ALL PROJECTS Dog Eye Kunsthalle Münster, 3 Sept - 22 Nov 2020 Produced in Bangladesh with the Samdani Art Foundation, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s narrative film Fog Dog and photographs produced from the artist's Bangladesh experience inform the ghostly narratives found in his solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Muenster, Dog Eye. Watch the work and an interview with the artist here: www.artbasel.com Watch Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s ‘Fog Dog’ A horror film from the point of view of Dhaka's street dogs

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun The Bay of Bengal once supported an amphibious life. Water was not a force to keep at bay, but an entity to live with, and through. In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather , mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans Delta of Bangladesh that has soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. Mud complicates the relationship to liquid, which is no longer delineated, discrete. The attempt to extract oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees as a result of the resulting effects of global warming. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them; a catastrophe on one hemisphere inevitably impacts the other. With colonialism came the attempted erasure of muddiness as condition – amorphous zones became hardened into coastlines; lines were even drawn in the muddy space between the human and the non-human. The time of stones, of tides, of swamp, of earth, became subsumed to the relentless measure of the clock. Omer Wasim and Saira Sheikh’s drawings and text in The Impossibility of Loving a Stone (2017) reconstitutes the human in geological time, where the present stretches back two million years – they soil the skin between the Earth and us, slowly moving us like shifting mud through the present. Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st century. He transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the 19th century colonial surveyor morphs into today’s corporations that are exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this haunting essay film. Moving further away from the generation of knowledge as mere data, Neha Choksi turns her attention to the sun, both as planetary sustenance and a point of reference for dialogue across generations and within the self through multiple modes of narration. The artist’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Choksi invited ten Bangladeshi children to embody a fictive dream of a child obsessively drawing suns, and to consider the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They considered the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities. They imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Each day of the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Choksi invited a different adult professional to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature drawing the visitor back to their primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as they morph from atoms into beings and back. Artists Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) 2 or 3 Tigers, 2015 2 Channel CGI Video, 10-channel sound courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery Technology supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Presented here with additional support from the National Art Council Singapore and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/Shanghai Taking inspiration from 19th Century wood engraving, Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st Century. The wood engraving chronicles the story of George Dromgoole Coleman, the then Government Superintendent of Public Works in Singapore who was surprised by a tiger who was determined to attack not Coleman and his entourage of convict laborers, but rather the theodolite (surveying instrument) they were using to conduct a survey on the unexplored forests of Singapore. Post-colonial historians have noted that the imperial methods of data collection, through census reports, and land surveys, were directed at the control of the lands and bodies of subjugated populations. The creation of these data sets belied the complex inter-relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of a place. Village folklore from South and Southeast Asia describes a symbiotic relationship between humans and tigers, where tigers assume roles of ancestors, gods, protectors, and even estranged brothers of man. The powerful figure of the were-tiger, or a person who can become tigers, and a tiger who can become a person and live in the village, points to the strong bond between man and animal. Contemporary versions of these tales often use the trope of the colonial census taker who asks about the number of tigers in a particular area. In myths such as that of Haru’r Pishima (Haru’s grand-aunt) in the Sunderbans and of Tsaricho in Nagaland, the villagers respond “sometimes 5, and sometimes 6”, alluding to the presence of the were-tiger in their midst, to the bafflement of the census taker. Producing confusion through untranslatable knowledge becomes a weapon of resistance against colonial control. Introducing the were-tiger into Coleman’s story, Ho Tzu Nyen transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the Coleman of the 19th Century morphs into today’s corporations exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this essay film. Ghosts and spirits can often move easily across lines drawn by man, and by transfiguring the agent of colonialism (Coleman), the tiger collapses the gap it attempts to create between man and nature. Neha Choksi (b. 1973 in New Jersey, lives and works in Mumbai and Los Angeles) Every Kind of Sun, 2017-2018 Installation activated with daily live performance involving 10 children and 10 adults Interaction from 1-2pm on February 2, 6:30-7:30pm daily Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Project 88 Neha Choksi’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Her latest salutation to the sun, Every Kind of Sun (2017-2018) debuts as a Solo Project, bringing to life her emotional piece of short fiction, which starts: Now and then…I have a repeating dream of me as a child coming home from school and sitting down to draw. And I draw suns. I use every crayon in the box. I draw every type of sun…A rainbow sun, a hollow sun, a scared sun, a new sun, a neat sun, a dirty sun, a magic sun, a spinning sun, a poem sun, a danger sun, a boss sun, an open sun, a tired sun, a breathing sun, a clapping sun, a mirror sun, a funny sun, a sour sun. Choksi invites ten Bangladeshi children to embody these dreams, drawing suns daily in the exhibition space, considering the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They consider the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities (such as a rock, the wind, or even a lizard). They also imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Venturing deeper into the fictive dream that inspires this work, the mother worries about the obsessive nature of her child’s drawings, and consults an ayurvedic doctor to interpret the meaning of these stacks of suns. Choksi invites a different adult professional each day to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature draws us back to our primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as we morph from atoms into beings and back. Omer Wasim (b. 1988 in Karachi lives and works in Karachi ) & Saira Sheikh (b. 1975 in Karachi, d. 2017 in Karachi) The Impossibility of Loving a Stone 2017 Drawings on paper Courtesy of the artists This work situates the makers amidst the changing peripheries of the ocean. Once porous, continuous, the coastline—carved over millions of years by the love of water for land and stone—is ravaged, pushed out, to make room for concrete. The mother—sea and adjoining land—and/or bearer is continuously mined for animate and inanimate beings. Hence, The Impossibility of Loving a Stone is indeed, or signals, the impossibility of loving the land, water, and other beings, hinting at colonial and neocolonial modes of knowledge construction and production, value, consumption, and bio-power. The desire to decipher, to fully understand, to grapple with the physicality of the stone is also informed by the need to get closer to the father—a geologist, a displaced body. His didactic words directed at deconstructing the physicality of the stone, allow the makers to traverse through boundaries, both permeable and impermeable, and make them visible on paper. And in this manifestation, with the original text next to its Bangla translation, the work comes full circle. A little part of the father returns home, albeit only as words and lines on paper for a short while. The father in this work is also a biographical reference, as Wasim’s father is a geologist and was born in Bangladesh. He lived there until November 1971—and has not been able to go back since. Ursula Biemann (b. 1955, Zurich; lives and works in Zurich) Deep Weather, 2013 Video Essay Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather (2013), mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans- the deltaic regions of Bangladesh that have soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. The attempt to conjure oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to massive displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the very insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them and naturally environmental catastrophes on one side of the earth impact the other.

