ALL PROJECTS TONDRA: Phase One A project commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, uniting ten Bangladeshi artists with international curators and mentors to create score-based works that explore the space between dreams and reality, unfolding across global partner institutions in 2026. The meaning of the word TONDRA in Bangla can be described as a state of existence where reality and dreams collide; a lucid dream that captivates the soul. TONDRA is also a common female name in Bangladesh, which became popular during the mid 1990s-2000s for a character named Tondra in a novel by the Bangladeshi author Humayun Ahmed. For many the name tondra carries a wave of nostalgia -tied to love, longing and cultural imagination shaped by Bengali literature and film. Our story of TONDRA emerged from heartbreak expressed by a young visitor at DAS 2023, who wrote messages for a woman named TONDRA on the walls of our exhibition such as “Everyone is here, but you are missing from my life”. His writing style ranged from graffiti to poetry, referring to his Tondra as ‘a cloudy day’ and other beautiful metaphors that connected his deepest personal feelings for his beloved to the stories and films of Humayun Ahmed, Zahir Raihan and lyricist Ukil Munsi. We see this visitor as an emerging artist who found the need to express the feelings inside of him in a public cultural forum, transforming the delirious state of heartbreak into something others can connect to, as we do with some of our favourite love songs. TONDRA is a journey through the landscapes of emotions, where the line between what we feel, what we see and what we imagine becomes blurry. In July 2024, Bangladesh entered a state of radical transformation, catalyzed by a historic student uprising that ended a 15-year autocracy and opened up space for imagining new futures. Many from the generation of “the student who loved Tondra” were active in this revolution, freeing Bangladesh from one reality and currently living in a place where a new reality has yet to land. One can describe life in Bangladesh as a state of Tondra, a liminal space where Bangladeshis are dreaming about what kind of future they wish to have. TONDRA is a project by Samdani Art Foundation supporting ten Bangladeshi artists to work with a global curatorial team to develop score-based projects, which like a dream, are not limited to a particular time and place to exist. As Bangladesh approaches democratic elections in 2026, the Samdani Art Foundation is rethinking how best to support artists in this moment of transition. With international mobility more limited than when the Dhaka Art Summit began in 2012, our focus is shifting from producing exhibitions to empowering artists to develop works that connect their ideas with the world. TONDRA will be the heart of a reimagined Dhaka Art Summit, led by Tondra’s curatorial team , which will reopen to visitors after Bangladesh has elected its future leadership—contributing to a forward-thinking civil society through art and culture. Dreams might also be the last frontier of freedom. These works of art will circulate as part of a global dream about what is possible when ideas can move even when bodies lie still, as they do when we dream. In dreams and in art, the wildest things are possible. Samdani Art Foundation’s Artistic Director Diana Campbell, as Chief Curator, and a team of guest curators will be working with the selected ten artists for a year to develop their projects. The guest curators are: Nora Razian (Deputy Director, Arts, Art Jameel, Dubai), Lucas Morin (Senior Curator, Art Jameel, Dubai), Indranjan Banerjee (Curator, Art Jameel, Dubai), (Chief Curator, WEILS, Brussels), Hiuwai Chu (Head of Exhibitions and Curator, MACBA, Barcelona), Mohamed Almusibli (Director, Kunsthalle Basel), and Christina Li (Independent Curator based in the Netherlands), with the curatorial support from Ruxmini Choudhury (Curator, Samdani Art Foundation) and Swilin Haque (Curatorial Assistant). TONDRA’s first artist dreamers in residence are Ashfika Rahman, Joydeb Roaja, Kamruzzaman Shadhin, Laisul Hoque, Munem Wasif, Promiti Hossain, Reetu Sattar, Samsul Alam Helal, Sumi Anjuman, and Yasmin Jahan Nupur. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Humayun Ahmed (13 November 1948 – 19 July 2012) was one of the most influential and popular writers, filmmakers, dramatists, and educators in contemporary Bangladesh. Zahir Raihan (19 August 1935 – disappeared 30 January 1972) was a prominent Bangladeshi novelist, writer, journalist, and filmmaker. Ukil Munsi (11 June 1885-12 December 1978) was a Bengali Baul singer, songwriter, and lyricist, known especially for his “birohi” (longing / separation) songs.

