primarily spoken, without a standardized written script. Mohammed Rezuwan, a young Rohingya Folklorist (part of the Transnational Folklore Research Forum of Very Small Feelings ), spent seven months traveling the camps looking for Rohingya elders who themselves are the living repository of Rohingya oral folklore. Rezuwan spoke to 35 elders, making recordings of their oral retellings, which he later transcribed, translated, and collected into the first-ever English language book of Rohingya folktales, helped by his American collaborator and friend Alex Ebsary. More than just stories, folktales are used to teach morals and lessons to the next generation, many of whom were born in the camps. With support from Rohingya artists Enayet and Mayyu Khan, a group of ten Rohingya embroidery artisans rendered the story as a series of tapestries. Relevant for today, the story depicted in these tapestries is about a powerful queen who has a vivid dream about torrential rains following a period of drought. Everyone who drinks the rain lose their minds. When she wakes, the queen sends advisers to warn the people not to drink the rain. But no one listens, and everyone drinks and goes mad. In the end, the queen decides to end her suffering and isolation, joining her people in drinking the rain herself. According to Rezuwan, the moral of the story is that, if the majority of a people are wrongdoers, they have the power to force an entire nation into a disaster. Embroidery workshops at the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre provide an essential outlet for women artisans, who gather to share personal experiences that are then stitched into tapestries. The embroidered tapestries presented here are references to their resilience, and an effort to add joy to their life. Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty Belly of the Strange III , 2023 Immersive wood structure Commissioned by Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Samdani Art Foundation The Belly of the Strange is a transactional object/space for children and the child in you. It holds within it strange books from different geographies, both real and fictional, inviting you to add to the stories in your imaginations. Belly’s voluminous space with stage-like stepped access, is a poetic ascent to another register, to very small feelings. It becomes a place for daydreaming, a performative functional ground for multiple activities, exchanges and kinships with strangeness, strange forms, and ideas. In its first iteration of the Belly of the Strange at MACBA, Barcelona in an exhibition curated by the Raqs Media Collective, the belly took the form of a strange bulbous fruit softening the high-modern masculine space of the European gallery. The second iteration at the Dhaka Art Summit 2023 in the exhibition ‘Very Small Feelings’ was made of a bamboo skeleton and fleshed with paper mache. It responded to the carnivalesque energies of the summit with feminine form and a womb-like space that invited everyone within. Now, in its third iteration at KNMA, the Belly assumes the form of a giant toy awkwardly fitting within a tight space, creating a confusing sense of scale. One doesn’t know whether this is a large object or a diminutive space. Its whale-like interior invites you to sit in its warmth and glow, to tell and listen to stories and imagine worlds far and near. In doing so the work draws on the absurdities of transactional objects / spaces in cities that often bypass conventional narratives of capital to create logics of strange convivial encounters. Visitors are invited to enter, read aloud and project their voices from the gaping orifices of the installation. Different projects and references within Very Small Feelings exhibition find home and resonances inside the Belly. Such as the books in reference to Afrah Shafiq’s research and interactive game on Soviet Books translated in Indian languages, books in indigenous languages resulting from workshops led by Blaise Joseph and Atreyee Day, Amitav Ghosh’s Junglenama , Anpu Varkey’s Summers’ Children , among others This large commissioned work draws on Rupali Gupte and Prasad Shetty’s works on ‘transactional objects’ as the city settles, blurs and produces multiple trips and kicks through these transactional objects. Extension to shops, folding shops of street vendors, porting devices, resting apparatus, fixtures fixed on boundary walls that help occupy them, things used to claim space, orphaned furniture left for wanderers, etc. are all transactional objects. Gupte and Shetty trained as architects and urbanists. They jointly run Bard Studio, a multidisciplinary practice that traverses between architecture, art, and urban studies, and are founder members of the School of Environment and Architecture in Mumbai. Their research and practice sit at the intersection of experimental pedagogy, exploring different aspects of urban form and experience and building environments and objects inspired by functional everyday urban forms. Rupali Gupte b. 1974, Mumbai; lives and works in Mumbai Prasad Shetty, b. 1975, Mumbai; lives and works in Mumbai Sanjoy Chakraborty Shades of Flowers , 2022-2023 A participatory space based on 1950-70s children’s culture in Bangladesh Archival prints, canvas, tools Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Sanjoy Chakraborty sets up a participatory, tactile, color-coded and material-based provocation for children visiting DAS, inviting them to draw, sketch and paint. He imagines this space as a resting post in conversation with the rest of the exhibition. This invitation and intervention is based on his research on the historical formation of children’s pages in prominent newspapers in pre-liberation Bangladesh (East Pakistan), revealing their connections to the social and political situation of their time. Initiated by artists, writers and intellectuals, these children’s pages— Mukul Mahfil (Daily Azad), Khelaghor (Daily Sangbad) and Kochi Kachar Mela (Daily Ittefaq) —transformed into forms of organizations with their own focus on different activities for children over the course of several decades. This slow and everyday embedding of powerful cultural practices related to children brings to light the under-researched relationship between modernism, the new nation state, and young children as cultural citizens, and how artists and creative practitioners addressed this relationship. Drawing from his fieldwork, research, and interviews of practitioners who continue to lead these organizations, Chakraborty creates a participatory space for children to engage by drawing on a red surface, a symbol of unity in his artistic practice, giving a glimpse of the historical development of the cultural movement for children, focused on these three organizations, and the regular contributions of many iconic modernist painters, writers, and cultural figures who illustrated and conceptualized content for them. For the exhibition and its future iterations, his research developed deeper engagement into the work of each of these children-focused organizations in Bangladesh and their ideas related to the cultural citizenship of children. As an art historian, Chakraborty has a keen interest in finding new narratives of the history of Bangladesh in relation to art and its deeply rooted culture. He is also an artist who explores drawing, installation and performances derived from his research practice. b. 1984, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka Simon Fujiwara Once Upon a Who? Installation with stop-animation, 2021 Duration: 5 minutes Who is la Femme Cubiste? (Female Panic!), 2022 Who's a Blooming Fool? (Icon Appropriation Anxiety), 2022 Pastel and charcoal on canvas Who is She? (Biological sex procreation), 2022 Who’s Who? (Gender Questions), 2022 Who’s Patriarchy? (Distressed Diagram), 2022 Gesso, acrylic, pencil, charcoal, pastel and acetate on wood panel Courtesy of the artist and Esther Schipper Who the Bær is a cartoon character created by the artist Simon Fujiwara taking inspiration from fairytales, fantasy literature, animation and theme park worlds. “Who”, as they are known, seems to have not yet developed a strong personality or instincts. They have no fixed identity, no gender, and no sexuality. Who does not even seem to have a clear design but is a being in the making, a self-creation. Who only knows that they are an image, and they seek to define themselves traversing a “Whoniverse” of images. Who the Bær’s world is a flat, online domain of pictures, yet one full of endless possibilities. Fujiwara created Who the Bær during the first Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 as a “childlike, dada-esque response to the increasingly nonsense world of hyper-capitalist entertainment culture.” The artist elaborates that “Who is really a fairytale, in the end, one that asks ‘What if…?’ and allows us to imagine things we are not really allowed to imagine or question at the moment.” Who is la Femme Cubiste? (Female Panic!) and Who's Screaming at Who? (Eternal Influencer) are from Fujiwara's series of works recreating iconic artworks by famous, historically significant artists through the perspective of his cartoon figure Who the Bær. The former is painted in a style recalling the oeuvre of Spanish modernist painter Pablo Picasso, specifically his portraits of female models painted in a distinctly late cubist style. The depiction of Who the Bær draws on images of Picasso’s portraits of women, especially long-time companion Dora Maar. Despite the work being heavily stylized, Who’s characteristic features are clearly visible, namely their prominent pink tongue from which yellow liquid emanates in one form or another in almost all of Simon Fujiwara’s depictions of the cartoon character. Who's a Blooming Fool? (Icon Appropriation Anxiety ) is based on Vincent van Gogh’s series of sunflower still life paintings, an iconic recurring motif in the post-impressionist artist’s body of work. Closest to an iteration of the motif painted in 1888, Fujiwara’s work depicts a vase with a bouquet of sunflowers against a blue background. Who the Bær’s shape can be recognized in the depicted bouquet of flowers, with the cartoon figure’s characteristic enormously long pink tongue that circles the composition and seems to wrap around their own head. Van Gogh’s paintings of sunflowers have become one of the most popular images in the canon of Western art history. The paintings have been reproduced countless times in a large variety of media, ranging from books to consumer goods and merchandise. Who