ALL PROJECTS A Beast, A God, And A Line Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway, 30 Nov 2019 - 8 Mar 2020 Dhaka Art Summit 2018 exhibition, A beast, a god, and a line travels to Kunsthall Trondheim in Norway for its fifth iteration, featuring many works commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation as part of exhibition's the initial edition during DAS 2018. This exhibition was organised by the Samdani Art Foundation in collaboration with Para Site, Hong Kong and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw. Image Courtesy: Aage A. Mikalsen/ Kunsthall Trondheim

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 1 - Politics: The Most Architectural Thing To Do Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 1 - Politics: The Most Architectural Thing To Do “Architecture must inspire the people, for whom it is built, by creating spaces that incite the finer, more gracious aspects of the mind,” said Bangladeshi architect and urbanist Muzharul Islam (1923-2012). When asked why he entered politics, he responded, “because it was the most architectural thing to do.” This Bearing Point considered the entanglement of the history of architecture in South Asia with the quest to undo the effects of imperialist colonisation. Decolonial practice meant re-making the world; re-framing a new attitude to internationalism against the modes created by imperialism. Moving towards the de-hegemonisation and decolonisation of form, Rasheed Araeen’s monumental commission Rite/Right of Passage (2016-2018) used the familiar form of bamboo scaffolding, as well as that of temporary bamboo pavilions, used across South Asia for ritual and ceremonial purposes to destabilise an imperialist idiom of minimalism, with its focus on the machine-made, replicable form, and erasure of the traces of the presence of the human hand. A rite of passage can be described as a ceremony marking when an individual, or individuals, leave one group/society to enter another. Inspired by figures like Araeen, DAS sought to create a space for artists on the periphery of a Western-dominated art historical discourse, but also an India-dominated South Asian cultural discourse. Seher Shah and Randhir Singh’s Studies in Form (2017-2018) was a tribute to a history of internationalist thinking in architecture, while simultaneously imagining a blueprint for cultural hybridity in architecture through a landscape of cyanotypes. The post-independence moment saw the invitation of many pioneering architectural thinkers to the region. Franco-Hungarian architect and theorist Yona Friedman was first invited to South Asia by UNESCO in the 1980s to research into techniques of vernacular architecture, which could be used to respond emergencies where resources were limited. Friedman worked with existing craft practices, such as basket-making and the use of bamboo, to develop what would eventually become the Museum of Simple Technology (1982) in Madras (Chennai). Rebuilt in 2017 in Bangladesh, this project symbolised the spirit of self-reliance, flexibility, and freedom that allowed Friedman’s manifestos for mobile architecture to exist into perpetuity, infinitely translatable. Questioning the hierarchical position of the museum, and the role architecture plays in the creation of its hegemonic position, Dayanita Singh’s Pocket Museum and Shoebox Museum workshops created a different form of a museum without walls – as mobile entity, one in a permanent state of flux. Continuing the Tagorean tradition of syncretism between vernacular and western forms and de-colonial pedagogy, the Education Pavilion, designed by Samdani Architecture Award laureate Maksudul Karim, imagined a space for a nomadic art school at the centre of DAS which hosted free workshops on artistic and curatorial methodology. The Dhaka Art Summit hoped to foster modes of architectural thinking that are able to conceive of located, contextual forms of life, oriented against imperialism, that produce their own syncretism framework that reimagines both built and non-human environments. Artists Rasheed Araeen (b.1935 in Karachi, lives and works in London) Rite/Right of Passage, 2016-2018 Bamboo Construction Scaffolding Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the Artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Grosvenor Gallery A rite of passage can be described as a form of ceremony which occurs when an individual, or individuals, leave one group/society to enter another, a harbinger of impending change. Moving towards the decolonization of form, Rasheed Araeen’s monumental commission Rite/Right of Passage (2016-2018) rises from the entrance of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, adopting the familiar form of bamboo scaffolding as well temporary bamboo pavilions used across South Asia for ritual and ceremonial purposes to destabilise the American imperialist idiom of minimalism, with its focus on the machine-made, replicable form. Araeen’s sculptural passage into Dhaka Art Summit 2018 is through an improvised space of geometry, fundamental to an Islamic worldview which was developed from the 8th Century. The reference to these forms becomes a conceptual gesture for Araeen, acting in defiance of Western hegemony over regimes of vision, which he believes are enforced through the proliferation and circulation of living images. We invite visitors to embark on a rite of passage into a new mode of thinking with Bangladesh at the centre of its own existence, rather than that periphery of someone else’s, while also looking back at the philosophies that informed the long history of internationalism in the region. Yona Friedman (b. 1923 in Budapest, lives and works in Paris) Museum of Simple Technology, 1982/2018 Bamboo, Woven Baskets, Aluminium Foil Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from Institut Français . The post-independence moment saw the invitation of many pioneering architectural thinkers to the region, such as that of Le Corbusier to design the city of Chandigarh in 1950 and Muzharul Islam bringing his mentor Louis Kahn to Bangladesh to plan the Jatiya Sangsad Bhaban in 1962. Franco-Hungarian architect and theorist Yona Friedman was first invited to South Asia by UNESCO in the 1980s to research into techniques of vernacular architecture, which could be used to respond to situations of emergency where resources were limited. Friedman worked with existing craft practices within communities, such as basket-making and the use of bamboo scaffolding, to develop what would eventually become the Museum of Simple Technology (1982) in Madras (Chennai) which was awarded the Scroll of Honour for Habitat from the United Nations. Friedman was equally interested in the modes of transmission of architectural knowledge: he devised instead a sequential visual language to produce scores for the creation of his improvisatory architecture. The Museum of Simple Technology, rebuilt in 2017 in Bangladesh, speaks to the spirit of self-reliance, flexibility, and freedom that allow Friedman’s manifestos for mobile architecture to exist into perpetuity, infinitely translatable. Seher Shah (b. 1975 in Karachi, lives and works in New Delhi) & Randhir Singh (b. 1976 in New Delhi, lives and works in New Delhi) Studies in Form, 2017 Cyanotype monoprints on Arches Aquarelle paper Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artists, Samdani Art Foundation, and Nature Morte, New Delhi Presented here with additional support from Nature Morte, New Delhi Studies in Form is a new collaborative body of work between artist Seher Shah and photographer Randhir Singh exploring overlapping ideas in architecture, photography, drawing and printmaking. A series of cyanotype prints builds on these overlaps to further an ongoing interest into concepts of architectural scale and sculptural intent. Cyanotypes were one of the first photographic printmaking processes developed in the 19th century and a precursor to the blueprint which was an important reproduction method for architectural and engineering drawings well into the 20th century. Working with this printmaking process, Shah and Singh focus on five unique buildings by fragmenting their architectural components through photographic images. These buildings share a number of aesthetic qualities including heavy massing, the sculptural use of concrete and repetitive structural grids along with a visionary intent driven by a desire to break from the status quo. Grouped into chapters, the buildings in this ongoing series are: Akbar Bhawan (Shivnath Prasad, New Delhi. 1969) The Barbican Estate (Chamberlin Powell and Bon, London. 1976) Dentsu Head Office (Kenzo Tange, Tokyo. 1967) Brownfield Estate: Balfron Tower, Glenkerry House and Carradale House (Ernő Goldfinger, London. 1970) Dhaka University Library (Muzharul Islam, Dhaka. 1954) Alongside these five chapters, two smaller series of works, both reproduced as cyanotypes, offer varying perspectives. A series of drawings, titled Flatlands Blueprints, explores notions of incompleteness and uncertainty as a counterpoint to determined architectural expression. The sculptural forms and massing found in the photographs is further explored in a series of woodcut based prints, titled Hewn Blueprints. Working with architectural representational methods, such as the plan and elevation, these prints function between the precise formalism of a blueprint and the intuitive nature of drawing. Dayanita Singh (b. 1961 in New Delhi, lives and works in New Delhi ) Dayanita Singh’s art uses photography to reflect and expand on the ways in which we relate to photographic images. Her recent work, drawn from her extensive photographic oeuvre, is a series of mobile museums that allow her images to be endlessly edited, sequenced, archived and displayed. Stemming from Singh’s interest in the archive, the museums present her photographs as interconnected bodies of work that are replete with both poetic and narrative possibilities. Selected exhibitions include Suitcase Museum, Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai (2017); Museum of Chance Book Object, a solo project at the Dhaka Art Summit (2016); the 20th Sydney Biennale (2016); Go Away Closer, Für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2014). Singh has also authored several books including Zakir Hussain (1986), Myself, Mona Ahmed (2001), Go Away Closer (2007), Sent A Letter (2008).

ALL PROJECTS Ex-Ist Curated by Ambereen Karamant Ex-ist* is the experience of following an unconscious road map of one’s everyday life, enveloped in various images. Our gaze has to wander over the surface of the images, feeling its way, following the complex path of the image’s structure on one hand and the observer’s intention on the other. The journey of being charged with just glancing at an image casts a magic spell on our imagination - emotions are stirred that put us under a trance - and the nature of the still image transforms it from a single image into moving scenes in our minds. The ostensible function of an image is just to inform, the magic on the surface itself does not bring change, but it is the power inside us that influences us to imagine better. This practice can evoke both positive and negative experiences, and can have a mysterious quality of enchantment, through a series of episodic events of looking at an image that binds together vision, hearing and imagination. Our lives are filtered through these magical images; they act as screens between man and the world, allowing human beings to ‘ex-ist ’ . We are constantly living in the past which is documented on different electronic devices used in daily life, creating a visual assemblage of still and moving images; and the present is recorded and re-lived on screens. An abundance of these significant surfaces, images appearing on laptops, television, cellphones, and reflective surfaces helps us to construe the world “out there.” These are meant to render the world imaginable for us, by abstracting it, by reducing its four dimensional space-plus-time to a two-dimensional plane. The specific capacity to abstract planes from the space-time ‘out there’ and to re-project these abstractions back ‘out there’ might be called ‘imagination’. Aroosa Rana in her works explores this imaginative world of realities, which intentionally or unintentionally cross over readily on a regular basis in our daily lives. The participating artists have learnt to manipulate metal, plastic and glass (the camera) in a way that expresses their ideas: Amber Hammad searches her own identity in observing the other; Wardah Shabbir works on old black-andwhite European photographs, adorning them further with miniature style painting, creating a handmade visual statement which can be seen as miniatures of ‘posed reality’ of dispersed lives and preset perceptions. The picture may not be a whole reality, but there is always a presumption that something exists, or used to