ALL PROJECTS Rewind Curated by Amara Antilla, Beth Citron, Diana Campbell and Sabih Ahmed Rewind was built on the Dhaka Art Summit’s mandate as a research platform by assembling works from public and private collections in Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and the United States that chart the diverse manifestations of abstraction in pre-1980s South Asia. Rewind featured more than 90 works by 13 artists associated with Bangladesh (Safiuddin Ahmed, Rashid Choudhury, S.M. Sultan), Burma (Germaine Krull, Bagyi Aung Soe), India (Monika Correa, Nalini Malani, Akbar Padamsee, Krishna Reddy, Arpita Singh), Pakistan (Zahoor ul Akhlaq, Anwar Jalal Shemza), and Sri Lanka (Lionel Wendt). The exhibition explored how three generations of artists have responded to shifting cultural, political, and social contexts with experiments in abstraction, or the relationship between representation and abstraction—even when some of their primary practices are or were firmly rooted in figuration. The majority of the works on view were produced between the late 1940s and the late 1970s, a period that witnessed the Independence of India and Pakistan from Britain and the devastating Partition of the subcontinent, followed by several major conflicts including the 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh. Transnational modernism provided fertile ground for many artists in the face of unstable borders. From the pared-down calligraphic scrawls of Aung Soe, Shemza, and Singh, and the distillations of natural and human form undertaken by Reddy, Ahmed, Sultan, and Krull to the experiments with light, pattern, and flatness of Choudhury, Malani, Padamsee, the works in Rewind embody some of the ways in which modernism has played out within and beyond the region. For some of these artists, abstraction signified participation in an increasingly international, even global, modernism that developed in the wake of World War II. Gestural abstraction, most often related to expressionist movements, enabled artists to adapt or even discard figural iconography. Others turned to folk motifs linked with traditional practices and materials to explore how modernism and national independence might coexist. Yet others, inspired by achievements such as Le Corbusier’s design for the city of Chandigarh, turned to geometry and the visual logic of industrialisation or, in defiance of a universal rhetoric of progress and modernisation, revived elements of the pre-modern. Acknowledging the focusing of, art and ideas on cosmopolitan sites in South Asia; the growth of exchange between Europe, Latin America, and the United States; and the concomitant rise of cultural and political isolationism, Rewind seeks to create new affinities between artists and artworks that transcend temporal and national affiliation, while dislodging the West as the central point of reference. The Bangladesh, Burma, East and West Bengal, Ceylon, India, Pakistan, and East Pakistan, where these works were made have solidified into new geopolitical formations with some of the tightest and longest borders in the world today. These realities have prevented many of the works shown from travelling freely; in many cases, they are being shown publicly here for the first time. The exhibition offered conceptual and formal perspectives that challenged the way we define South Asian abstraction and the larger history of mid-century modernism. Safiuddin Ahmed and Nalini Malani Rewind, installation view, works by Safiuddin Ahmed, courtesy of Ahmed Nazir Collection and Nalini Malani, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Rewind, installation view, works by Safiuddin Ahmed, courtesy of Ahmed Nazir Collection and Nalini Malani, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Nalini Malani Rewind, installation view, works by Nalini Malani, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Saffiudin Ahmed Rewind, installation view, works by Safiuddin Ahmed courtesy of Ahmed Nazir Collection. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Krishna Reddi Rewind, installation view, works by Krishna Reddy, courtesy of the artist and the Samdani Art Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Monika Correa Rewind, installation view, works by Monika Correa, courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Rashid Choudhury Rewind, installation view, works by Rashid Choudhury, courtesy of the Bangladesh National Museum, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Anwar Hossain Manju Collection, Dhaka and Farooq Sohban Collection, Dhaka. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Anwar Jalal Shemza Rewind, installation view, works by Anwar Jalal Shemza, courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and the Estate of Anwar Jalal Shemza, Eastbourne, UK. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Zahoor Ul Akhlan Rewind, installation view, works by Zahoor ul Akhlaq, courtesy of the Inayat Ismail Collection, Karachi, the Estate of Zahoor Ul Akhlaq, Lahore and Toronto, Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and Pakistan High Commission, Dhaka. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter S.M. Sultan Rewind, installation view, works by S. M. Sultan, courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation Collection, the Bangladesh National Museum, Farooq Sohban Collection and Enam A. Chaudhury Collection, Dhaka. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Lionel Wendt Rewind, installation view, works by Lionel Wendt, courtesy of Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai and Mahijit Singh and Nalin Tomar, New Delhi. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Germaine Krull Rewind, installation view, works by Germaine Krull, courtesy of The Museum of Folkwang, Essen, Germany and the Germaine Krull Estate. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Bagyi Aung Soe Rewind, installation view, works by Bagyi Aung Soe, courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation Collection, private collection Singapore and Bagyi Lynn Wunna collection, Yangon. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface Rewind Installation views Rewind, installation view. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface

ALL PROJECTS Below the Levels Where Differences Appear Curated by Vali Mahlouji The first iteration of an ongoing transnationally roving amphitheatre, as part of A Utopian Stage, artists, performers and filmmakers were inclusively incorporated within a collective arena of experimentation echoing the progressive pitch of the Festival of Arts, Shiraz-Persepolis (1967-77), and the highs and lows of universalist utopian ideals. Amidst resurgent forces of cultural and political reactionism around the world, below the levels… proclaimed a radical site of collective exchange. During the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, below the levels… drew upon the music, theatre, dance and politics that informed the utopian aspirations and contradictions of the original festival, with contributions by Hassan Khan, Goshka Macuga with Vali Mahlouji, Silas Riener (Merce Cunningham Trust), Reetu Sattar, Yasmin Jahan Nupur with Santal performers and Lalon Baul singers. GOSHKA MACUGA AND VALI MAHLOUJI | LIKE WATER ON HOT ROCKS (2018) An inaugural performative collaboration in which a procession of known characters from the Festival of Arts, Shiraz – Persepolis protested and occupied. HASSAN KHAN | PURITY (2013) What is it that is so comforting about the narrator’s voice? And is conflict always predicated on some sort of agreement? What does the hammer strike when it does? And why do I hate this word yet choose to speak of it? REETU SATTAR | HARANO SUR (LOST TUNE) Performance with 30 musicians and 30 harmoniumsHow do we encapsulate time via our shared past? This performance engaged visitors with the sound people grew up within South Asia, simultaneously recognising the receding path into so-called ‘modernity.’ This project was co-commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation and Liverpool Biennial, in association with Archaeology of the Final Decade and the New North and South. SILAS RIENER | FIELD DANCES (1963), BY MERCE CUNNINGHAM Silas Riener engaged with the local audience and leading them through Merce Cunningham’s Field Dances workshop, culminating in a site-specific performance. Inspired by children’s carefree, unstructured play, Field Dances was first performed in 1963 to music by John Cage with costumes designed by Robert Rauschenberg. YASMIN JAHAN NUPUR AND SANTAL PERFORMERS Collaborating with the Indigenous Santal people and Lalon Baul singers, Yasmin Jahan Nupur’s performative dance and video series broke down language barriers through a process of body movements and participatory dances, telling stories about life, spirituality, and culture, to create a bridge between city and local dialects, cultures and lost languages.

ALL PROJECTS The Space Between - Rana Begum At The Parasol Unit Foundation For Contemporary Art 13th June - 18th September 2016| The Parasol Unit Foundation For Contemporary Art, London, UK Dhaka Art Summit 2014 Solo Project artist Rana Begum had her first solo show, supported by the Samdani Art Foundation at The Parasol Unit.

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

ALL PROJECTS A BEAST, A GOD, AND A LINE | PARA SITE HONG KONG CURATED BY COSMIN COSTINAS 17 MARCH - 20 MAY 2018 | PARA SITE, HONG KONG Dhaka Art Summit 2018 exhibition, A beast, a god, and a line travelled to Para Site in Hong Kong for its second 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. Installation image of A beast, a god, and a line at Para Site, Hong Kong. Photo credit: Eddie Lam, Image Art Studio.

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 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=AEDqz-T8BHk 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=-DLhTEPoy-I 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=EfevtOVp5v4 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=Y2qsI7wiFGY 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=fr4Z-N_OEAs 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=IlDLbk2jpaY 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=UPiAr8246SM 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=ka6ToIwK4Cc 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=GuZ3cmBoBC0 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=fqce2fIxV3g 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). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=eVKvkCXzFII 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). https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=Tk7OlKNpKcA 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=_4_vBaKjePI 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=rKrVdFfsYO0 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=vrmr0rGUkNY 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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLpE5N73vV6zAtoGiUHDQedOjac6kYSjw9&v=5oKt45NNJPw 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 Crafting Togetherness Workshop Srihatta Crafting Togetherness fosters collaboration between artisans and architecture students through workshops and knowledge exchanges, guided by Rizvi Hassan. Taking place at Srihatta and supported by the British Council's Climate Futures: South Asia Grant 2025, the project focuses on sustainable building practices and explores Sylhet’s indigenous techniques using bamboo, mud, and leaves. These exchanges will shape the design and construction of a biodegradable, zero-waste cultural space. After completion, the space will continue to host workshops and performances on sustainability, inspiring eco-friendly practices in the arts and strengthening community connections through shared learning. Crafting Togetherness is shaped by a team that connects artistic vision with deep local knowledge. Diana Campbell leads the artistic direction, while Ruxmini Choudhury guides the curatorial direction, with support from our curatorial assistant, Swilin Haque. Architect Rizvi Hassan, whose long-standing work with natural materials anchors the project, leads the architectural research and design. Our administrative and on-site backbone comes from Mohammad Sazzad Hossain, along with the Srihatta team who ensure everything functions smoothly on the ground. The workshop and design process is led by Rizvi Hassan, supported by a dedicated group of young architects and designers: Minhajul Abedin, Zareen Sharif, Ruhan Al Faruk, and Fazlul Haque, whose hands-on engagement with artisans and students is vital to the project’s collaborative approach.