the Bær has been described by Fujiwara as lacking any form of concrete identity. Therefore, Who being integrated into images of existing works of art can be seen as part of the character’s ongoing search for identity. Who’s Patriarchy? (Distressed Diagram) depicts Who in an abstract style. The geometric lines may recall styles of expressionism or cubism, but also are reminiscent of statistical graphics and charts. The drawing is paired with a print on acetate, a diagram explaining the patriarchy’s reproduction cycle within society. Who is She? (Biological sex procreation), shows Who as a pregnant woman, rendered in a few expressive pencil strokes. The drawing is paired with an anatomical diagram printed on acetate, showing the development of a fetus. Who’s Who? (Gender Questions) presents Who in a few abstract broad strokes. Their facial expression seems to be perplexed or questioning and it is paired with a printed chart mapping the overlapping of various gender identities. Working across video, sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, Fujiwara’s practice is a personal exploration of human desire that underpins tourist attractions, historical icons, celebrities, ‘edutainment,’ and neo-capitalism. In this seductive yet fraught arena, his work reveals the paradox of our simultaneous quest for fantasy and authenticity in the culture we consume. b. 1982, London; lives and works in Berlin Susanta Mandal Odds and Ends of a Place called ‘Memari’ , 2022-2023 Performance installation with rotating stage, circuits, sensors, and motor. Duration: 6 – 8 minutes Commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Acknowledgement Movement Programming: Himanshu Bablani Audio Editing: Anupama Srinivasan Voice Over: Sarbani Mandal Press the button to start the show. Settle into your seat and get ready to meet a string of imaginary characters from a place called ‘Memari’. The repertoire of the show consists of a magician, a tailor, a shopkeeper, a girl, a teenager, a cat, and a few unknown characters. Sometimes their gender identities are blurred. Follow the clues and feel free to take imaginary leaps. This theatrical experience unfolds on three distinct color-marked stages/scenes that are structured into two episodes. All invisible characters of the repertoire have their names marked with letters of the alphabet, and travel from one scene to another through spoken words. Sometimes the characters may not follow the described locations and, at times, appear to be glitches. These characters register themselves (or make their presence) slowly on the stage, with specific descriptions and conversations. Playing with the idea of memory and staging, or rather how memory stages itself, Susanta Mandal creates an elaborate assortment of characters that allows viewers to develop their own associations and references for each one. He maps and controls these different characters, their appearances, absences, and traces through fade-in and fade-outs, kinetic mechanisms and automated circuit programming. Inspired by the rawness of early technology of magic lantern and moving image making, Mandal constructs immersive interactive environments with spotlights and kinetic mechanisms. His works take on narrative and performative elements, echoing the tradition of vernacular storytelling in India. b. 1965, Kolkata; lives and works in New Delhi Satyajit Ray Two - A Film Fable/Parable of Two , 1964 Courtesy of the Academy Awards Film Archive Restored by the Satyajit Ray Preservation Project at the Academy Film Archive This short film shows an encounter between a child of a rich family and a street child, observed through the rich child's window. The film was made without dialogue and displays attempts of one-upmanship between the children in their display of their toys. This film was part of a trilogy commissioned by PBS (American public television) and, rather than accept the proposal to create a film in English set in Bengal, the legendary filmmaker Satyajit Ray decided to pay homage to the genre of silent cinema. Dealing with themes like loneliness, industrialization, materialism, war, inequality, and mankind’s thirst for power, this film, like many other works of Ray, could be read as an allegory for the Vietnam War, speaking to how the impoverished farmers of Vietnam put up a brave fight against America as a bullying superpower. Satyajit Ray was an Indian Bengali filmmaker, widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century. He was also a fiction writer, publisher, illustrator, calligrapher, music composer, graphic designer, and film critic, and authored several short stories and novels, primarily aimed at children and adolescents. His style of storytelling relied on emotions and humanism, connecting India to the world in new and nuanced ways. b. 1921, Calcutta; d. 1992, Calcutta Thảo Nguyên Phan Tropical Siesta , 2017 Two channel video with sound; 13 minutes 41 seconds Courtesy of the artist Speedily painted images of students sleeping on their school benches quickly appear on two screens, emerging from a rural landscape in Vietnam. A text speaking of how the communist regime has placed agriculture at its economy’s center accompanies the scene. The script tells of how children have access to only one book History of the Kingdom of Tonkin (1650) by Alexandre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit missionary, who converted not just the religion of the Vietnamese people’s but also their relationship to their own language through his introduction of Romanized script. This work recalls a dark period during which many people were deported or executed— a history that was not written, the amnesia of a people to which the innocence of children responds. Nguyên is an artist who uses painting, installation, video, and performance to depict historical events, narrative traditions, and minor gestures that challenge received ideas and social conventions. Through literature, philosophy, and daily life, she observes ambiguous issues in social convention, history, and tradition. The artist is expanding her ‘theatrical fields,’ including what she calls performance gesture and moving images. Nguyên is also a member of the collective Art Labor, which explores cross-disciplinary practices and develops art projects that benefit the Jrai indigenous community of the highlands of Vietnam. b.1987 Ho Chi Minh City; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Yasmin Jahan Nupur Home, 2022-2023 Participatory performance Co-commissioned by Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum of Art with the support of Bagri Foundation. Courtesy of the artist and Exhibit320 Home is a safe space for conversations around childhood and memories of places, landscapes, people, objects and stories that one deeply misses. Yasmin Jahan Nupur invites all DAS visitors to pause, rest, and acknowledge those lost, disappeared feelings, connecting with other visitors and strangers, listening to their expressions and stories and while sharing their own. As prompts to build these conversations, Nupur extends and choreographs certain gestures and intentions beyond her own body to the overall collective body of DAS visitors. Be the carrier and feel free to transfer them to other corners of the exhibition. Nupur hopes that this slowness and loose passing of ephemeral shared moments, instructions and knowledge will add to our collective re-learning of how to relate to others, as we all slowly learn how to be in public spaces after the pandemic isolation. You can also join the artist as she herself searches for the smells, trees, particular fruits and roads, people, and very small feelings that she associates with her childhood in her ancestral village home, sensations that she lost when she grew up and moved away. Over nine days, as this re-constructed landscape swells with collective yearning for particular foods, games, playtime, and favorite objects from childhood that have now disappeared, readings from Thakurmar Jhuli , and many other triggers, asking what we will make of it. Nupur works with sketches, installations, and performances. Her work explores human relationships from various perspectives, reflecting her belief in democratic rights regardless of social position. She explores social discrepancies such as those of women and migrants in South Asia, hoping to support increased understanding between peoples of different backgrounds. b. 1979, Chittagong; lives and works in Dhaka

ALL PROJECTS JOG and ruangrupa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Jog Art Space is based in Chattogram, in south eastern Bangladesh. Unlike Dhaka, Chattogram has no commercial galleries and no network of contemporary art collectors, leaving artists to find alternative ways to sustain themselves. Jog Art Space provides the local visual arts community with mentoring support, exhibition opportunities, platforms for exchange and discussion, and access to international artistic exchange programmes. Some members of the group are teachers at the Institute of Fine Arts and see themselves as a bridge to experimental ways of working outside the confines of the academy, thus the name Jog, which translates as ‘connect.’ They advocate taking art out of the gallery, and into public spaces, which they refer to as ‘the emancipation of art.’ Since its establishment in Jakarta in 2000, ruangrupa has founded a video art festival, an online newspaper, music festivals, a library, a radio station, and an art school, among numerous other projects. ruangrupa also create installation works and other devices to investigate how the population of a city of more than 10 million people and lacking in infrastructure can appropriate the public space. ’Ruang‘ means ’space‘ in Sanskrit and Bahasa Indonesia, and ‘rupa’ means ’visual form‘. The collective includes artists, curators, architects, and writers, varying in number from 6 to 50 according to the project. Through programmes and interventions in urban space, ruangrupa exposes how knowledge is produced and shared through informal social situations — in line with their motto ‘Don’t make art, make friends’. Gerobak Cinema is a mobile rickshaw screening station created through a collaboration between Jog and ruangrupa, producing screening sessions in several spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy on 14 February, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment was collaboratively designed by artists, designers, IT technicians and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos or selected Bangladeshi films.