exist. Other artists have used images that have dispersed into our stagnant lives by consciously breaking through them, playing with the programmes of the camera, and entering the photographic universe by creating an image of a magic state of things whose symbol informs its receivers how to act in an improbable fashion. We are living in a world where we are surrounded by redundant images that create a standstill situation in our ever-moving lives. Sajjad Ahmed uses imagery from mundane life, digitally fabricating and dividing the assemblage into geometric blocks which appear as a one-shot photograph, while Muhammad Zeeshan studies the imagery of faith, myths and transcendental narratives, producing them in a laser scouring technique that examines the power and longevity of a particular class on imagery. These image-makers are asked to play against the camera and to place within the image something that is not in its programme. Farida Batool creates an illusion and three-dimensional depth in her lenticular print, photographing her walk in the city of Lahore that allows her to take a new walking partner each time the image is viewed. To understand a painting, the observer needs to understand the relation between the image and its transference by the painter. It is this process that needs to be decoded, and decoding process is the pass to the ‘world of magic’ one can experience through this exhibition. * Ex-ist is a term used by Vilem Flusser in his book ‘Towards a Philosophy of Photography,’ Reaktion Books Ltd, 1983, pp. 9. Artists Farida Batool Farida Batool (b. 1970) a Lahore-based , internationally educated researcher, educationalist and established visual artist is best known for her lenticular prints, a process that gives her work a sense of dynamism, intrigue and metamorphosis through the three dimensional depth and illusion created. Her works are politically charged and are a representation of the socio-political climate of Pakistan. In the work exhibited at the Dhaka Art Summit 2014 she narrates ‘the story by taking you on a tour of Lahore’ by photographing herself walking in different parts of the city, capturing the expressions of strangers around her, the ever changing setting of the city influenced by political posters, walk-chalkings of religious rallies, providing a commentary to the once rich cultured, historical city engulfed by the menace of corruption and terrorism. Sajjad Ahmed Sajjad Ahmed (b. 1982) is a Lahore-based visual artist, exploring concerns such as holding abstraction and representation within the same surface, by using imagery from mundane parts of life that resemble the composition of paintings from art history. For the exhibition Ex-ist, one of the prints is digitally fabricated by two realistic images overlapping each other, forming in totality a geometric abstraction. The coalescence of western and eastern images is found in his works; the exhibition includes a print of Nato soldiers dominated by Mughal miniature war painting, creating a visual assembly of time, space and events. The other exhibited work, with an aerial looking view of a flock of sheep and precisely divided geometric patterned fields, is an assemblage from various sources appearing as a one shot photograph bearing a moment of mundane looking activity. The work addresses the broader system of multiplicities of power, economics, globalisation and individual identities. Amber Hammad Amber Hammad (b. 1981) Lahore-born and educated is best known for her works that are a commentary of her sociocultural environment; this is brought into her work by appropriating images from art history and the personification of characters. The idea of self and the other, gender ideologies and dress, and their relationship to the formation of identity, have always been part of the visual content of her work. For the new body of works for Ex-ist she has chosen her contemporaries’ works instead of images from art ‘history’. The search for her own identity is deeply rooted in observing ‘the other’ which ironically can only be perceived in her new works through her bias and personal view. Aroosa Rana Aroosa Rana (b. 1981) is a Lahore-based artist and educator trained as a painter who is currently working in digital media, photography and video. Her art is a constant query about ‘who is a viewer and who is being viewed’ and the position of the viewer. Being surrounded by an abundance of still and moving images - captured by cameras, seen on television, laptops, cell phone screens as well as reflective surfaces of many other objects simulate visual experiences; the mirage of so many realities exists all at the same time. The exhibited works for Ex-ist document these realities which, intentionally or unintentionally, cross over readily and regularly in our daily lives. Wardah Shabbir Wardah Shabbir (b. 1987) Lahore-born and educated, absorbs and translates what she sees and experiences within her environment into her ‘own language’ mostly using a traditional miniature painting technique. Her works can be described as surreal; she successfully draws from her imagination to create fantastical beings that only exist in her mind. In her new works for Ex-ist, she has worked on the surfaces of 19th century European photographs, connecting them with miniatures being produced in the subcontinent simultaneously. These hand-made visual statements give a glimpse of the East’s perception of the West, an attempt at reconciling the orient-occident polarities that exist in our minds. Muhammad Zeeshan Muhammad Zeeshan (b. 1980) raised in Mirpurkhas, living in Karachi, worked as a cinema board painter before he was trained as a miniature painter in Lahore. Still developing his practice, he now employs found images and videos from popular culture (posters, cable TV and magazines) and iconic ‘high’ art. At times he rephotographs the images with different lenses to create various effects, drawing out physical and thematic aspects that interest him. For Ex-ist, he combines faith, myths and transcendental narratives with modern laser scouring techniques examining the power and longevity of a particular class of imagery.

ALL PROJECTS The Sunwise Turn Curated by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa The Sunwise Turn took Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point and meditated upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industrial, modern and region. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writings in the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the symposium sought to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western modernism. Bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy, the workshop is conceived as a series of propositions linking Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. The Sunwise Turn was a critical circumambulation around the philosopher, curator and historian. It picked up the phrase from an oft-overlooked bookshop, which became the centre of anarchist political thought in New York City just after the first World War, a place that Coomaraswamy not only came to be closely associated with, but evoked as “the storm of the world-flow”. Following are the papers presented at the symposium: Still Reading Coomaraswamy by Shabbir Hussain Mustafa Date: 9 February 2018, 10.20am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The Sunwise Turn took Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy’s seminal 1927 publication, A History of Indian and Indonesian Art as a starting point and meditated upon three political ideas that have marked the writing of art histories in the 20th century: industrial, modern and region. Constructed around Coomaraswamy’s writings in the backdrop of anti-colonial struggles of the inter-war years and his curatorial work at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the introductory remarks sought to examine the interventions his thoughts made into the self-consciousness of Western modernism. One methodological approach that this paper sought to engage with was that of an “alternative geography” that Coomaraswamy puts forwards in A History of Indian and Indonesian Art, where he seeks to understand cultural production in Asia not through the tried lenses of 'influence' and 'borrowing' but through the steady proliferation of 'cognates', i.e. the study of connections and lateral links between different sites. This paper also tracked some of the critical secondary literature that has emerged on Coomarswamy in the last three decades from the Indian subcontinent where much of his work remains canonised and contested from beyond the subcontinent, especially the United States of America where newer lines of inquiry are emerging on his thoughts and impact as a curator of Asian art. Overall, the remarks offered thoughts about the rationale in bringing together international voices from art, theory, history, and philosophy and how The Sunwise Turn linked Coomaraswamy to the sentiments of his time, but also to the gradual curve of their evolution today. Shabbir Hussain Mustafa curated SEA STATE featuring artist Charles Lim Yi Yong for the Singapore Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. He is Senior Curator at the National Gallery Singapore, where he currently heads the curatorial team overseeing Between Declarations and Dreams, a long-term exhibition that surveys art about the region from the 19th century to present day. From 2013-2015, he was lead curator of Siapa Nama Kamu? (in Malay, What is Your Name?), the Gallery’s other long-term exhibition that focuses on art in Singapore from the late 19th century onwards. He was formerly Curator (South-Southeast Asia) at the National University of Singapore Museum (NUS Museum), from 2007-2013, where his approach centred on deploying archival texts as ploys in engaging different modes of thinking and writing. It was at NUS Museum that he initiated the critically acclaimed accumulative platforms Camping and Tramping through The Colonial Archive: The Museum in Malaya (2011) and co-conceived the experimental space prep room | things that may or may not happen (2012-ongoing). Mustafa writes often and is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, Singapore Section. In 2017, he was curator in residence at the DAAD in Berlin and is currently developing two multimodal projects on the philosopher-curator Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and the artist-poet Latiff Mohidin. The Figure of the Artisan in Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art by Iftikhar Dadi Date: 9 February 2018, 11.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ananda Coomaraswamy resided in Ceylon between 1902-1907. Based on this experience, his first major book, Mediaeval Sinhalese Art was self-published with great care in a luxurious limited edition in 1908. It contained a great amount of original research carefully detailing technical and cultural information, which remains valuable today as an indispensable guide to traditional crafts of Kandy. Mediaeval Sinhalese Art engages with the problem of translating the legacy of William Morris and the British Arts and Crafts movement into the colonial context. This paper argued that the book is caught between a historical recreation of 'mediaeval' Kandy, and an anthropological and historical description of craft processes. Coomaraswamy’s paradoxical account is the result of a necessary 'mistranslation' of the 'mediaeval,' as carried over from industrial Britain into a colonial site. The consequences of this maneuver are both textually and photographically incorporated into Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, in which the artisanal figure oscillates between a dying anthropological specimen on the one hand, and an already deceased and thus a spectral figure on the other. Iftikhar Dadi is an associate professor in Cornell’s Department of History of Art. He is the author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) and the edited monograph Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). Dadi has co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). Curatorial projects include Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space at Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (2012) & Nasher Museum, Duke University (2013-14); and Unpacking Europe at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001-2002). Dadi serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals Archives of Asian Art; Bio-Scope: South Asian Screen Studies; and on the board Art Journal during 2007-2011. He is an advisor to the Hong Kong based organization Asia Art Archive, and director of The Institute for Comparative Modernities at Cornell University. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. As an artist, Iftikhar Dadi has collaborated with Elizabeth Dadi for twenty years. Their practice investigates popular media’s construction of memory, borders, and identity in contemporary globalization, and the productive capacities of urban informalities. Their work has been widely exhibited internationally, including the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil; Third Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane, Australia; Liverpool Biennial, Tate Liverpool; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Miami Art Museum; Queens Museum of Art, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Dhaka Art Summit; and the Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Oslo. Coomaraswamy to Ambedkar: Tracing the Vanished Horizons of the ‘Vernacular in the Contemporary' by Nancy Adajania Date: 9 February 2018, 11.40am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper traversed a genealogy of perspectives that bear strongly on the categories of the 'folk', 'tribal', 'rural', 'national' and 'modern', which have shaped our discourse around what constitutes the contemporary in postcolonial Indian cultural production. Certain tropes, figures, sites and themes recur in this discourse: the village, regarded variously as the site of native and pre-modern authenticity, pre-industrial backwardness or cultural wholeness; the figure of the artisan, variously conceived as an organic bearer of holistic cultural values, a poor relation to the metropolitan and academy-trained artist, or as a scripturally sanctioned producer of culturally significant icons; the 'folk' as the pre-national repository of collective consciousness that assured its members of identity and belonging in a locale; the 'tribal', either stigmatised as a rustic figure without access to cultural capital, championed as a subaltern victim deserving of developmental assistance, or idealised as a cultural subject rooted in the specificities of a local environment. Above all, it is 'authenticity' that persists as an anxiety in this discourse. As such, it becomes the ground of claims exerted by numerous forces, including the Hindu right wing, aggressive modernisers, resurrectionists of the crafts, and progressively oriented thinkers who wish to invest contemporary artists emerging from these backgrounds with agency. This paper revisited a series of debates staged across the 20th century in India, and which involved such participants as the cultural historians E B Havell and A K Coomaraswamy, the anthropologists G S Ghurye and Verrier Elwin, and the political thinkers M K Gandhi and B R Ambedkar. In doing so, it demonstrated that the debate over the 'vernacular in the contemporary' is both about an aesthetic self-assertion and a choice of artistic form, as well as a demand for the redistribution of social equity and the securing of participatory citizenship for India's subaltern communities. Nancy Adajania is a cultural theorist and curator based in Bombay. Her book, The Thirteenth Place: Positionality as Critique in the Art of Navjot Altaf (Guild Art Gallery, 2016), goes beyond the mandate of a conventional artist monograph to map the larger histories of the Leftist and feminist movements in India. She recently edited the transdisciplinary anthology Some things that only art can do: A Lexicon of Affective Knowledge (Raza Foundation, 2017). She was Joint Artistic Director of the 9th Gwangju Biennale in 2012, and has curated many exhibitions including: ‘No Parsi is an Island; A Curatorial Re-reading Across 150 Years’ (National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi, 2016); ‘Sights and Sounds: Global Film and Video’, Jewish Museum, New York (2015); and the hybrid exhibition-publication project ‘Sacred/Scared’ at Latitude 28/ TAKE on Art magazine, New Delhi (2014). Adajania taught the curatorial practice course at the Salzburg International Summer Academy of Fine Arts (2013/2014). She is the juror for Video/Film/New Media fellowship cycle of the Akademie Schloss Solitude (2015 - 2017). Locating Art in the Colonial Milieu by Swati Chattopadhyay Date: 9 February 2018, 12.20pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy A.K. Coomaraswamy remarked that nothing of artistic value had been produced in 19th century India, and that modern Indian architecture was “at its very lowest ebb.” Overcoming this degraded condition necessitated learning the forgotten 'art of living.' Where was this lost art of living to be found? In the art schools, in the village community, in colonial cities, or among the educated classes? In this paper, Chattopadhyay looked at the ethical implication of location/space in the work of Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose that engaged with and critiqued Coomaraswamy’s vision of cultural regeneration in everyday life. Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (Routledge, 2005), Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minnesota, 2012), the co-editor (with Jeremy White) of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (Taylor and Francis, 2014). She is currently completing two book projects: Geography of Small Spaces, and co-edited volume (with Jeremy White), Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (Routledge, 2017). She received a 2015-16 Guggenheim Fellowship for her research project, “Nature’s Infrastructure: British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains, 1760-1880.” She is a former Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. A.K. Coomaraswamy and Japan – A Tentative Overview by Shigemi Inaga Date: 9 February 2018, 1.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This paper gave an overview appreciation of A. K. Coomaraswamy in Japan. Kakuzo Okakura (also known as Tenshin Okakura), author of The Book of Tea (1906), might have had a chance to see Coomaraswamy in London. Okakura’s attempt at constructing Asian Art History as an idea has been accomplished by Coomaraswamy as curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. British rule of India may find a parallel in Japan’s colonial rule over Korea. In this context, Muneyoshi Yanagi, founder of the Popular Crafts Movement in Japan, is worth comparing with Coomaraswamy. Yanagi’s medievalism, inspired from his Korean experience, may shed new light on Coomaraswamy’s view of arts and crafts. Both Yanagi and Coomaraswamy have shown affinity with William Morris, though their encounter did not bring any fruitful outcome to the posterity. And yet, the friendship between Takumi Asagawa and Gurcharan Singh in their pursuit of ceramics in Korea and India cannot be overlooked. The merging of Oriental religious experience and aesthetics is another common feature between Yanagi and Coomaraswamy. Just like Coomaraswamy’s relation with Rene Guenon and Mircha Eliade, Yanagi was closely related to D.T. Suzuki. As an epilogue, and in token of Coomaraswamy’s legacy, this paper touched upon Fuku Akino, a Japanese woman painter who took special interest in decorations made by women in Kacchi, Gujarat. Shigemi Inaga is Professor at International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken), Kyoto, Japan. He was formerly Dean of the School of Cultural and Social Studies, Graduate University for Advanced Studies (Sokendai). He grew up in the city of Hiroshima and obtained a Ph.D. at l’Université Paris VII in 1988. Thereafter he was appointed Assistant Professor at the Department of Liberal Arts (1988-1990), later he served as Associate Professor at Mie University (1990-1997), before being appointed to his current position in 1997. His main publications include La Crépuscule de la peinture, Lutte posthume d’Édouard Manet (1997), The Orient of the Painting, from Orientalism to Japonisme (1999), The Painting on the Edge, Studies in Trans-national Asian Modernities (2013). Academic proceedings he has edited include Crossing Cultural Borders (1999), Traditional Japanese Arts and Crafts in the 21st Century (2005), Questioning Oriental Aesthetics and Thinking (2010). Shigemi Inaga is also co-editor of Vocabulaire de la spatialité japonaise (2013) and recipient of the Suntory Academic Award, Shibusawa-Claudel Prize, Ringa Award for the Promotion of Art Studies (all in 1997) as well as the Watsuji Tetsuro Culture Prize (2001). Banished to America - The Anarchist Turn by Alan Antliff Date: 9 February 2018, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In early 1917 Ananda Coomaraswamy arrived in New York from Britain under trying circumstances. Agitation for India’s independence from colonial rule, coupled with his outspoken opposition to Indian involvement in the British war effort, had led the authorities to regard him as a dangerous subversive, better expelled than tolerated. Upon arrival, however, he found a ready audience for his views among New York’s anarchists. Plunging into that milieu, Coomaraswamy would contribute a series of articles to the anarchist Modern School journal and codify his own variation of anarchism for an American audience in The Dance of Siva (1918). Coomarawamy’s involvement in, and impact o,n the movement in America was multifaceted; his concept of 'idealistic individualism' influenced the arts; his calls for 'post-industrial' social transformation resonated with critics of capitalism; his 'cosmopolitan' interpretation of Frederick Nietzsche’s philosophy captured the imagination of theorists; and his anti-colonial condemnation of World War One struck a strong chord among revolutionaries. This paper explored this pivotal moment in Coomarswamy’s career through a rich network of activists, artists, cultural centers and publications. Allan Antliff is Associate Professor in Art History at the University of Victoria, Canada. He has authored Joseph Beuys (2014); Anarchy and Art: From the Paris Commune to the fall of the Berlin Wall (2007); Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001), and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004). Allan has published on a wide range of topics, including radical pedagogy, post-structuralism, and aesthetics. Currently he serves as art editor for the UK-based journal Anarchist Studies and co-edits the interdisciplinary journal Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies. His writings have been translated into numerous languages and he is recognised as one the foremost authorities on the history of anarchism and the arts. Stella Bloch, Navigating a Radical Life of Art and Dance, East and West by Kim Croswell Date: 9 February 2018, 3.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Stella Bloch was an artist, dancer, and writer whose emergence on the New York art scene unfolded during tumultuous and exciting times during the later years of World War One. A self-taught artist and performer, Bloch initially drew her inspiration from the revolutionary dancer Isadora Duncan, but also sought out other performers to capture on the page. In 1917, she was attending a recital of the performing duo Roshanara and Ratan Devi where she met Ananda Coomaraswamy. That evening she showed him some of her drawings, which would mark a significant turning point in her life. Coomaraswamy soon became her mentor and her lover. Shortly after meeting Coomaraswamy Bloch made her acquaintanceship with Isadora Duncan’s six proteges, began practicing with them, and drew further studies of the dance from observation and from memory. In 1920, Coomaraswamy invited Bloch to join him on a museum purchasing trip to Japan, China, India, and Indonesia. There, Bloch was inspired by the performance traditions of Java and Bali, where she had an opportunity to closely study the art forms. Upon her return home to New York, she embarked on a new direction as a dancer, now performing in the manner of the Javanese dances she saw while on her journeys. This presentation of Stella Bloch offered an overview of Bloch’s art and dance, as well as an analysis of two texts by Bloch: “Intuitions” published in the Modern School Journal in 1919, and Dancing and the Drama, East and West, a booklet in which Bloch concluded Eastern dances to be superior to those in the West, for their value as cultural traditions rather than as ‘mere’ entertainment. Kim Croswell is an artist and writer currently living in Victoria, Canada. She has a history as a welded steel sculptor and a street puppetista. Her M.A. thesis, The Politics of Dance: Stella Bloch and the Ideal Drama, East and West, analyzed tensions between 'tradition' and 'modernity' in art and dance-drama by comparing the social-political function of the arts in South Asia with Euro-American dance practices. Currently, she is completing a Ph.D. in Leadership, Adult Education, and Community Studies at the University of Victoria, where she is investigating the value of educating for social change utilizing arts-based research practices. Ananda Coomaraswamy and Traditionalism by Mark Sedgwick Date: 9 February 2018, 4.20pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy As well as introducing the West to Asian art, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy also helped introduce the West to Asian religion, not as something remote and distinct from Western religion, but as an instance of that core religious truth that is "the common inheritance of all mankind." Coomaraswamy came to understand common, core religious truth in terms of what the Franco-Egyptian philosopher and metaphysician René Guénon (1886-1951) called “tradition,” itself a form of the “perennial philosophy” hat had interested Western thinkers and esotericists since the Renaissance. Coomaraswamy in turn changed the understandings of Guénon and of other “Traditionalists,” both by adding a certain academic rigor to their work and by convincing them to accept Buddhism as a valid expression of tradition, along Hindu Vedantism, Islamic Sufism, and Late Antique Neoplatonism. This paper placed Guénon’s Traditionalism within its wider context and examined both Traditionalism’s impact on Coomaraswamy and Coomaraswamy’s impact on Traditionalism. This included an abiding emphasis not only on Buddhism but also on traditional arts, reflected for example in the activities of the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts, founded in 2004 by Great Britain’s Prince of Wales. Mark Sedgwick is professor of Arab and Islamic Studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Before moving to Denmark, he studied at the universities of Oxford and Bergen and taught for many years at the American University in Cairo. He works on cultural and religious transfer between the Muslim world, the West, and global transnationalism. His Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century was first published in 2004, and his Western Sufism: From the Abbasids to the New Age was published in 2016. He also works on contemporary politics. Transformation of Art in Nature by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath Tagore by Samit Das Date: 10 February 2018, 10.