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 Breathe In Breathe Out: Susan Philipsz Pathshala South Asian Media Institute & Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 10 - 11 April 2017 As part of the Samdani Seminars 2017, Susan Philipsz conducted an open seminar for everyone to learn about her practice using sound and architecture at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute. She then ran a half-day closed-door workshop along with her partner Eoghan James Mctigue at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The project was a collaboration between the Samdani Art Foundation and Goethe Institut, Dhaka. Through the seminar and workshop, Susan Philipsz explored acoustic properties of sounds and the relationship between sound and architecture. The workshop concentrated on sounds we make with our own bodies with a particular focus on breath as a metaphor for life and mortality. Breathing is a fundamental part of living, and it is something that unites us all. In classical music, wind instruments require the human breath to activate them. Philipsz wanted to develop a workshop where we use everyday objects to produce sound with our own breath. The workshop was conducted in two parts: PART I: BREATHE IN: INTERNAL SPACE, INTIMATE, CLOSENESS, DARK, QUIET, SOFT, LUNGS, THE BODY. During the workshop, the participants began by focusing on their own breath: how their diaphragm shifts as they expel air from the lungs, making each aware of his/her inner body space. The physicality of producing sound is particularly emphasised when people sing, and Philipsz chose to focus on sound as a sculptural experience. When sound is projected out into the room, the participants defined the space with sound, drawing attention to the architecture while heightening their sense of self within the space. PART II: BREATHE OUT: EXTERNAL SPACE, PUBLIC, OPEN, LIGHT, ARCHITECTURE, DISTANCE, IMMENSITY. The participants explored potential locations in their near-by surroundings with temporary play-back devices. They chose sites that have interesting architecture and acoustics such as corridors and stairwells. Everyone discussed each other's work in-situ and developed the workshop as a group. PARTNERS: Samdani Art FoundationGoethe Institut, Dhaka VENUE PARTNERS: Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Pathshala South Asian Media Institute SUSAN PHILIPSZ Susan Philipsz has explored the psychological and sculptural potential of sound. She uses recordings, predominantly with her own voice. Creating immersive environments of architecture and song that intensify the audience’s interaction with their surroundings while allowing for insightful introspection. Philipsz often selects music ranging from sixteenth century ballads or Irish folk tunes to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust . The music is selected and responds to the space where the work is installed. While the works remain unique, all explores familiar themes of loss, longing, hope, and return. This creates a narrative that encourages personal reactions and also bridges gaps between the individual and the collective as well as interior and exterior spaces. Philipsz was born in 1965 in Glasgow and currently lives and works in Berlin. She received a BFA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College in Dundee, Scotland in 1993, and an MFA from the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1994. In 2000, she completed a fellowship at MoMA P.S.1. in New York. She was the recipient of the 2010 Turner Prize and was shortlisted for the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award the same year. Philipsz's work has been exhibited globally at a number of institutions and venues. In 2012, she debuted a major work at dOCUMENTA (13) entitled Study for Strings , which was later featured at the Museum for Modern Art as a part of the group exhibition, Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013). Philipsz has presented a number of solo exhibitions at institutions to include Museum Ludwig (2009), Cologne, Germany; Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State (2009-10) Columbus, OH; Aspen Art Museum (2010-11) in Aspen, Colorado; Museum of Contemporary Art (2011), Chicago; K21 Standehaus Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (2013), Dusseldorf, Germany; the Carnegie Museum of Art (2013), Pittsburgh; and Hamburger Bahnhof (2014), Berlin. She has separately created installations for the 2007 Skulptur Projekte in Muenster, Germany and for the Carnegie Museum of Art’s 55th Carnegie International in 2008. Major commissions include Turner Prize-winning work for Glasgow International (2010); SURROUND ME: A Song Cycle for the City of London a public project organised by Artangel (2010-11) London; Day is Done , a permanent installation organised by the Trust for Governors Island that opened on Governors Island in New York (2014), and a project for the Grace Farms Foundation (2015) in New Canaan. Philipsz’s work can be found in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Tate, London; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Baltimore Museum of Art; Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Castello di Rivoli, Italy; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