ALL PROJECTS Let me get you a nice cup of tea Tate, London Yasmin Jahan Nupur’s work "Let me get you a nice cup of tea' 2019-2020 acquired by Tate, is currently on display at the Tate Modern. While she joins a great group of Bangladeshi artists in the collection, she is the first Bangladeshi artist whose work is being displayed at Tate as part of their permanent collection. This is a historic moment we are proud to be a part of - especially when it comes to mediums like performance which are not always the most simple works to collect. SAF worked on this project curatorially to support Yasmin Jahan Nupur from the start of an idea as one of the first DAS 2020 commissions to a presentation in our Artisitc Director Diana Campbell’s Frieze London program for Frieze LIVE in 2019 developed in partnership with a research residency DAS facilitated with Peabody Essex, further working with the artist as her ideas expanded into what was experienced at DAS 2020. Exhibit320 supported the initial presentation in London and so many people from around the world contributed to the development of this live piece through sharing their research knowledge.

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

ALL PROJECTS Sean Anderson: A Talk about Moma’s Young Architects Program around the world EMK Center, Dhaka, 27 April 2017 Dhaka Art Summit 2018 Fellow Sean Anderson spoke about MOMA's Young Architects Program that takes place around the world at the EMK Centre. SEAN ANDERSON Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, he received two degrees in architectural design and architectural history from Cornell University, an M. Arch from Princeton University and a Ph.D in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka and the U.A.E. His book, Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea was published in 2015 and was a finalist for the AIFC Bridge Book Award for Non-Fiction.

ALL PROJECTS Art Around the Table We at the Samdani Art Foundation see our community as a body that is nourished by a constant flow of ideas, provocations, care, debate, and curiosity. For nearly ten years the Samdani Art Foundation has built an intellectual movement, punctuated every two years by a thought-provoking, joyous physical event: The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). Today we announce the launch of a new programme: Art Around the Table. Via our social media channels, we will serve up activities, things to look, listen and react to, around thousands of literal and figurative tables across Bangladesh and the globe. The diverse group of artists, curators and writers who make this possible have one thing in common: in exchange for their contributions, they have generously agreed that food will be provided in their name to be shared around the tables of people in need in Bangladesh through a partnership with the JAAGO Foundation. Over nine days in February, half a million of us dressed up, went out, and explored together the euphoria of being part of a movement. The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS 2020) may have been one of the last major embodied gatherings of makers and thinkers this year and for some time to come, but its real purpose has always been to set the stage for what comes next. “Unless this kind of wonderful effort is supplemented by another kind of effort [meaning activism outside of the exhibition], we cannot achieve the impossible possibility of a socially just world,” said Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak in her speech at Dhaka Art Summit 2018. We have always sought to sustain the momentum of the fresh thoughts, innovative ideas and new relationships made possible by the Summit; to make sure the thousands of physical interactions and exchanges flourish and grow into actions after everyone has gone home. Working together across the global majority world, we must come up with ways to overcome political and geographical challenges as well as the isolation some of us encounter, often without formal infrastructures. Art Around the Table aims to unite us and to set the table for a more equal world. We have built a school (of thought) and will continue to make sure it prospers because we believe we are all students. We are commissioning new work from which we can all learn. As members of our movement gather round to take part, the JAAGO Foundation, will be using Art Around the Table activities in their schools in Bangladesh, which they run in addition to responding to the Covid-19 crisis. We're hoping the ideas, projects, and further provocations will be as diverse as the tables they pile up on. On Friday 12 June, we launched the first Art Around the Table digital workshop with the Sylhet born artist Rana Begum, who is the first Bangladeshi artist to be a member of the Royal Academy in London. This workshop is available via the social media channels of Samdani Art Foundation and our dedicated Instagram page @artaroundthetable ; new programmes contributed by artists and thinkers from Bangladesh and around the world will be released every Friday. ABOUT JAAGO FOUNDATION The JAAGO Foundation is a registered civil society organization with a vision of eliminating poverty and illiteracy from Bangladesh and rebuilding the nation. JAAGO (founded in April 2007),is among the few organisations which provides free-of-cost schooling exclusively for underprivileged children living in Bangladesh. JAAGO started with only 17 children and a single classroom and overthe past 13 years its platform has grown to accommodate learning for 3500 children currently enrolledin its 11schools all around Bangladesh. JAAGO also works to empower the youth of Bangladesh with its youth development program- Volunteer for Bangladesh. This program was established in 2011 with the purpose to create a platform that would allow youth to raise their voice and come together to reduce social and economic inequalities to build a better Bangladesh. JAAGO Foundation and its team of over 3500 volunteers across Bangladesh have come together to provide needed relief in these challenging Covid-19 times. Through collaborating with various organizations who have been helping out financially, as well as providing food items and transportation services, JAAGO Foundation has been able to reach out to a vast number of people through its network. JAAGO’s school venues are being utilized as hubs to distribute packages of food (containing rice, flour, pulses, potatoes, salt, soap, and other needed supplies) to people in need in locations including Dhaka, Chittagong, Rangpur, Dinajpur, Gaibandha, Madaripur, Rajshahi, Habiganj, Bandarban and Teknaf. JAAGO and its collaborators are working to keep families in Bangladesh from facing the crisis of hunger while ensuring the safety of its volunteers through social distancing. Artists' contributions to Art Around the Table The first artistic contribution to #artaroundthetable is by the Swiss based design non profit common interest who designed our logo. Learn more about it below: Rana Begum Our first family artmaking workshop as part of our new initiative 'Art Around the Table' is presented by Rana Begum. Habiba Nowrose Bangladeshi artist Habiba Nowrose inspires us to consider our leftover food and the potential found in waste. Gidree Bawlee Our third video workshop comes all the way from Balia village in Thakurgaon, Bangladesh and is our first workshop in Bangla (with english subtitles). Led by seven amazing children, the workshop inspires to make puppets out of objects found in nature - like leaves and seeds. Gisela McDaniel Our fourth video for Art Around the Table is presented by Detroit based artist Gisela McDaniel. Soma Surovi Jannat Our fifth video for Art Around the Table is presented by winner of the Samdani Art Award 2020, Soma Surovi Jannat. Tsherin Sherpa Our 6th Art Around the Table video workshop is presented by Tsherin Sherpa. Tsherin Sherpa presents us one of his drawings from the 'Protector' series to fill the colour out and make one-of-a-kind piece in collaboration with Tsherin Sherpa. Yasmin Jahan Nupur Our 7th Art Around the Table video is presented by Bangladeshi artist Yasmin Jahan Nupur. Yasmin Jahan Nupur has also arranged a virtual tea party through a performative process. Joydeb Roaja Our 7th Art Around the Table video workshop is presented by Bangladeshi artist Joydeb Roaja. In the video he shows the how he uses natural materials from his surrounding in his performance. Tahia Farhin Haque Our 8th Art Around the Table is presented by Bangladeshi artist Tahia Farhin Haque. Tahia Farhin Haque’s work shatters traditional stereotypes about women, specifically in Islamic countries, by bringing women’s unique perspectives to the forefront of her photography practice. She hopes to lend a voice to issues that are unheard of and unseen in the rest of the world, while making her viewers question their paradigms on a personal level. Dr. Nurur Rahman Khan This #artaroundthetable session brings in a lecture presented by architect, educator and researcher Dr. Nurur Rahman Khan on 'Architect Muzharul Islam: Politics and Architecture'. Najmun Nahar Keya Samdani Art Award 2020 shortlisted artist Najmun Nahar Keya is a multidisciplinary artist who employs old photographs, gold gilding, drawing and printmaking in her work - which she juxtaposes to create nostalgic settings. Grace Grace Grace Our fourteenth Art Around the Table is presented by Grace Grace Grace featuring Bangladeshi famous singer Momtaz! Grace Grace Grace is a collective of artists who focus on the politics of everyday life, gender and ageing through their performance. Their newest piece CLUB addresses gender and ageing which involves sequins, movement and the disconnect of older women clubbing, owning/taking up space ON THE DANCE FLOOR. Diana Campbell As the Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit since 2014, Diana shares the transformation of Dhaka Art Summit as a South Asian event to a platform that connects global art with Bangladesh in this session of Art Around the Table. Bishwajit Goswami, Tania Sultana Bristy and Barisho Dhora This Art Around the Table is presented by artists-trio Bishwajit Goswami, Tania Sultana Bristy and their daughter, Barisho Dhora.