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Many years ago, I was surprised at how two bearded Brahmin scholars, namely Ananda Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath Tagore, exchanged thoughts on art, nature and time. Since then, my curiosity has evolved towards the philosophies of these two great scholars. I studied at Santiniketan, the school founded by Rabindranath Tagore, where I tried to grasp his ideas about nature and education. Coomaraswamy entered my life much later. My paper explored the idea and philosophy of art and nature in the context of the pre-independence period. I inquired how the ‘modern’ came to be negotiated between these two figures while trying to unpack the historical context as discussed and perceived by Tagore and Coomaraswamy, as I feel their thoughts are relevant today. Coomaraswamy suggested that culture is a living heritage, not something that belongs in a museum. Coomaraswamy’s profound grasp of the twin ideals of harmony and truth in Indian art helped him understand the evolution of Indian culture as a crossing of spiritual tendencies. Yet, he knew very well that the fusion of religious and aesthetic experiences was not exclusively Indian. This resulted in a dialogue between the spiritual traditions of the East and the West. Indeed, Coomaraswamy did not reject Western culture, what he opposed was modern secularism and anti-traditionalism. On the other hand, Rabindranath could see himself as an integral part of nature and could dissolve his innermost self in the elements – earth, water, air. In this state, he no longer perceived the earth merely as earth, or something apart from himself. The flow of water merged with the stream of joy in his soul, and he wrote: “If I be the earth, if I be water If I be a twig, if I be fruits or flowers If I travelled the world and beyond with this One Life There would no cause for care Wherever I go I would find the infinite self in the embrace of the boundless.” Neither of these thinkers believed that art and nature belonged in a museum but attempted to associate the aesthetic closely with everyday life, in which nature too plays an integral part. My presentation also looked at the thoughts of Swami Vivekananda and Sister Nivedita and the way they resonated with art, because without their journey, Coomaraswamy and Rabindranath would not be complete. Samit Das was born in 1970 in Jamshedpur, India and specializes in painting, photography, interactive art works and artist’s books, often creating multi-sensory environments through art and architectural installations. He studied fine arts at Santiniketan Kala Bhavan and thereafter at Camberwell College of Arts. Samit has deep interest in archival and documentation tactics, often in search of newer visual vocabularies. Samit has held several solo exhibitions, most recently at TARQ and Clark House Initiative. One of his key projects has been to document the Tagore House Museum in Kolkata (1999-2001) and develop resonances with Tagore's concept of space in relation to Swami Vivekananda and Nandalal Bose. This resulted in the book Architecture of Santiniketan: Tagore’s Concepts of Space (2013). In 2016, he received the Prohelvetia Grant to research at The Material Archives in Sitterwerk. Most recently, he was awarded the Pernod Ricard Fellowship to work on post-independence Indian artists with Parisian links. Titled ‘Punashcha Parry’, the exhibition was held at Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2017). 'Who is this Coomaraswamy? Durai Singam's Life Work and the Impossibility of Not Writing' by Simon Soon Date: 10 February 2018, 11.20am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In what ways can the intellectual horizon of the diaspora be triangulated? How do they demonstrate a global connection that is not strictly formed by a movement from East to West? Can this multi-centre story complicate our commonplace understanding of what kind of 'worlding' did historiographical projects produce outside of the academia? This paper considers the life work of Ceylonese Malaysian Durai Raja Singam, who corresponded briefly with the esteemed scholar of Indian art history and curator at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, Ananda K. Cooramaswamy, in the late 1940s. Durai Raja Singam later became one of the most obsessive biographical compiler of Coorasmaswamy’s life and work. Towards this end, he had self-published some of the most idiosyncratic yet valuable books, often filled with memorabilia, photos, excerpts, newspaper clippings, graphs and charts that aimed at preserving for posterity the profile of Cooramaswamy as one of the most renown scholars on Indian art and spirituality, alongside recognition of Coomaraswamy's greatness as a scholar-saint for the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. In this paper I considered Durai Raja Singam’s building of an archive and self-publishing initiatives in relation to the spiritual use of print technology. Though premised on a language of devotion, the life work ultimately attempts to construct an intellectual memory through the use of allegory. In this sense, these publications circulate a form of intellectual, cultural and moral resistance amongst the Sri Lanka Tamil diaspora in a time of civil war as ethnic tensions between the Tamil and the Sinhalese communities were heightened following the independence of Sri Lanka. Simon Soon is a researcher and Senior Lecturer in the Visual Art Department of the Cultural Centre, University of Malaya. He completed a Ph.D. in Art History at the University of Sydney under an Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. His thesis ‘What is Left of Art?’ investigates the spatial-visual cultures at the intersection between left-leaning politicized art movements and the emergent modern publics of Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines from 1950s–1970s. His broader areas of interest include comparative modernities in the art, urban histories, history of photography and art historiography. He has written on various topics related to 20th century art across Asia and occasionally curates exhibitions, most recently Love Me in My Batik: Modern Batik Art from Malaysia and Beyond. He is also co-editor of Narratives of Malaysian Art Vol. 4. From 2015–16, he is a participant in the Power Institute’s “Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art,” funded by Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative. He is also an editorial member of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, and a team member at the Malaysia Design Archive, a repository on visual cultures from late 19th century to the present day. Crafting the Nation from Boston and Baroda by Priya Maholay-Jaradi Date: 10 February 2018, 12.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The crafts’ discourse serviced a complex web of imperialist, nationalist and capitalist agendas between the metropole, colony and indirectly-ruled British India from the 1820s to the first half of the twentieth century. The nationalist ideologue within A.K. Coomaraswamy’s writings on Indian art in general and The Indian Craftsman (1909) in particular, furthered two aims: one was to educate the colonial state on the different standards of Indian art; the second was to champion the cause of the disadvantaged artisan by furthering a protectionist discourse to preserve caste-based guild systems and their contexts of production in what was viewed as a coherent, timeless Asian tradition against the aesthetically failed experiments of a rapidly industrialising Britain. For all its emphasis on timelessness, authenticity and anti-industrialism, equally national-minded crusaders such as Maharaja Sayajirao III of Baroda steered the cause of the craftsman with a reformist slant. This paper problematised Coomaraswamy’s writings by juxtaposing Baroda’s pragmatic experiments which yielded an alternative paradigm of traditional crafts, technology and capital. Close archival reading of Baroda State’s polytechnics, workshops and loans to international exhibitions and firms, not only points to a modernising narrative of the crafts but also illuminates Baroda’s participation in a global system of production and taste-making. By underlining a series of ironies and paradoxes, this paper highlighted how protectionism and reform actually co-opted each other in the space of exhibition and publications. Quite contrary to the “Boston-based giant’s” idyllic picture of the craftsman as pre-modern, provincial Baroda demonstrated the craftsman’s readiness to unhinge caste-based categories and participate in new systems of technical education, workshop-style production and metropolitan capital and technologies. Despite their seemingly conflictual strains, in the end, both ideologues, theorised and displayed alternative standards of assessment of Indian (art), craft and design and its adaptive leverage to groom the uneducated European view. Priya Maholay-Jaradi is currently Convenor for Art History Minor, a collaboration between the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore and the National Gallery Singapore. She earned an MA in art history from School of Oriental and African Studies, London (2001); a PhD from the National University of Singapore (2012) and a post-doctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2013). Former Curator at the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, she has co-curated Portrait of a Community (National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai, 2002), Beauty in Asia (Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore, 2007), Tautology of Memory (NUS Museum, Singapore, 2012). Jaradi has authored Parsi Portraits from the Studio of Raja Ravi Varma, Mumbai: KR Cama Oriental Institute (2011); Baroda: A Cosmopolitan Provenance in Transition, Mumbai: Marg Foundation (2015); Fashioning a National Art, Oxford University Press (2016). Panel Discussions: Histories Panel Discussion led by Allan Antliff with panelists Shabbir Hussain Mustafa, Nancy Adajania, Swati Chattopadhyay and Shigemi Inaga Date: 9 February 2018, 5.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Panel Discussion led by Swati Chattopadhyay with panelists Samit Das, Simon Soon, and Priya Maholay Jaradi. Date: 10 February 2018, 12.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Cosmopolitanism, Panel Discussion led by Shigemi Inaga with panelists Allan Antliff, Kim Croswell, and Mark Sedgwick Date: 10 February 2018, 12.40pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy

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

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

ALL PROJECTS Risquons-Tout Wiels, 19 Sept 2020 – 1 Jan 2021 Shezad Dawood's research about Bangladeshi modern architecture through the archives and history of Muzharul Islam took a new form at Wiels, expanding upon his Samdani Art Foundation supported co-commissions with the Bagri Foundation and Jhaveri Contemporary at Frieze LIVE London 2019 (with Timothy Taylor Gallery) and Dhaka Art Summit 2020.