ALL PROJECTS Uronto Artist Community Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum 2020 URONTO Artist Community came up with their first VR project in 2019. This project was supported by the Annual Grant of Artist-Led Initiatives Forum from Samdani Art Foundation. Uronto always works out of Dhaka in Rural and remote areas in abandoned heritage buildings. They interact with the local community of those rural areas and they do their open studio there only. The City based audience cannot always visit their exchange program or the open studio for many practical reasons connected to their busy urban life. So Uronto came up with this alternative Idea to create accessibility to their work and sites for a wide range of audience. The VR project was produced around the 8th and 9th Episode of Uronto Residential Art Exchange Program activities. That took place in Naogaon at Dubolhati Palace by November 2019. The VR consists of all the site-responsive works by almost 30 artists coming from different countries together to explore the lost narratives of the fascinating site. It gives the audience a unique opportunity to be present at the site virtually, have a 360 experience of a 200 years old fragile and abandoned palace. Also allows them to see how artistic expressions are merged into the space with a local interaction in and around them.

ALL PROJECTS Nobody Told Me There Would be Days Like These Curated by Mustafa Zaman Assistant Curator: Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury The 1980s was a decade during which art played an increasingly social-political role in Dhaka’s art scene. This defiant point of departure from ‘surface painting’, which saw its emergence in the 1960s, can be seen as a tectonic shift since this strain of artmaking continues to inform the discourses and debates across the cultural horizon in Bangladesh to this day. Artists sought detours and vocalised antagonistic positions primarily to dislodge art from its elite academic perch. Dehumanisation and storytelling became twin conduits for artists to formulate new strategies to articulate dissent. In artist-curated exhibitions, access to ideas and information on art and artists was supplied with the intention to edify the public. This ‘critical turn’ left its influence on many disciplines – it effected a change in how artists, poets, as well as theatre and film activists perceived the relationship between their works and society. Thus, the 1980s witnessed a determined detour through reframing of the ‘social’ and invocation of the ‘political’. New idioms were born out of the resistance movements waged against the longest-ruling military dictatorship in Bangladesh – the regime of the recently deceased general H.M. Ershad that lasted from 1981 to 1990. The dictator’s unscrupulous move to align with those who collaborated with the Pakistani army during the Liberation War in 1971, the pseudo-Islamic garb that came with the emerging brand of populism he was responsible for, the opening up of the economy to global market forces, and rising corruption coupled with political repression provided the backdrop for the subsequent resistance movements leading to the final overthrow of the dictator in 1990. To parse the developments of the 1980s, one can say that in the arts, it was the decade of radicalisation as interrogation won over introspection and action over passivity. It was an era of political resistance as well as cultural re-organisation. In the arts, this critical turn resulted out of the conviction that to topple the dictator one must spread antagonism in all spheres of life. After the fall of the dictator in 1990 – the fate of ‘democracy’ in Bangladesh became entangled with issues of corruption and flawed elections, and art and activism of the 1980s were carried over to subsequent decades to be reframed and re-organised to bear on various different goals. As DAS mounts its fifth edition, in which a synergy of the newest samples of South Asian art provide fodder for the public eye/mind, ‘Nobody Told Me There Would be Days Like These’ maps the history of groups that laid the ground for art and theatre, film and literary movements in the 1980s with the hope that we do not collectively renege on our promises made in favour of life. The exhibition’s title is a nod to a song from the same era by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Visual Arts In the visual arts, Quamrul Hassan (1921–1988) set a visual language into motion that sought to critique the emerging ruling elite of the early 1970s. Otherwise well-known for his pleasant depiction of rural life, Hassan, who belonged to the first generation of artists in East Bengal when Pakistan was formed, tackled what may be termed as the gentrification of urban society and the concomitant loss of social values. His political art, which articulated a critical voice by crowding his canvas with symbolic motifs where the dominant minority or alienated elite is represented in both human and animal form, was the first attempt in Bangladeshi art to instrumentalise ‘social fact’. Later in the 1980s, a group of young artists calling themselves ‘Shomoy’ emerged fresh out of art institutions. The group’s politically cast art once again brought storytelling