ALL PROJECTS Pasar Ilmu, Activation Programme by Gudskul Goethe Institut Auditorium, Dhaka, 5 Aug 2019 (It is to invent a learning space in where people participate in deciding what’s needed and learning material.)

ALL PROJECTS The Collective Body Curated by Diana Campbell and Kathryn Weir. Assistant curator: Kehkasha Sabah. Supported by Adam Ondak, Lucia Zubalova, Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Teresa Albor Expressions of community and connections that precede the neoliberal individual and the nation-state are at the heart of The Collective Body, an exhibition that brings together more than thirty collaborative art initiatives. Half of these are from Bangladesh, where the thriving contemporary art ecology is largely carried by artist-led interdisciplinary initiatives that have developed festivals, art spaces, schools and collaborative networks to support their practice in the absence of centrally funded institutions or sources of economic support. Alongside these, artists and collectives have been invited from parallel contexts in order to crystallise discussions pertinent to collaborative practice in Bangladesh, drawing parallels and creating unprecedented forms of exchange of tools and strategies across Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Oceania. The curating process opened articulated conversations from which emerged common interests and preoccupations; these include the transmission of long-standing aesthetic forms, relationships between rural to urban contexts, labour movements across agricultural and industrial domains, climate change and environmental toxicity. An emergent network of initiatives comes together at DAS to address – through puppet shows, concerts, debate, installation, documentation and performance – issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersection of gender, caste and ethnicity. Centred on ideas and contemporary social contexts, the artistic practices represented in The Collective Body are fundamentally engaged in the creation of social tissue and in sharing knowledge. They are both rooted in particular contexts and looking elsewhere in formulations of what decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo calls ‘cosmopolitan localism’. Artistic experiments around processes of community selfdetermination are gaining strength in the context of the ecological crisis and the widening cracks in the system of extractivist neoliberalism, defined by French sociological theorist Pierre Bourdieu over 20 years ago as ‘A program to destroy the collective structures capable of opposing pure market logic’ (Le Monde diplomatique, March 1998). The Collective Body structures a reflection rooted in the dynamics and questions of contemporary art initiatives in Bangladesh but reaching out to multidisciplinary groups of creative practitioners across diverse geographies to highlight the collective processes that may be ignited in the space of freedom that art offers. These processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based artists’ collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country; it is part of UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage list since 2016. This is not a generations old tradition, it is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations (especially children) to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Charupith is a longstanding research and education-based initiative located in southwestern Bangladesh; close to ten thousand young students have graduated from their independent school of fine arts. Rising fundamentalism has threatened the use of masks due to criticism of the figurative nature of the art with resulting security threats to the festival. The presentation in The Collective Body includes a series of masks created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Artist and philosopher Denise Fereira Da Silva speaks of ‘the task of unthinking the world, of releasing it from the grips of the abstract forms of modern representation’ that have supported violent forms of appropriation and extraction in modern juridic and economic systems. She suggests that artistic practice should today be considered ‘a generative locus for engaging in radical reflection on modalities of racial (symbolic) and colonial (juridic) subjugation operating in full force in the global present.’* Artist-led initiatives such as Trovoa in Brazil, The Hill Group, Kaali, and Shako in Bangladesh, Mata Aho Collective in New Zealand, Thuma in Myanmar, and eleven and ProppaNOW in Australia, among others, have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa, a group of black and nonwhite women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil, the context that has given birth to both Trovoa and Ferreira da Silva’s approaches to blackness. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia (Shako) and South America (Trovoa) for a five-hour tea party within the exhibition’s dedicated discussion space to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions will be published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media. The imperative to ‘unthink the world’ is also linked to what Ferreira Da Silva calls the deep implication of the human and non-human (and of life and non-life) to the collective, fluid, intuitive body and the elements that combine and recombine within it. In terms of the practices of art, where the image ‘reduces the basis of existence to lethal abstraction’ (as Ferreira Da Silva states in the film of 2019, 4Waters: Deep Implication), elemental matter is always more complex than its representation and can provide pathways for artists’ collective radical reflection. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, have been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes our relationship to the earth more complex and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. For DAS, Jatiwangi has explored parallels between the clay-based culturesof Indonesia and Bangladesh. The Vietnamese collective Art Labor brings together agronomy as well as colonial and cultural history to study the circulation of plant species in international markets and the effects of industrial agriculture, notably focussing on Robusta coffee beans (introduced to Vietnam in the French colonial period). Policies of increasing scale and modernising techniques related to the introduction of coffee farming have led to mass deforestation and rapid changes in the lifestyle of local indigenous Jarai community in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. Art Labor collaborates with these communities, from which one of the collective’s members comes, to diversify sources of economic support outside of coffee cultivation and support Jarai culture and farming practices. Also working on community regeneration and seeking food sovereignty through revisiting indigenous agriculture traditions, Calpulli Tecalco works on the outskirts of Mexico City to revive indigenous language and farming techniques, constructing an ecology of knowledge to rethink and defend the use of the land. Adopta Una Milpa is one example of the organisation’s agricultural regeneration projects that reinforces systems of collectivity embedded within Nahuatl language and culture. As opposed to the monoculture of industrial farming, a milpa is a cultivated field where around a dozen crops are planted together – maize, avocados, squash, bean, melon, tomatoes, chilis, sweet potato, jícama, amaranth, and others – which are nutritionally and environmentally complementary, helping each species to grow and providing complementary proteins to the farmers. Unthinking the world takes place not only through working with unexpected materials but also with unexpected groups historically excluded from serious art production such as children, climate change refugees or those affected by natural disasters, all examples taken from specific art projects included in DAS. Calpulli Tecalco has facilitated The Book Club Incualli Ohtli for over twenty years, introducing several generations of children to Nahuatl language and storytelling and also engaging them in imaginative activities with pictographic representation of their linguistic roots. Storytelling is one of the many ways that an idea can move across generations and be renewed. In Bangladesh, Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together local communities and artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created Hamra to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, Golpota Shobar performs local history and myths surrounding a small village in northwest Bangladesh and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south to north movements of climate change refugees. In 2015, Bangladesh’s neighbouring Nepal was hit by a massive 7.8 Richter scale earthquake, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving 22,000 injured and 3.5 million homeless. The collective ArTree Nepal initiated 12 Bishakh Post Earthquake Community Art Project at Thulo Baysi, Bhaktapur, Nepal which started as an immediate relief initiative and developed into a sixmonth-long collective healing process involving more than 100 artists, community members, researchers, and musicians who created multi-generational interactive programmes, helping to allow the emotional ground of the community to settle in the wake of the trauma. In recent times, an increased awareness of questions of the interdependence of the human community with non-living elements has emerged in the context of climate change and industrial toxicity. Bangladesh is home to one of the largest poisonings of a population in history via arsenic in the groundwater, exacerbated by ill-conceived plans for shallow wells imported by foreign NGOs who sought inexpensive solutions to provide clean drinking water, but whose lack of specific knowledge of the local context instead unleashed enormous harm. When Europe and North America are directly affected by toxicity and freak weather effects that they previously had only read about in places like Bangladesh, their elites no longer quarantined from the sites of contamination and danger, the limits and violence of neoliberalism begin to be broadcast through the system’s own infrastructure. The ‘end of the world as we know it’ is announced as a contemporary crisis without any recognition that this is the culmination of a more than 500-year accelerating history, the effects of which have been long felt by others who the system discounted, by other lifeforms, and by non-life. Artists, as receivers and transmitters of some of the key questions of our time, and particularly those working collectively in contexts historically subjected to violent extractive and colonial forces, have been approaching environmental interdependence in powerful and lateral