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

ALL PROJECTS Critical Writing Ensembles- Sovereign Words Curated by Katya García-Antón 2-10 February 2018 | Dhaka Art Summit The Office of Contemporary Art Norway returned to the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 with ‘Sovereign Words. Facing the Tempest of a Globalised Art History’: a platform of panel discussions, lecture performances, group debates and readings during DAS 2018. ‘Sovereign Words’ is a new iteration of the ‘Critical Writing Ensembles’, committed to the strengthening of critical writing within and across communities of the world. This edition was focused on writing by peers from Indigenous communities around the world contesting the Western canon. ‘Sovereign Words’ was conceived by OCA, and organised in partnership with DAS, Artspace Sydney and the Australia Council for the Arts. Keynote Lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Date: 9 February 2018, 6.00 – 7.15pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Dr Spivak’s presentation addressed the precarious situation of the Rohingya people in relation to Indigeneity in the world today, with a special emphasis on the languages of the Bengal region. Rohingya are stateless people who are Indigenous to nowhere, and who speak a different language from Bengali; Spivak connected their current situation to the history of the region. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the world’s foremost literary theorists. She is a University Professor at Colombia University and a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Spivak is best known for her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” and for her translation of, and introduction to, Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). In 2012, Spivak was awarded the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy as a critical theorist and educator speaking for the humanities against intellectual colonialism in the face of the globalised world. In 2013, she received the Padma Bhushan, the third highest civilian award given by the Republic of India. She has published a number of articles and books, including Readings (The University of Chicago Press, 2014); An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation (Harvard University Press, 2012); Other Asias (Blackwell Publishing, 2008); A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Harvard University Press, 1999); The Post-Colonial Critic – Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues (Routledge, 1990); and In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (Routledge, 1987). She will be the 2018 recipient of the Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award from the Modern Language Association of America. She has received eleven honourary doctorates and the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Government of France. Presentations: Máret Ánne Sara Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In the afterword to her debut book Ilmmiid gaskkas (In Between Worlds), Máret Ánne Sara writes “People say they don’t believe in such things anymore. Still, they don’t dare to deny it either.” Ilmmiid gaskkas explores Sami beliefs vis-à-vis contemporary reality through the voices of teenagers and their experience of Sami worlds. In her presentation, Sara read sections of her book that speak about the traditions of Sámi storytelling, the use of this philosophy in modern literature and in a political settings. She also made use of her artwork to showcase how she addresses the same topics through different artistic forms and approaches. Máret Ánne Sara is an artist whose work deals with political and social issues affecting the Indigenous Sámi people and their reindeer-herding communities. Sara has created posters, CD/LP covers, scene visuals and fabric prints for numerous Sámi artists, designers and institutions and has exhibited in the field of visual arts since 2003. Furthermore, she is an editor, journalist and published novelist. Her first book Ilmmiid gaskkas (In Between Worlds, 2013), was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Children’s and Young People’s Literature Prize in 2014. She is one of the founding members of the Dáiddadállu / Artists’ Collective Kautokeino. Sara’s ongoing project Pile o’Sápmi was showcased, amongst others, as part of the documenta 14 exhibition at the Neue Neue Galerie, Kassel 2017. Djon Mundine Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy The exhibition To Strike – To Leave My Mark (2017–18), celebrated the 30th anniversary of the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative through the work of its ten founding members: Michael Riley, Bronwyn Bancroft, Arone Meeks, Euphemia Bostock, Fiona Foley, Brenda L. Croft, Jeffrey Samuels, Tracey Moffatt, Avril Quaill and Fern Martins. The exhibition's curator, Djon Mundine, explained; “The group is interesting from several angles in that the group was across all genders, ages, and training –all had, or were attending, Western art courses or art schools, most members were women (7/10), almost half were refugees from Joh Bjelke-Peterson’s Queensland (4/10), the other half were from New South Wales (NSW), most weren’t teenagers anymore, and the two ‘gay’ men members had been ‘out’, proud and well known nearly all their lives. I really, first met several of this group who were in the Koori Art 84 exhibition at Sydney’s Artspace in 1984. I was living and working as an Art and Craft Advisor in central Arnhem Land then and had just curated an exhibition of the Art Gallery of NSW’s bark painting collection in 1983. Following the Koori Art 84 show, several artists started to correspond with me and wanted to visit. They were travelling to the Tiwi Islands as part of their Western style art courses to be exposed to ‘real’ Aboriginal art. About half of the ten visited and worked and formed relationships with Ramingining or Maningrida communities.” A number of the original ten members moved on to great achievements in terms of global art world recognition, as much as they left their mark in establishing the co-operative that has influenced and provided openings for so many Aboriginal artists: Tracey Moffatt presented a solo exhibition within the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2017. In this presentation, Mundine honoured both her and the rest of the ten for their struggle and triumph. Djon Mundine, OAM (Medal of the Order of Australia), is a curator, writer, artist and activist. He has held prominent curatorial positions in many national and international institutions, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane. In 1993 he received the OAM for service to the promotion and development of Aboriginal arts, crafts and culture. Between 2005 and 2006 he was Research Professor at The National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Osaka. He is a member of the Bandjalung people of northern New South Wales, and currently an independent curator of contemporary Indigenous art. Léuli Eshraghi Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In Léuli Eshraghi’s words, “This piece reflected my many journeys in recent years connected with relations across the coasts and inland mountains rimming the Great Ocean. A third of our planet’s surface, home to millions of Indigenous and migrant beings, including plants, fish, animals, birds, spirits and humans: this is a continent rendered invisible in dominating Euro-American military and economic endeavours." Eshraghi aimed to approach diasporic yearning for homelands / waters / intergenerational trauma and mourning for repeated genocides / epistemicides / ecocides / linguicides, alongside the development of contemporary Indigenous sovereignties as part of responsible belonging, caring and visiting. This presentation brought sensual lessons and languages to the fore in understanding how curating / artmaking / writing by Indigenous peoples of the Great Ocean are practices of leadership through service, and healing through cleansing. Léuli Māzyār Luna’i Eshrāghi (Sāmoan, Persian, German, Chinese ancestries) is an uninvited guest in unceded Kulin Nation territory, and a PhD candidate at Monash University Art Design Architecture (MADA). Hailing from the Sāmoan villages of āpia, Leulumoega, Si’umu, and Salelologa, his work centres on ceremonial-political renewal, languages, embodied futures, and diasporic and local indigeneities. He has undertaken residencies at Para Site, Hong Kong; the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity; the University of British Columbia, Okanagan; and the Tautai Pacific Arts Trust, Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland in English). He serves on the board of the Aboriginal Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires Autochtones; the editorial advisories for Broadsheet, Tardanyangga (Adelaide in English) and un Magazine in Narrm (Melbourne in English); and the Pacific Advisory Group for the Melbourne Museum. Megan Cope Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation of Cope's artistic practice, focused on the transition from mapping practices to her most recent sculptural work. Looking into mapping practices as colonial tools, and mining industries which both alter Indigenous landscapes and their economic, relational and ecological systems, she discussed the impact of Australia’s colonial settlers on the artist’s traditional Quandamooka country and offered a snapshot of an industry that has relied heavily on both Aboriginal aqua-cultural systems and labour in the region. This presentation explored the role that contemporary art has in the promotion of Indigenous culture and provided legal documents to challenge the notion of the hegemonic state. Megan Cope is a Quandamooka woman from North Stradbroke Island in Southeast Queensland. Her site-specific sculptural installations, video work and paintings explore the myths and methods of colonisation. Her diverse practice also investigates issues relating to identity, the environment, and mapping practices. Most recently Cope’s large scale sculptural installations have been curated into three major national survey exhibitions: The National, Art Gallery of New South Wales (2017); Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial, National Gallery of Australia Parkes (2017); and Sovereignty at ACCA (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Melbourne (2016). Her work has been exhibited widely, in exhibitions at Next Wave Festival Screen Space, Melbourne (2014); Incinerator Gallery, Sydney (2013); My Country: I Still Call Australia Home, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane (2013); Para Site, Hong Kong (2013); Tony Albert Wellington City Gallery, New Zealand (2010); and