ALL PROJECTS Shifting Sands, Shifting Hands Curated by Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore And Jana Prepeluh “Now, as I do this, now, as the light here goes out, for instance. What is the now? Is the now at my disposal? Am I the now? Is every other person the now? Then time would indeed be me myself, and every other person would be time. And in our being with one another, we would be time—everyone and no one. Am I the now? Or only the one who is saying this?” Heidegger The notion of the now in the discussion of time and duration (that it takes to create a work of art) can be formulated as the work being in the constant state of becoming. This idea, of the Becoming, where the work of art emerges in the live and lived moment, and not as an object transported in the artist’s studio or on the gallery walls (or on pedestals), handled such that its aura is kept intact. Here in lies the potential of an intense energy exchange between the viewer and the performer. The idea is delivered and communicated as a sensory effect, a feeling, a mark made, all lending to the aura of the work and the lingering feeling that the spectator is left with. While the reigns of time are pulled by the performer, the audience willingly participates in its completion, suspended in the spectacle of disbelief, seeing it through to its finale. Theatre has already broken the fourth wall for visual artists working with performance and has entered the arena of multidisciplinarity with the visual arts. Anxious scripts and disjointed texts express the schizophrenia and absurdity of rituals and banalities of contemporary life. For an artist working with performance or live art practices, time and duration become the central material engagement. The title of this program, Shifting Sands, Sifting Hands, relates to the above idea of everything being in a constant state of becoming, in the slippage(s) of time through movement or stillness, of the body in the recognition of death present in every moment as it passes. The second parallel material engagement of performance art is the body. Performance art is of the body and from the body. The body is always dealt with in a performance, even in the absence of the artist, or in the absence of a watching viewer. Performance art is transformative; it evokes, or wants to represent a state of flux, conflict, catharsis, within the arrangements of time and space. It is ephemeral, transient, and at times transcendental. One deals at times with the residue of the performance as a composition; the residual effects that in the end hold the visual gestalt of the work together even after the event. Thirdly, the relationship of performance to æsthetics can be established, as it questions notions of beauty -a key entry into the language of live art. Here we can begin to bring the visual aesthetic of a performance and its residue into the framework of visual art practices, and relate it to the histories of painting and photography or sculpture and installation, and hold on to the viewing models of art ascribed to rarified white cube gallery spaces. While engagement with performance art can be entered from the academy by drawing relationships to tribal ritual, cultural practices and identity debates, performance art is an integral part of visual art. Performance work from the 1960s- 1980s has etched itself into art history. Major museums present retrospectives of the life’s work of pioneers of performance, while discussing how performance can be part of permanent collections. We want to rethink the critique of the institution and of an object oriented art world that practitioners of performance art have engaged with. Participating artists: Ali Asgar, Sanad Kumar Biswas, Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty, Manmeet Devgun, Sajan Mani, Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Venuri Perera, Atish Saha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

ALL PROJECTS Liberty Curated by Md. Muniruzzaman assisted by Takir Hossain This exhibition articulates a wide range of emotions and helps visualise freedom, sovereignty and free thought. Liberty -- its analytical significance -- is very much connected to the political, social and economic context of Bangladesh. Since the birth of the country, the people of the state have experienced political turmoil, religious bigotry and natural catastrophe. The people of the country lost their freedom in different periods for varied reasons. Freedom is the birthright of a man. However, we had to suffer under the shackles of slavery for long 200 years under the British colonial rule and about 25 years under the savage domination of the Pakistani rulers. Pakistani rulers treated the Bangalees with very brutal and malicious attitude. An