ways. Made up of architects, remote-sensing geographers and visual culture researchers, INTRPRT investigates underreported environmental crimes known as ecocide (including the case of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh). Their advocacy work, visual culture research, exhibitions and publications work towards making justice approachable in the fight against climate emergency and all forms of ecological impunity through collaborations with lawyers and policy-making bodies. Whereas INRPRT works through the judicial systems of the world, The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) engages scientists and engineers with young people growing up in Ladakh, especially those from rural or disadvantaged backgrounds. This platform equips young Ladakhis with the knowledge, skills, perspective, and confidence to choose and build a sustainable future in a high desert lacking water more every year. Temperatures in the Indian Himalayas are rising as a result of climate change, causing snow from glaciers to melt faster, negatively affecting local communities that rely on springtime meltwater for agriculture. Resulting from two years of experiments at SECMOL Alternative Institute, Ice Stupa was born as a local solution to a local problem, which is now being implemented elsewhere in the region and the world. Ice Stupa is an artificial glacier created by piping an un-useful winter mountain stream down below the frost line, and then cascading it out of a vertical spout in the desert plateau. When gushing water encounters freezing ambient temperatures, it transforms into a conical ice formation with minimal surface area exposed to direct sunlight. The artificial glacier lasts late into the spring, allowing communities extended access to water throughout the season, as opposed to ice, which melts much faster. This is a local solution at a human scale. Particularly in resource and infrastructure-poor contexts, artists work to amplify local initiatives, voices, and materials, even experimenting with alternative economic systems, other approaches to technology and different articulations of scale in political and social intervention in order to generate other sustainable models. The multidisciplinary platform Aman Iwan has developed an action-based research process, combining a research laboratory and the concrete experimentation of a workshop. The realities of diaspora and migration have allowed for a group to come together in Paris of which the members retain connections to many different places. Combining cultural translation and local, rooted knowledge, the platform focusses on cultural heritage preservation and renewal through knowledge transmission. In the installation The Weight of Water commissioned for The Collective Body, one landscape disappears while another appears, using elements inspired by longstanding water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan, where Aman Iwan founding member Feda Wardak works with artisans on reviving and transmitting skills. Wardak says that ‘Water management systems are both indicative of exceptional human know-how enabling settlement and catalysts for the evolution of certain landscapes, sometimes leading to their disappearance.’ Responding to a lack of spaces for the exchange and debate of ideas in Bangladesh, the open membership artist-led initiative Shonimongol 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 Cafe. It continues to host bi-weekly debates and exhibitions and has recently begun publishing newsletters. While initiatives such as Shonimongol Adda push the limits of where a space for art could be located, several artists’ collectives in the exhibition examine the political limits of where their passports allow them to go. The Shelter Promotion Council based in Kolkata and Dhaka’s Britto Arts Trust collaborated in 2014 on Project No Man’s Land, a research and process-based project that brought together twenty-four artists on the borderlines of Dhonitila of Monipur Para in Sunamgonj, Bangladesh and Kalibari village in Cherapunji, India, where they developed installation, performance, sound, photography, and video works on either side of the border. Their activities inspired the border authorities on either side, who in a seemingly unthinkable act, allowed the artists to shed their documents and meet and embrace each other in the zone between the borders. In another border area, issues between Bangladesh and Myanmar have been highly publicised in the wake of the Rohingya crisis, dominating conversations related to these two countries’ relationships, and making it nearly impossible for Burmese citizens to obtain Bangladeshi visas, and viceversa. Two collectives of young female photographers from either country came together in Yangon in 2019 to explore notions of identity, respect, hope, conflict, and resolution through storytelling and photography, a collaboration which culminated in the photo book project Bridging the Naf (the river connecting Bangladesh and Myanmar). Based on their interests and experiences, artists from each country were paired up and took a journey to solve problems, make decisions, and explode stereotypes through the process of artistic exchange. The Burmese artists were denied visas to Bangladesh when it was time for the reciprocal exchange to occur, and The Collective Body is facilitating these collectives to meet in Dhaka for the first time. The Lagos-based platform Invisible Borders has placed political and conceptual border crossing at the heart of their activity of collaborative road trips bringing together photographers, filmmakers and writers from across the African continent. Founder Emeka Okereke speaks to the role that the important and long standing Dhaka photographic and activist initiative Drik (and its school Pathshala) played as a model when he was conceiving Invisible Borders even though there had been no direct contact in Bangladesh. The Collective Body invited Invisible Borders to conceive together with the Drik Network a collaborative road trip taking Bangladesh as a starting point and they decided to focus on the area in the northeast of the country around Sylhet. This landmark trip inscribes itself into long histories of exchanges and solidarities between Africa and Asia and brings into the present their radical imaginaries. The very act of assembling this event’s collective of collectives in Dhaka dissolves borders through bringing initiatives together outside of an international art circuit centred in Europe and North America and tending to involve individuals who can speak ‘art world English’ and are also from countries where visas can be more easily procured. Born from relationships distributed across the global majority world between groups of artists who responded to the challenge to unite in Dhaka, The Collective Body opens a space for public conversations around common interests and preoccupations within reimagined geographies. Some important shared themes include the transmission of long-standing aesthetic forms, relationships between rural and urban contexts, labour movements across agricultural and industrial domains, climate change and environmental toxicity. An emergent network of initiatives comes together at DAS to address – through puppet shows, concerts, screenings, debate, installation, documentation and performance – issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersections of gender, raciality, caste and class in their symbolic and economic dimensions. When art is practised in life, not abstracted to formal dimensions or insular conversations, material approaches come to the fore that recompose and reinforce existing elements. Networks of artists and other producers develop generative spaces and work against the uniformisation of economic and cultural systems and experiment with other futures. * Denise Ferreira Da Silva, In the Raw, e-flux journal #93 , September 2018, at www.e-flux.com/journal/93/215795/in-the-raw DAS 2020 Collectives Platform Participants Akāliko Founded 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh Jatiwangi Art Factory Founded 2005, Jatiwangi, Indonesia Akāliko means ‘timelessness’ in Pali, the language of the Buddhist scriptures, reflecting the group’s belief that musical forms have always been present in everyday life in society. The promotion of electronic and experimental music is at the heart of Akāliko’s activities and they collaborate with artists and professionals who make digital and sound art. Born out of Dhaka’s electronica scene, the group was originally established in 2012 as an independent music production label set up to address the need for a common platform to promote the work of ‘bedroom’ music producers. They collaborate with like-minded performance artists, writers, choreographers/dancers, communication specialists, psychologists, and, most recently, sound artists, while at the same time maintaining their label. Their compositions are streamed online and can be experienced in this listening station. Jatiwangi Art Factory in Indonesia, located in the rural district of Jatiwangi that includes 16 villages, has been developing new community-based practices that take as their point of departure the local material of clay, particularly drawing on histories of roof tile production. Activities have ranged from tasting, chemically testing and cooking local clay to developing a Ceramic Music Festival using clay-based instruments to reanimate ceramic production. The elemental matter of clay makes our relationship to the earth more complex and calls up widespread mythological stories of humans being shaped from this. A listening station within the exhibition connects visitors with the sounds this collective creates that emerge from the ground of Indonesia. Through a mini-residency catalyzed by DAS, Akaliko and Jatiwangi explored parallels between the clay-based visual cultures and sonic qualities of Indonesia and Bangladesh. Looking out the window into the garden, visitors could see collaborative instruments created in Bangladesh, which were activated during several jam sessions on the closing three days of DAS from 4–8pm. Jatiwangi’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by the Indonesian Embassy of Bangladesh. Aman Iwan Founded 2015, Paris, France Particularly in resource and infrastructure-poor contexts, artists work to amplify local initiatives, voices, and materials, even experimenting with alternative economic systems, other approaches to technology and different articulations of scale in political and social intervention in order to generate other sustainable models. The multidisciplinary platform Aman Iwan has developed an action-based research process, combining a research laboratory and the concrete experimentation of a workshop. The realities of diaspora and migration have allowed for a group to come together in Paris, with the group’s members still retaining connections to many different places. Combining cultural translation and local, rooted knowledge, the platform focusses on cultural heritage preservation and renewal through knowledge transmission. In the installation ‘The Weight of Water’ commissioned for ‘The Collective Body’, one landscape disappears while another appears, using elements inspired by long standing water management and irrigation systems in Afghanistan, where Aman Iwan founding member Feda Wardak works with artisans on reviving and transmitting skills. Wardak says: ‘Water management systems are both indicative of exceptional human know-how enabling settlement and catalysts for the evolution of certain landscapes, sometimes leading to their disappearance.’ Aman Iwan’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Institut Francais and Alliance Française de Dhaka. Art Labor Founded 2012, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam Art Labor brings together agronomy as well as colonial and cultural history to study the circulation of plant species in international markets and the effects of industrial agriculture. Each project is considered an experiment to test boundaries of art, in terms of exhibition forms, exhibition venues, the artist’s role, curation limits, and the value and appreciation of art in society. Policies of increasing scale and modernising techniques related to the introduction of coffee farming by French missionaries in the 19th century have led to mass deforestation and rapid changes in the lifestyle of the indigenous Jarai community in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam. Art Labor collaborates with this community, from which one of the collective’s members comes, to diversify sources of economic support outside of coffee cultivation and support Jarai culture and farming practices. Visitors can engage with Art Labor inside the ‘Jrai Dew Hammock Café’ at DAS offering Vietnamese-style filter coffee to the public in a style reminiscent of roadside cafes in Vietnam. The title of this pop-up coffee shop draws its inspiration from the Jarai belief that humans are part of a metamorphosis of nature and will eventually become dew that evaporates into the environment, entering a state of non-being, and transforming into particles that fuel new existence. Artpro Founded 2016, Dhaka, Bangladesh Artpro’s projects mobilise artists to work with less visible segments of society, often working to bridge expressions of urban and rural culture. Nakshi Katha: Interwoven Dialogues (2019–2020) exemplifies their collaborative process. This research-based project involved 4 Dhaka based artists and 24 Jamalpur based Nakshi Kantha embroiderers through storytelling workshops. In the Nakshi Kantha tradition, communities (primarily of women) share stories and pass time together embroidering closely linked linear stitches on found fabrics. Bangladesh once had 6 seasons which are depicted in its songs and folk culture, but climate change has reduced this number to 4 or 5 (depending on who you ask). Artpro engaged with the community in Jamalpur to share memories about these seasons, collaborating with the artisans to then stitch these on a saree that was divided into 6 individual panels. The depictions of Boishahk (Summer), the Rainy Season, Autumn, Winter, and Spring are joined by the ‘missing season’ of ‘Late Autumn’ created by the artisans during the first 2 days of DAS. Visitors share memories tied to this lost period of the year and these are memorialized in textile form through the expressions of the artisans. ArTree Nepal Founded 2013, Kathmandu, Nepal In 2015, Bangladesh’s neighbouring Nepal was hit by a massive 7.8 Richter scale earthquake, killing more than 9,000 people and leaving 22,000 injured and 3.5 million homeless. The collective ArTree Nepal initiated ‘12 Bishakh Post Earthquake Community Art Project’ at Thulo Baysi, Bhaktapur, Nepal which started as an immediate relief initiative and developed into a 6-month-long collective healing process involving more than 100 artists, community members, researchers, and musicians who created multi-generational interactive programmes, helping to allow the emotional ground of the community to be remade in the wake of the trauma. Two examples of this healing are represented here through interventions by ArTree members Subas Tamang and Mekh Limbu. ‘Basibiyal’ is the result of storytelling in the aftermath of the disaster. In an abandoned, damaged house, stories of survivors were recorded through an intimate and cathartic mourning process. Conductive ink was used to make ‘screen portraits’ with a video appearing on a screen when a human hand completes the electric circuit. ‘Still Shots from Chal-Ne-Chitrais’ is an animation based on the art of Subina and Suprem, two children who were part of a group encouraged to express their emotions and experiences following the earthquake through drawings. Meticulously traced, re-drawn, and re-traced, their drawings, made over a period of 3 months, are transformed into an animation in which Subina and Suprem themselves narrate their stories and reveal their own coming to terms with what they experienced. ArTree Nepal’s travel to DAS 2020 was generously supported by Contemporary Art of Nepal. Back ART Foundation Founded 2013, Dhaka, Bangladesh Game Time –‘Khela-Ramer Khel’ Project Coordinators: Adil Hasnat, Afsana Hasan Shejuti, Mahmuda Siddika, Sanjid Mahmud. BACK Art refers to the founders’ ‘backpack’ approach to the portability of art and ideas in public spaces. They are particularly interested in rural life and issues related to urbanisation, water systems and climate change. Various projects, including ‘Dhaka Live Art Biennale’ (‘D’LAB’), use performance to explore folklore and long-standing aesthetic forms, seeking ways to locate these within contemporary art practice. Game Time – ‘Khelaram Khel’ is a performative game labyrinth addressing the question ‘Are ghosts real?’and considering shared time and play. It was developed from BACK Art’s Native Myth rural residency project in which they collaborated with local children to create ghost characters used in games later on. Games are widely played in rural areas of Bangladesh by people of different ages. Danguli, Ekka-Dokka/Kut-kut, Saat Chara, Saap Ludo, Ha-Du-Du, Bou Chi and Dariya Banda are very old games in this region that are no-longer common in urban areas. The collective is interested in rewiring and reviving older ways of being together, using contemporary art practice as a vehicle for this. The audience enters a playing area with a design pattern created from children’s drawings to experience and engage with a series of customized games. Britto Arts Trust Founded 2002, Dhaka, Bangladesh Shelter Promotion Council Founded 1986, Kolkata, India Britto Arts Trust (Bangladesh) is one of the oldest artist-led initiatives that is still active in Dhaka, and it aims to encourage critical discourse, research, interaction, diversity, and innovation in art. They provide support and visibility opportunities for artists in a variety of ways, including participation in exchange programmes facilitated by the Triangle Network and other international partners in home and abroad as well as organising exhibitions, residencies, and festivals in Bangladesh. Shelter Promotion Council (India) was established with the objective of promoting the cause of housing and inclusive development of rural and semi-urban areas with special emphasis on the economically weaker section of society. Its members are social activists, architects, engineers, scientists, environmentalists, artists and planners who work together to produce public art festivals addressing socio-political and environmental issues pertinent to north east India. In 2014 as part of ‘Project No Man’s Land’, these two artist led initiatives pushed the political limits of where their passports allowed them to go. This research and process-based project brought together 24 artists on the borderlines of Dhonitila of Monipur Para in Sunamgonj, Bangladesh and Kalibari village in Cherapunji, India, where they developed installation, performance, sound, photography, and video works on either side of the border. Their activities inspired the border authorities on either side, who in a seemingly unthinkable act, allowed the artists to shed their documents and meet and embrace each other in the zone between the borders. Calpulli Tecalco Founded 1990s, San Pedro Atocpan, Mexico Working on community regeneration and food sovereignty, Calpulli Tecalco works on the outskirts of Mexico City to revive indigenous language and farming techniques, constructing an ecology of knowledge to rethink and defend the use of the land. They have facilitated The Book Club Incualli Ohtli for over 20 years, introducing several generations of children to Nahuatl language and storytelling and also engaging them in imaginative activities with pictographic representation of their linguistic roots. Storytelling is one of the many ways that an idea can move across generations and be renewed; several of these stories can be found within these 5 pictographic flags created by the initiative’s founder Fernando Palma. In Mexican native cosmogony, the coordinates axis North-South and East-West is called Nahui Xochitl or Flower of four petals, and when the center or cross road is named, that is the fifth numeral, it is called Macuil Xochitl or Flower five. Interestingly, the numeral Maquil Xochitl is the name of ‘creation’ and it was attributed also to be the artist. This was common practice among the Aztecs, who spoke Nahuatl, and among the Mayan peoples. Incidentally, the Nahuatl language is the second most important after Spanish in Mexico. These flags orient us in another way of seeing and experiencing the world. Charupith Founded 1985, Jessore, Bangladesh Many processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change in society yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country. This is not a generations old tradition. It is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Close to 10,000 young students have graduated from Charupith’s independent school of fine arts. This series of masks was created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Charupith led mask-making workshops for Dhaka school children on the children’s days of DAS. Drik, Pathshala, and Chobi Mela Drik: Founded 1989, Dhaka, Bangladesh Pathshala: Founded 1998, Dhaka, Bangladesh Chobi Mela: Founded 2000, Dhaka, Bangladesh Invisible Borders Founded 2009, Lagos, Nigeria Invisible Borders investigates the spectrum of knowledge and artistic practices that may be generated by the process of a road trip. Through collective journeys of photographers, videographers, and writers, Invisible Borders conducts research