the ARC Biennial, Brisbane (2009). In 2014 she was selected for the Victorian Aboriginal Art Award, in 2011 she won the Churchie National Emerging Art Prize, and in 2009 was a finalist for the Clayton Utz Travelling Scholarship and won the Sunshine Coast Art Prize. Her work is present in many national public art collections, including: Australian Parliament House, Canberra; Mater Hospital, Brisbane; Gold Coast University Hospital, Gold Coast; Redlands Art Gallery, Redlands; and the NEWflames Anne Gamble Myer Collection, Brisbane. Santosh Tripura Session Date: 5 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Indigenous people’s survival and existence are associated with the lands where they have lived since time immemorial. The importance of lands is the very survival of Indigenous cultures and their articulated ideas of communal stewardship over land, as well as their deeply felt spiritual and emotional nexus with the Earth and its fruits. Hence the claiming of land rights means ensuring the security of land ownership which guarantees the economic viability and development of such communities. Land is the central issue when discussing Indigenous peoples’ empowerment as it is the basis for the enjoyment of their cultural rights and ensures their basic rights while respecting their distinct identity. The Indigenous notion of the ownership and management of land is based on the customary laws which are considered more or less a collective property. This presentation offered a brief glimpse into the status of Indigenous peoples’ land rights in Bangladesh. Sontosh Bikash Tripura is a scholar and researcher, working in the field of development studies. He studied Anthropology for his BSS Hons and MSS degrees at the Dhaka University. He also received a M.Phil. in Indigenous Studies from UiT (Arctic University of Norway), Tromsø, under the Norad fellowship programme. His M.Phil. thesis is titled Blaming Jhum, Denying Jhumia: Challenges of the shifting cultivators land rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Between August 2009 and February 2017 he worked for UNDP (United Nations Development Programme). Belonging to the Tripura Indigenous community in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, his research interests explore Indigenous peoples’ rights, land rights and development. Irene Snarby Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy For many Sámi people, duodji (commonly translated as Sámi handicraft, the word was used extensively to define the community’s creative activities) is one of the strongest indicators of Sámi identity. Their relationship with their traditions signify deep collective values and norms. Intangible knowledge is an important part of both the process and the experience of duodji. Consequently, Sámi traditions and the practice of duodji are subject to varying degrees of knowledge and understanding. Iver Jåks stressed the importance of duodji as not being exclusively associated with memories, keepsakes and the past, and was concerned with giving his art relevant content as contemporary art. In this presentation, Snarby elaborated on how a deep and specific notion of duodji and ancient Sámi thinking incorporated with avant-garde art practices informs Iver Jåks’s three-dimensional works. Through his practice, which was closely associated with a broad, holistic understanding of duodji, he gave a voice to Sámi methods, traditions and experiences in an arena that had previously rejected Sámi art as ethnology rather than art. Irene Snarby is a Doctoral Research Fellow in Art History at SARP: The Sámi Art Research Project at UiT (Arctic University of Norway), where she is carrying out research into the works of the artist Iver Jåks for her PhD thesis. Snarby has worked as a curator within the Art Department of Riddo Duottar Museat (Sámi Museums of Western Finnmark) in Kárášjohka (Karasjok in Norwegian) and has been a member of the Sámi Parliament’s Art Acquisitions Committee for Contemporary Art. For the last 20-years, she has written essays, given lectures and been an editor for several publications of Sámi art. Snarby has also been an advisor on important art projects such as the International Indigenous Art exhibition Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, and There is no, at the Sámi Art Museum at Northern Norwegian Art Museum. Daniel Browning Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Decolonisation is at least intellectually and aesthetically possible, even though the power structures of colonialism persist. However, colonialism transmutes; it shifts and rebalances, forever finding a way to maintain its power and hegemony. Post-colonial thinking, the process of re-imagination, is evident in public artworks in Australia and the impetus to challenge historical amnesia is being driven at a superficial level by arts funding bodies, with philanthropic money from urban development sectors and such resources. This presentation attempted to outline the ways in which public memory is being challenged to rethink the colonial meta-narratives: that of discovery, the terra nullius and White Australia. Daniel Browning is an Aboriginal journalist, radio broadcaster, documentary maker, sound artist and writer. Currently, he produces and presents Awaye!, the Indigenous art and culture programme on ABC RN, a specialist radio network of Australia’s national broadcaster. Awaye! surveys contemporary Indigenous cultural practice across the arts spectrum. A visual arts graduate, Daniel is also a widely-published freelance arts writer. He is a former guest co-editor of Artlink Indigenous, a publication produced regularly since 1990 by Artlink Magazine, a quarterly Australian contemporary arts journal. He is the curator of Blak Box, an immersive sound installation in the newly-redeveloped precinct on the western foreshore of Sydney Harbour. He studied English and Art History at the University of Queensland before graduating with a degree in visual arts from the Queensland University of Technology. Daniel is a descendant of the Bundjalung and Kullilli peoples of far Northern New South Wales and Southwestern Queensland. Santosh Kumar Das Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy From a personal perspective, Santosh Kumar Das’s presentation gave insight into his practice: “I focused mainly on the freedom that being a speaker of the folk or Indigenous language of Madhubani has given me as an artist and as a human being. It is like when an idea comes to me, in the mind it has a certain language, a certain form. I watch it for some time carefully and realise it is in the language or form which I have known so intimately all my life. It is always in the folk language (read visually as ‘form’) of my place. At times, the source of the idea may be quite diverse and strange. Maybe a film poster or maybe the figure of a bridge seen from a distance. But ultimately as it begins to solidify, it starts to take on the form of Madhubani. It is like a mother tongue; speaking in it comes more naturally to a child. We don't think much while speaking in our mother tongues. We feel and express. There is no strain and risk. It is the same for me as painting in the style of Madhubani. It is the language of my thought. And the form itself has been a rewarding experience for me. All these years, I have just tried to be honest to the medium, i.e., that of the lines drawn with a pen nib on paper.” Santosh Kumar Das is an artist from a village in the Madhubani region. His work draws inspiration from the traditional folk language of Madhubani, using various iconological figures and symbols, and creating a unique artistic language. Kumar Das has a BA Fine Arts in Painting from the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. During the 1980s he conducted a research project on folksongs of Mithila, together with the ethnomusicologist Naomi Owen from the USA, and assisted Dr. Raymond Lee Owens on a film about Mithila painters. In 2017 Tara Books published Kumar Das’ Black: An Artist’s Tribute, a memoir of his growth into art and a tribute to his personal muses that transformed him into an artist. Between 2003 – 2008 he served as the First Director of the Mithila Art Institute in Madhubani. In 2005 he travelled around several universities in the USA where he gave a number of artist talks. His work has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, and is included in the collections of the Oberlin College and Conservatory, Oberlin, and the Ethnic Arts Foundation, Berkeley, among others. Kimberley Moulton Session Date: 6 February 2018, 11.00am - 4.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In this presentation, Kimberley Moulton looked at the past seven years of her research into ancestral belongings in international and national collections. Through imagery, journal entries and critical engagement with the history of collecting and institutions, in Moulton’s own words this presentation “highlighted the personal effect working within these spaces has had on me as a Yorta Yorta woman and looked at how the intersection of First Peoples’ contemporary art practice and cultural material work can decentre the white paradigm.” This presentation also reflected on the legacy of Captain James Cook’s maiden voyage to trace the path of Venus and the mission of Terra Australis 250 years ago, which resulted in the very first cultural objects to be stolen from Australia. Kimberley Moulton is a Yorta-Yorta woman with a curatorial and writing practice which has engaged with many museums and contemporary art spaces. She is Senior Curator of South Eastern Aboriginal Collections for Museums Victoria at Melbourne Museum, focusing on the intersection of contemporary First Peoples art and cultural material in museums. Prior to this, Moulton was Project Officer and Curator at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre, Melbourne Museum between 2009 and 2015, and Assistant Curator for First Peoples exhibition at Melbourne Museum in 2013. Alongside her institutional curatorial roles, she has independently curated: where the water moves, where it rests: the art of Djambawa Marawili, Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, Charlottesville (2015); State of The Nation, Counihan Gallery, Brunswick (2016); A Call From The West: The Continuing Legacy of Mr William Cooper, Footscray Community Arts Centre (2016). She was also co-curator for Artbank Sydney Social Day 2016, RECENTRE: sisters, City Of Melbourne Gallery (2017); and co-curator with Liz Nowell of Next Matriarch, ACE Open Adelaide and TARNANTHI Festival (2017). Kimberley is an alumna of the National Gallery of Australia’s Wesfarmers Indigenous Arts Leadership Programme 2010, British Council ACCELERATE programme (2013), National