excessive inequality was created by them in the different spheres of national life. These were made simultaneously in political, economical, social and cultural spheres. This exploitation by the Pakistani rulers caused bitterness among the Bangalees. Consequently, at one time, Bangalees crossed the limits of their patience and revolted against the Pakistani rulers. At last, the nation got freedom and relished liberty. Afterwards, the state faced several dilemmas in different phases. Specially, the artists of the country engaged themselves when the country faced any crisis. Their canvases always liberally express their thoughts, common people’s rights, and were in favour of establishing democracy and secularism in our society. The exhibition provides a chronological feature of Bangladeshi contemporary art. The show highlights the wide range of subjects but the theme of the exhibition --- “Liberty” --- is the focal point. The exhibition features several styles of different generations of painters in the country. The styles can be categorised as realistic, semi-realistic, abstract expressionism, abstract impressionism, symbolism, figurative, neo-expressionism, photo realism and more. To maintain individual languages, the painters depict rustic scenic beauty and untainted river and pastoral life, river erosion, daily chores of varied occupations, surrounding atmospheres, social and political crises, folk tradition, urban and rural life and more. A number of painters have concentrated on pure form, composition and architectural lines and texture. The exhibition includes the artworks of the first generation of artists in the country. A few of them were directly involved with the establishment of the first art college of the country in Dhaka in 1948. The exhibition also comprised of the artworks of the painters who first went abroad to take higher education on their preferred fields in the mid 1960s. During that time, these groups of painters were greatly influenced by abstract expressionism, lyrical abstraction, pure abstraction and non-figuration. This time, artists concentrated on textures, forms, tones, especially they concentrated more on technical aspects. Though the movement of the sixties was heavily influenced by internationally prominent Abstract Expressionists like Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Franz Kline and Adolph Gottlieb, it paved the way towards liberalisation. Thus the present accomplishments of Bangladesh’s art owes a lot to the liberalisation. The exhibition also includes the artists of the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s generations. The 1970s and 1980s were very significant times for the painters of our country. These generations of painters went through political turmoil and most of them were regarded as socially aware painters. It is also very noticeable that after independence, another transformation happened in our art arena. Painters felt free and their artistic creativities flowered. During the time a number of painters went for higher training in different parts of the world. Some stayed there permanently and tried to establish themselves in the new horizon. Their works are also included in the exhibition and some of these paintings highlight the blending of West and East art. Most of these works are colour and composition based. The exhibition also includes the artworks of leading painters of early ‘90s. Their works are experimental in terms of line, form and space. Textural intensity is also emphasised in several painters’ works in the exhibition. Their working styles are bold, thought-provoking and their themes clearly reflect our political instability, religious intolerance, economic hardship and social discrimination. Takir Hossain Artists Abdul Manan Abdus Shakoor Shah Syed Abul Barq Alvi Ahmed Nazir Ahmed Shamsuddoha Anisuzzaman Atia islam Anne Chandra Shekhar Dey Farida Zaman Golam Faruque Bebul Hamiduzzaman Khan Hritendera Kumar Sharma Jamal Ahmed K. M. A. Quayyum Kalidas Karmakar Maksuda Iqbal Nipa Mohammad Eunus Monsur Ul Karim Nasim Ahmed Nadvi Nazlee Laila Mansur Nisar Hossain Ranjit Das Rashid Amin Samarjit Roy Chowdhury Sheikh Afzal Hossain Sawpan Chowdhury Tasadduk Hossain Dulu Kanak Chanpa Chakma Khalid Mahmood Mithu Nasreen Begum Syed Jahangir Monirul Islam Sahid Kabir Rokeya Sultana Abu Taher Mohammad Iqbal Biren Shome Mostafizul Haque Saidul Haque Juise Shahabuddin Ahmed Aloptogin Tushar Shishir Bhattacharjee Zahura Sultana Hossain Wakilur Rahman