into possible artistic responses to the unexpected. Founder Emeka Okereke comments: “In a world obsessed with artefacts — the physical, final object — as the preferred artistic outcomes, Invisible Borders shifts the gaze to the never-ending, evolutive nature of process. The work produced by the participating artists are precipitates of aesthetic experiences that are ephemeral but contain the seeds of further conversations. The artist’s presence on the road is as important as the work that commences from that presence’’. The resulting works combine photographs, texts, and video to present the critical inquiries of the travellers, their daily journals, and the voices of those met along the way. In a discussion with the curators of the Collective Body, Okereke spoke to the inspiration that the important and long-standing Dhaka photographic and activist initiative Drik (and its school Pathshala) played as a model when he was conceiving Invisible Borders even though there had been no direct contact in Bangladesh. Drik is an independent media organisation committed to challenging social inequality. It specialises in providing state of the art media and communication products for a local and global audience. Establishing its own identity through images and words, it defies the stereotypes created by western media and is a vibrant source of creative energy that refuses to be stifled. Part of the Drik network, Pathshala South Asian Media Institute is a path-breaking school of photography in South Asia. The vision of the institute is to enable an independent, responsible, and creative media industry that contributes to a just and equitable society. Its photography biennial, Chobi Mela International Festival of Photography has become a global platform that brings the world to Bangladesh (as opposed to taking Bangladeshi students to global festivals). This landmark trip inscribes itself into long histories of exchanges and solidarities between Africa and Asia and brings into the present their radical imaginaries. Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation. Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts Founded 2001, Balia, Bangladesh Gidree Bawlee Foundation of Arts in northwest Bangladesh acts as a catalyst for social inclusivity through community-focused activities, bringing together diverse members of their neighbourhood as well as artists to experiment with local cultural traditions. In 2018, they created ‘Hamra’ to develop experimental forms of puppeteering. The presentation in DAS, ‘Golpota Shobar’ performs local history and myths surrounding a small village and the many living and non-living beings that inhabit it – as imagined by a theatre company of children. The handmade puppets made with found materials by the children tell stories of small incidents in the village – natural and/or supernatural that connect to long histories of waves of migration through to recent south to north movements of climate change refugees. ‘Golpota Shobar’ was realized in collaboration with Jolputul Puppet Studio and was performed inside Taloi Havini’s ‘Reclamation’ installation at 4pm on 7, 8, 9, 14, and 15 February. There were periodic interventions within the puppet theatre in this amoeba. The children also ran theatre workshops with Dhaka-based children during the DAS school days, performing the results of their workshop from 12:45–1:15pm on 11 and 13 February. Hill Artists’ Group Founded 1992, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh The Hill Artists’ Group is based in 3 districts along Bangladesh’s south eastern border with India and Myanmar known as the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Home to 11 distinct indigenous groups with different languages and cultures, the region is under the control of the Bangladeshi army. In this highly militarised environment, many indigenous people are reluctant to be visible in public space. The Hill Artists’ Group organises exhibitions and also art camps for artists and young people, underlining the need for solidarity across the 11 ethnic communities to preserve their diversity of cultures and languages within a Bengali majority country. Their project for DAS was developed through a workshop with Alejandra Ballón Gutiérrez on the methodologies of SÖI (a public mural project in Lima, Peru with the Amazonian community Shipibo-Conibo). The Hill Artists’ Group identified a key shared practice of ‘jhum’ cultivation, also known as ‘slash and burn agriculture’, where crops are planted on land first cleared of trees and vegetation that are burnt on the spot. The soil contains potassium from the burnt plant materials which increases the nutrient content of the soil. The place of cultivation shifts annually, and every year indigenous farmers raise temporary houses in the mountain forests for months known as ‘Jhum Houses.’ This mural of a Jhum House weaves together textile patterns from the 11 communities, identified by different members of the Hill Artists’ Group as a statement of togetherness. INTRPRT Founded 2016, London, UK Made up of architects, remote-sensing geographers and visual culture researchers, INTRPRT investigates underreported environmental crimes known as ecocide (including the case of arsenic poisoning in Bangladesh’s groundwater). Their advocacy work, visual culture research, exhibitions and publications work towards making justice approachable in the fight against climate emergency and all forms of ecological impunity through collaborations with lawyers and policy-making bodies. INTRPRT presents a temporary, mobile, research office organized into 3 informal sections. 1) A graphic system focused on original, archival, media and legal research into the genealogies of ecocide and more widely speaking, the presentation of the environment as a subject of international criminal law. 2) Methods and casework with a focus on its extraction and climate justice work, its innovative use of software, interactive mapping and remote sensing techniques such as data-intensive satellite imagery analysis. 3) Advocacy work, both in its legal and environmental justice contexts. This presentation is part of an ongoing collaboration between DAS and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. INTRPRT’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Jog Art Space Founded 2012, Chittagong, Bangladesh ruangrupa Founded 2000, Jakarta, Indonesia Jog Art Space is based in Chattogram, in south eastern Bangladesh. Unlike Dhaka, Chattogram has no commercial galleries and no network of contemporary art collectors, leaving artists to find alternative ways to sustain themselves. Jog Art Space provides the local visual arts community with mentoring support, exhibition opportunities, platforms for exchange and discussion, and access to international artistic exchange programmes. Some members of the group are teachers at the Institute of Fine Arts and see themselves as a bridge to experimental ways of working outside the confines of the academy, thus the name Jog, which translates as ‘connect.’ They advocate taking art out of the gallery, and into public spaces, which they refer to as ‘the emancipation of art.’ Since its establishment in Jakarta in 2000, ruangrupa has founded a video art festival, an online newspaper, music festivals, a library, a radio station, and an art school, among numerous other projects. ruangrupa also create installation works and other devices to investigate how the population of a city of more than 10 million people and lacking in infrastructure can appropriate the public space. ’Ruang‘ means ’space‘ in Sanskrit and Bahasa Indonesia, and ‘rupa’ means ’visual form‘. The collective includes artists, curators, architects, and writers, varying in number from 6 to 50 according to the project. Through programmes and interventions in urban space, ruangrupa exposes how knowledge is produced and shared through informal social situations — in line with their motto ‘Don’t make art, make friends’. Gerobak Cinema was a mobile rickshaw screening station created through a collaboration between Jog and ruangrupa. It produced screening sessions at various spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy on 14 February, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment was collaboratively designed by artists, designers, and IT technicians, and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos or selected Bangladeshi films. Jothashilpa Founded 2016, Bangladesh Jothashilpa is a centre for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself ‘a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language.’ The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society which emerges from everyday life. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. Through their research and making processes, they collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary and Master Artist of Cinema Banner Painting Mohammad Shoaib and his disciples to realise a timeline that contains exhibitions about collectivity within, grounding us in solidarities of the past and imagining solidarities of the future. Artists involved in this project: Mohammad Shoaib, Shawon Akand, Didarul Dipu, S. M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Hamayet Himu, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim. Kaali Founded 2018, Dhaka, Bangladesh Thuma Founded 2017, Yangon, Myanmar Issues between Bangladesh and Myanmar have been highly publicised in the wake of the Rohingya crisis, dominating conversations related to these two countries’ relationships, and making it nearly impossible for Myanmar citizens to obtain Bangladeshi visas, and vice- versa. Two collectives of young female photographers from either country came together in Yangon in 2019 to explore notions of identity, respect, hope, conflict, and resolution through storytelling and photography, a collaboration which culminated in the photo book project ‘Bridging the Naf ‘(the river connecting Bangladesh and Myanmar). Based on their interests and experiences, artists from each country were paired up and took a journey to solve problems, make decisions, and explode stereotypes through the process of artistic exchange. The Myanmar artists were denied visas to Bangladesh when it was time for the reciprocal exchange to occur, and DAS is facilitating these collectives to meet, for the first time, in Bangladesh. Both collectives realise the difficulties facing female photographers in both Bangladesh and Myanmar; coming together provides them the agency to claim space in their respective art scenes. They share postcards with images and text inspired by their cross-border experience for visitors to bring home. Mata Aho Collective Founded 2012, Aotearoa Ko te moteatea te mataaho ki te pa o te hinengaro Māori. The moteatea is the window to the foresight of Māori. Moteatea are