Gallery of Australia International Curatorial Fellow at Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Collection (2015), and a Victorian Curatorial Representative for the First Nations Exchange Programme at the Venice Biennale and First Nations Exchange Canada (2017). Kimberley’s current project is lead curator on Mandela: My Life at Melbourne Museum and guest curator of the Gertrude Contemporary, Octopus, exhibition (2018). Hannah Donnelly Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Hannah Donnelly asked: “How would our art histories be archived in Indigenous Futures?” This presentation explored future tense methodologies used to interview artists about the imagined collective representation of their work. Hannah Donnelly (Wiradjuri) is a writer and artist. Renowned for her ‘cli-fi’, she works with text, sound and installation exploring Indigenous futures and responses to climate trauma. Hannah is the creator of Sovereign Trax, a record label promoting First Nations music through energising decolonisation conversations and community in music. She is currently working as an associate producer at Next Wave, a biennial festival based in Melbourne, Australia, which promotes and showcases the work of young and emerging artists. Donnelly recently held the solo exhibition Long Water, at the Yirramboi Festival, Arts House, North Melbourne (2017). Her recent group exhibitions include: The Future Leaks Out, Liveworks, Sydney (2017); Future Eaters, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne (2017); Feedback Loop, Blak Dot Gallery, Melbourne (2017); and State of the Nation, Counihan Gallery, Melbourne (2016). Kabita Chakma Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation traced the emergence of Indigenous cinema in Bangladesh, particularly in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT), positing it into the framework of the global Indigenous cinema movement: known as the Fourth Cinema. Chakma linked CHT cinema with a wider discussion of representation of Indigenous subjects as ‘others’ in the mainstream media, and discussed critical questions raised against this representation by intellectuals of the Global North and the Global South, highlighting what might be considered sovereignty in relation to CHT’s Indigenous Cinema. Kabita Chakma comes from the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. Chakma is the largest indigenous group in Bangladesh. She belongs to the clan of Raange goza, Bhudo guttthi on her maternal side and Borbo goza, Phoraa daagi on her paternal side. Kabita is a freelance researcher, architect, writer and occasional guest lecturer and teacher at the School of Design, part of the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). She is a Coordinator of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Indigenous Jumma Association Australia (CHTIJAA), and a Community Adviser to BODHI (Benevolent Organisation for Development, Health and Insight) Australia, a charity organisation. Kabita’s interests include the history, culture, art and architecture of disadvantaged communities, particularly Indigenous peoples of the CHT, Bangladesh, and environmental sustainability. Prashanta Tripura Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Is there, or should there be, something called ‘Indigenous art’? Or is ethnicity a necessary or sufficient criterion for a practitioner of art to be categorised as an ‘Indigenous artist’? Tripura explains: “I wanted to explore such questions by talking about how I have dealt with them personally, such as when I once found myself resisting being labelled as an ‘Indigenous poet’, though I have also written a lot in support of the contested category of ‘Indigenous peoples’ in Bangladesh.” In this context, this presentation focused on how Tripura came to be interested in, and started writing about the identities and struggles of the self-identified ‘Indigenous peoples’ of Bangladesh: “My personal account was meant to serve as a window to the larger questions that concern academics, artists and activists alike in the contemporary world, e.g. how can art and literature help the Indigenous peoples assert and establish their identities and rights?” Prashanta Tripura is an academic anthropologist who currently teaches part-time at the Department of Economics and Social Sciences at BRAC University, Dhaka. Previously he was an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, where he taught for ten years before switching over to the development sector, where he worked for over a decade. He received his academic training in the USA, majoring in anthropology at Brandeis University, Waltham, and went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his MA. He has contributed many articles – in both Bangla and English – that have been published in academic journals as well as magazines and dailies. A collection of his essays – in Bangla – titled Bohujatir Bangladesh (Bangladesh of Many Peoples) was published in 2015. He also expresses himself in Kokborok, his first language, which is spoken by the Tripuras, an Indigenous people of Bangladesh and India (he is from the Bangladesh side, but was born and brought up in the Khagrachari hill district of the Chittagong Hill Tracts region). He is also the principal author of a research monograph which has been published as a book in Bangla, titled Shifting Cultivation in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. Biung Ismahasan Session Date: 7 February 2018, 2.30pm - 7.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation explored the ethno-aesthetic nature of Taiwanese Indigenous performative arts and the works of Truku performance artist and activist Don Don Houmwm, Rukai sculptor Eleng Luluan, and Bunun curator Biung Ismahasan (Truku, Rukai and Bunun belong to three of Taiwan’s sixteen Indigenous groups). They are examined as a contribution to the discourse of Indigenous and cultural sovereignty. This presentation examined their performative approaches, practices and curatorial strategies relevant to Indigenous artistic practices, particularly those pertinent to cultural loss, recovery and activation. It firstly questioned how Houmwm performs Indigeneity, sorrow and solitude, exposing hybrid identities; then demonstrated how Luluan uses her Indigenous minimalist installations to explore multiple social discrepancies between intrinsic and extrinsic performativity amid material objects and soft sculptures; it finally showcased how Biung Ismahasan himself structures a performative encounter of Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art by curating an off-site and culturally resonant space. Biung Ismahasan is a curator and researcher, currently working on his PhD in Curating at the University of Essex’s Centre for Curatorial Studies. Belonging to the Bunun Nation of Taiwanese Indigenous groups, he is awarded PULIMA Art Award (the first national art award dedicated to Indigenous contemporary art), and exhibited at Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts in Southern Taiwan. His research involves issues of contemporary Indigenous curatorial practice and aesthetics, focusing on the curation of Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art. His current research emphasises the issues of participation, performativity and the historiography of Indigenous curation and exhibition design. His most notable curatorial projects includes, Anti-Alcoholism: an Indigenous performative encounter 2014-2018, an international performance art exchange of Indigenous artists from Taiwan. David Garneau Session Date: 8 February 2018, 5.30pm - 7.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy ‘Indigenous’ is not just a term that attempts to corral thousands of local identities but one that announces a new way of being Native. Indigenous is a collective identity in formation that includes, but goes beyond, traditional identities. While it is the form through which local communities are mostly known, championed, and advanced, it can also be co-opted and distorted by dominant, non-Native cultures and discourses. How do Indigenous writers, thinkers, artists, curators, activists and other cultural workers negotiate the complex identity called Indigenous? In this presentation, David Garneau offered suggestions that have arisen from his own experience and recent projects. David Garneau (Métis) is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina. His practice includes painting, curation, and critical writing. With Kathleen Ash Milby, he recently co-curated Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound, at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York; Moving Forward, Never Forgetting, with Michelle LaVallee: an exhibition concerning the legacies of Indian Residential Schools, other forms of aggressive assimilation, and (re)conciliation, at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina; and With Secrecy and Despatch with Tess Allas: an international exhibition about the massacres of Indigenous people and memorialisation, for the Campbelltown Art Centre, Sydney. Garneau has given numerous talks in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and throughout Canada. His work is part of a five-year SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) funded curatorial research project, ‘Creative Conciliation’, and he is working on a commissioned public art project in Edmonton, Alberta. His paintings can be found in numerous public and private collections. Ánde Somby Honouring National Sami Day Session Date: 8 February 2018, 5.30pm - 7.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ánde Somby is a writer, yoiker (yoik is the Sámi way of singing or chanting; and the musical modus of yoiks differs from what is commonly known in Euro-American music) and Associate Professor of Law at UiT (Arctic University of Norway) where he specialises in Indigenous rights law. Somby was born in 1958 in Buolbmat in the Deatnu (Tana in Norwegian) municipality on the Norwegian side of Sápmi. He is the former Chair of the Centre for Sámi Studies at UiT and former leader of Sámiid Nuoraid Searvi (Sámi Youth Association in Kárášjohka, 1976–78). Somby has performed extensively as a yoiker since 1976, and has occasionally also lectured on the subject. His writings include: “How to recruit Samis to higher education and to research, items on an agenda of actions” (Sin neste som seg selv: Ole D. Mjøs 60 år 8. mars 1999, ed. by Arthur Arntzen, Jens-Ivar Nergård, and Øyvind Norderval, 1999) and “The Legal situation of The Nordic Indigenous Peoples” (paper presented at the 35th Nordic Jurist Assembly, 1999) and “Yoik and the Theory of Knowledge” (Kunnskap og utvikling, ed. by MagnusHaavelud, 1995).

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.