ALL PROJECTS Volcano Extravaganza | Total Anastrophes Curated by Milovan Farronato With Runa Islam as Artistic Leader Within the frame of the Fiorucci Art Trust (whose stated aim is to ‘collect’ or promote art experiences), Total Anastrophes reimagined the 8th edition of the annual Volcano Extravaganza in Dhaka. Instead of engaging with Stromboli’s landscape and the talisman of its active volcano, the programme transformed the inside of the Shilpakala Academy’s Auditorium into the inner echo chamber of an active volcano. Performative interventions evoked themes of isolation and distance; memory and mysticism; cosmic energy and the violence of nature; improvisation and theatre. On the occasion of its 8th edition, the Volcano Extravaganza — the annual festival of contemporary arts conceived and produced by London-based non-profit institution, the Fiorucci Art Trust — erupted away from its volcanic centre in Stromboli. Taking the empirical and ephemeral experiences collected on the island, the Fiorucci Art Trust migrated the knowledge, the collaborations, the artists, the talks, the volcanic activities: the mind as a volcano and the emotional body with Total Anastrophes. The Artistic Leader was Bangladeshi-born, London-based artist Runa Islam, while the festival was curated, as per tradition, by Milovan Farronato. The participants included Cecilia Bengolea, Alex Cecchetti, Patrizio Di Massimo, Haroon Mirza, Tobias Putrih, Osman Yousefzada (OSMAN)- all figures belonging to the astral orbit of the Trust. After DAS 2018, the Volcano Extravaganza will move back to Stromboli, completing its own anastrophe in July 2018. Total Anastrophes is a figure of speech, a form of poetic license to indicate that something has been taken and moved away, in order to emphasise something else. An alteration of the typical order which might look like a mistake, a transmutation gone wrong: yet anastrophes have the gift to metamorphose a regular sentence into a re-energised version of itself, opening space for chaos, and creation. Away from Iddu (him), as the locals call the volcano of Stromboli, the intention of Fiorucci Art Trust was to create a collective experience. To orchestrate an adequate environment to celebrate self-reflection, remembrance, personal and collective latent memories, as the Trust gazed into its history, and to the many collaborations which have helped characterise it. The auditorium was turned into a theatre inside of a volcano, into an echo-chamber pervaded by sounds and moans, magmatic hertz, vibrations: frequencies of a harmonious language inside a unique cradle for performances, where voices were born from inscrutable sources and latent memories evoked. Visitors were greeted by slowed movements, reverberations and distorted sounds. The echo chamber was inhabited by mobile architectural structures conceived by Tobias Putrih in dialogue with visual imagery and motifs by Runa Islam, acting simultaneously as diaphragms and screens, altering the space to dissolve the border between spectatorship and performers. Moreover, the same drapes of fabrics and textiles hanging from the mobiles became subjects for OSMAN to perform tailoring cutouts and create new designs on the spot, together with local seamstresses, as in a workshop. Re-contextualising both earlier and new performances from their bodies of work, live interventions by Alex Cecchetti and Patrizio Di Massimo were the voice of the echo-chamber. Cecilia Bengolea also drew from her own production history, to trigger and improvise movements and action in the space, through old and new choreographies. Haroon Mirza orchestrated a soundscape for the auditorium: an environment where a distorted sonority synchronised with a visual choreography of LEDs danced in conjunction with his own footage of Stromboli. Audiovisual contributions by Alec Curtis, Anna Boughighian, Roberto Cuoghi, Joana Escoval, Chiara Fumai, Liliana Moro, Christodoulos Panayiotou, Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa and Mathilde Rosier, among others, alternatively intervened in the landscape.

ALL PROJECTS Stepping Softly on the Earth Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art Gidree Bawlee and Kamruzzaman Shadhin’s collaborative project ‘Kaal’ explored how we perceive time, our place within its tapestry, and how these rhythms manifest in our narratives and practices. Informed by rituals, beliefs, and mythologies that persist across generations, the community-engaged project ‘Kaal’ is a study of our surroundings where past and present intertwine, and a dialogue between our shared history and the unfolding present. It’s a journey through time’s knotted and unraveled threads, seeking the enduring connections that bind us all. The first iteration of ‘Kaal’ is ‘Pala,’ showcasing at the Stepping Softly on the Earth exhibition curated by Irene Aristizábal and Kinnari Saraiya. Pala seven intricately woven jute figures echoing the ‘Bishahari Pala’ performance, which blurs the lines between human and non-human realities. Woven by the village community in a collaborative spirit, the work captures the collective essence of participation and shared narratives. This exhibition is supported by Pro Helvetia, Jhaveri Contemporary, and Samdani Art Foundation. Stepping Softly on the Earth evolved from Baltic’s Research and Development project Cosmovisions on Land and Entangled Futures . With additional support from the British Council through an International Collaboration Project Grant towards the research and development project titled Cosmovisions on Land and Entangled Futures.