songs rich with metaphor that play important roles within Māori communities. Often sung to support or contest a speech, an action or gesture, moteatea are a documentation of history; a way to uplift or lament ancestors, events and places, transferred through many generations. Mata Aho Collective’s time at DAS 2020 will focus on learning a specific form of moteatea called pātere. Composed by women, these fast, vigorous chants recount kinship connections and plot a journey of significant landmarks. Mata Aho will spend time in wānanga each day learning a pātere composed for them that recounts the whakapapa (layers of genealogy) of their artworks they have created together since 2012. Mata Aho’s presentation at DAS was made possible through the generous support of Creative New Zealand. Pangrok Sulap Collective Founded 2010, Ranau Sabah, Malaysia Pangrok Sulap are a collective based in Sabah in Malaysian Borneo, consisting of indigenous Dusun and Murut artists, musicians and social activists who are dedicated to empowering rural communities through art. Membership is fluid and participation open, and their name expresses their make-up, locality and orientation: Pangrok means punk rock, and Sulap is a hut used as a resting place by Sabahan farmers. Pangrok Sulap has no permanent members as it is ‘willing to welcome anyone who wants to contribute’. Their ethos is conveyed by the slogan ‘Jangan Beli, Bikin Sendiri’: ‘Don’t buy, do it yourself’. The group came together to conduct charity work in rural schools, orphanages and homes for the disabled. Working primarily with wood-cut printmaking, they create works that are impressive in scale and seductive in detail, depicting narratives relating to pertinent issues in Sabah. The group has consistently fought against censorship, worked to spread awareness of Sabah’s endangered rainforests, and promoted the power of the arts to empower. Shako Founded 2003, Dhaka, Bangladesh National Trovoa Founded 2019, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Several artist-led initiatives have been tearing away the cloak of invisibility thrown by structural racism within the art world. The manifesto of Brazil’s National Trovoa, a group of black and non-white women artists and curators which can be seen both as a collective and as a movement, states ‘We understand the need to speak of and to exhibit the plurality of our languages, discourses, research and media produced by us as racialised women’. A rallying call that lives in physical and digital space, Trovoa counts over 150 members and empowers the most disenfranchised members of the art world to become visible together. Shako – Women Artists Association of Bangladesh – for women and by women – believes art can play a role in healing society. It raises funds for individuals, male and female, who are unwell or in need of medical treatment; uses art to encourage physically or mentally challenged people; and promotes female artists and helps them develop skills. A ‘shako’ is a temporary bamboo bridge, built to make it possible to cross rivers and streams, an apt metaphor for Shako’s work connecting talented female artists to vulnerable communities. Reflections on blackness and racial subjugation must respond to different histories and contexts. The largest African diaspora in the world is found in Brazil. In South Asia also, the colour of a woman’s skin can subject her to structural prejudice. Skin-lightening creams are used widely across the country, derogatory phrases are directed at women with dark skin or indigenous features, and advertisements for arranged marriages explicitly favour ‘fair skin’. The Collective Body brings together these two generations of female-led collectives from South Asia and South America for a 5-hour tea party to compare experiences, and in their words, to ‘darken our thoughts.’ The results of these discussions were published in Bangla, English, and Portuguese on social media, following #darkeningthoughts . Shako also ran a workshop on black empowerment on 13 February from 4–6pm in the 4th floor workshop area. Shoni Mongol Adda Founded 2016, Bangladesh 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 invited visitors to join them for addas at Kamor Cafe on 8 February and 11 February and hosted artistic delegations from Nepal and Australia. Uronto Founded in 2012, Dhaka, Bangladesh Uronto is an artists’ community that reconnects with lost memories of forgotten places through interdisciplinary contemporary artistic interventions. They create opportunities to connect to cultural histories through coexisting and co-creating, gaining access to memories that inspire creative workers and empower current generations with knowledge. The Uronto Residential Art Exchange Programme is one of the major yearly initiatives of Uronto, which involves interactive pop-up residencies and workshops at sites that are mostly abandoned and soon-to-be demolished heritage buildings in rural areas. Uronto believes that if we lose a heritage building we lose a part of our sense of belonging. Each iteration takes place in a new location, explores a new community, and brings together a new group of local and international artists from different backgrounds, including visual artists, writers, musicians, storytellers, architects, poets, engineers, and so on. Operating as a ‘site-responsive’ art exchange programme, ten to fifteen creative practitioners are convened through an international open-call. The participants live in the surroundings of these structures, fully immersed in day-to-day life, for a week to ten days, exploring oral history through the community. The process culminates in an ‘Open Studio Day.’ Since 2012, through nine iterations, Uronto has brought together over a hundred artists of various creative orientations from more than nine countries making work at nearly a dozen soon-to-be-lost architectural structures/palaces in Bangladesh. Uronto mediates between local and international artists, rural and urban inhabitants, as well as conventional and experimental creative disciplines. Through shared experiences and storytelling, they have created an archive (available on their website) of lost narratives. Their work is a collaboration that both cherishes old narratives and creates new ones, resulting in a greater appreciation of the chosen sites.

ALL PROJECTS ACTIONS. THE IMAGE OF THE WORLD CAN BE DIFFERENT KETTLE'S YARD, CAMBRIDGE | RANA BEGUM | FEBRUARY - APRIL 2018 The Samdani Art Foundation was pleased to support the production of British-Bangladeshi artist Rana Begum's work No. 764 Baskets (2017-18), included in Kettle's Yard exhibition, Actions. The image of the world can be different .

ALL PROJECTS A Beast, A God, And A Line Curated by Cosmin Costinas, was on view at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand 14 November, 2020 - 26 March, 2021 The exhibition welds a narrative of the geographical expanse of Asia-Pacific as a collective universum, where the works on view bridge geographies and timeframes. Ancient and contemporary travel routes, personal biographies, political and environmental violence, and a revisiting of historiographies are but a few of the threads transcending the show. Over 60 artists from across the region which include Cambodia, India, Vietnam, Madagascar, Bangladesh, Philippines, Australia, as well as Thailand, sets a foundation for the possibility of taking an in-depth glimpse into this complex region of the world in both its political and artistic sense. A beast, a god, and a line question how we should negotiate common ground in the context of the overall political and ideological fragmentation discussed above. How can positions that claim disparate and conflicting genealogies sit together in a shared exhibition space? One tenuous leading line that weaves diverse intersecting layers and different aspects of this exhibition are textiles. A material and language common to different cultural spaces, textiles also have a firmly routed history in art, being possible sites for parallel processes of historiography. Moreover, textiles hold a different position in negotiating relationships with places and contexts, in ways that the individual agency of artists escapes. The exhibition works from today’s loss of confidence in the ideals and certainties of liberal democracy that have shaped globalisation in the previous decades. Across Asia-Pacific, as well as in Europe and most of the world, alternatives and challenges to Western modernity are currently proposed or unfolding. The artists in the exhibition investigate traces of colonial domination, as well as the different ramifications of that hegemony today, when cultural and environmental genocides continue to unravel landscapes, communities, and worlds, particularly among the most marginalised indigenous groups. The curator has selected artworks from MAIIAM’s collection to provide relatability in the context of Thailand, whilst contributing to the intentions and relevance to the exhibition. Many of the artists in A beast, a god, and a line are among the most powerful voices who today are reinventing the significance of matter, objects, and forms, their genealogies and deep significance. The exhibition is organised by Para Site, Hong Kong. It was on view at Dhaka Art Summit, Dhaka, the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, as well as at The Secretariat (Pyinsa Rasa/TS1), Yangon throughout 2018, and previously at Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway in 2019. Artists Ampannee Satoh| Anida Yoeu Ali| Anon Pairot| Antonia Aguilar| Apichatpong Weerasethakul| Arnold Flores| Chandrakanth Chitara| Charles Lim| Christy Chow| Cian Dayrit| Daniel Boyd| Dilara Begum Jolly| Etan Pavavalung| Garima Gupta| Gauri Gill| Harit Srikhao| Huang Rui| Ines Doujak| INTERPRT| Jaffa Lam| Jakkai Siributr| Jakrawal Nilthamrong| Jimmy Ong| Jiun-Yang Li| Joël Andrianomearisoa| Joseph de Ramos| Joydeb Roaja| Jrai Dew Collective (curated by Art Labor)| Khamsouk Keomingmuang| Lantian Xie| Lauro Penamante| Lavanya Mani| Malala Andrialavidrazana| Manish Nai| Ming Wong| Moelyono| Munem Wasif| Naiza Khan| Nguyễn Trinh Thi| Nontawat Numbenchapol| Norberto Roldan| Paphonsak La-Or| Paul Pfeiffer| Po Po| Raja Umbu| Rajesh Vangad| Rashid Choudhury| RJ Camacho| Sarah Naqvi| Sarat Mala Chakma| Sawangwongse Yawnghwe| Sheela Gowda| Sheelasha Rajbhandari| Simon Soon| Simryn Gill| Sopheap Pich| Su Yu Hsien| Sutthirat Supaparinya| Taloi Havini| Tawatchai Puntusawasdi| Than Sok| Thảo-Nguyên Phan| After Dhaka, Hong Kong, Yangon, Warsaw, and Trondheim, the latest international iteration of A Beast, a God, and a Line, curated by Cosmin Costinas, was on view at MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Trevor Yeung| Trương Công Tùng| Tuguldur Yondonjamts| Zamthingla Ruivah

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