to centre stage and sought to redefine narrative painting in South Asia. Shomoy, which literally translates to time, sought political salvation, hoping to end the military misrule which coloured life in Bangladesh in the 1980s. Their creative acts percolated into a critical analysis of their time, often reflecting the prevailing mass discontent, seeking to restore the ethos of the 1971 Liberation War. The members of Shomoy were Dhali Al Mamoon (b. 1958), Wakilur Rahman (b. 1961), Habibur Rahman (b. 1958), Shishir Bhattacharjee (b. 1960), Nisar Hossain (b. 1960), Dilara Begum Jolly (b. 1960), Aziz Sharafi (b. 1956), Saidul Haque Juise (b. 1960), Ali Morshed Noton (b. 1958), Lala Rukh Selim (b. 1963), Tawfiqur Rahman (b. 1959). Shomoy works lay at the intersection of many fields of emerging discourses and forms. The most active Shomoy members, including Shishir Bhattacharjee, Dilara Begum Jolly, Nisar Hossain, Dhali Al Mamun, and Wakilur Rahman also transported their creative energy to activities which lay beyond the scope of their respective disciplines. To understand the drift, one must take into account how the idea of dissent began to redefine cultural production of the era. The most active protagonists of theatre, cinema and poetry began to respond to the unfolding political events and the marketisation of the economy. Shomoy artists worked simultaneously through various themes and trajectories, utilising the power latent in little-noticed popular culture of South Asia. They devised their own brand of social realism – a way to attend to the ‘here and now.’ The works of Shishir Bhattacharjee, Wakilur Rahman, and Nisar Hossain unveiled the decadence and dehumanisation of the era while throwing up sharp critiques of the dictatorial and imperial political scheme. Both Dilara Begum Jolly and Dhali Al Mamoon’s figurative motifs began to break down into mangled entities referring to what was rotting in society, while Nisar Hossain’s insect-like predators were set against a backdrop teeming with references to rickshaw paintings. The belief in secularism and democracy was of prime importance to the generation of artists that came to maturity in the 1980s. Pitted against the destructive power unleashed through subsequent regimes, their conviction to create a secular social sphere fuelled their creativity, although the zeal for the ‘real’ assumed many different dimensions in theatre, cinema and even in poetry. If secular logic was the common thread to all this, artist’s voices often turned sarcastic while talking back to power. Architecture Networks of knowledge also kept people in sync with one another although they were working from within their respective disciplines. Chetana, a platform that grew out of a study circle that was presided over by late architect Muzharul Islam (1923–2012), often hosted their programmes in the presence of poets and literary personalities as part of the group’s early advocacy for interdisciplinarity. The late poets Shamsur Rahman (1929–2006) and Belal Chowdhury (1938–2018) and late professor and educationist Kabir Chowdhury (1923–2011) attended Chetana’s inauguration event. The most important element of their activism was that they attempted to bring Bangladesh’s architecture and heritage into the conversation about modern architecture. Chetana saw the union of like-minded architects: Raziul Hassan, Nazmul Latif, Syed Azaz Rasul, Uttam Kumar Saha, Nahas Khalil, then architects working in different fields including teaching at the architecture department of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, BUET, comprised the group. Saiful Haq (b. 1958), and Kazi Khaleed Ashraf (b. 1959), were members from the time they were fourth year students at BUET and are now established architects and researchers who continue to build on the ethos of Chetana. Theatre Resistance took the most effective and potent form in the arena of the theatre. The most influential iconic theatre and literary personality Selim Al Deen (1949–2008), who initiated Dhaka Theatre, was also responsible for Gram Theatre (launched in 1983) and worked to extend urban theatre to the rural hinterland. Nasiruddin Yousuff Bacchu, an actor-director, played an important role in the creolisation of modern theatre by way of absorbing Al Deen’s ideals and activism. By the late 1980s, more than 150 theatre troupes were developed in villages across the country under Gram Theatre, although most ceased to be active over the following years. These troupes lent momentum to a country-wide cultural regeneration and in spreading awareness among the masses about the slow erosion of society and politics under military rule. As a playwright and teacher, Selim Al Deen introduced what many refer to as ‘Epic Realism.’ His extensive study on Bengali popular theatre genre called ‘jatra’ coupled with his attempt in retracing the Hindu-Buddhist performance heritage led to his renowned drama ‘Kittankhola’, which is still considered a milestone in the modern theatre history in Bangladesh. Dhaka Theatre and Aranyak among other theatrical groups were instrumental in staging dramas that either harked back to the theme of the Liberation War and the repression of the Pakistan junta, or aimed to expose the anomalies of military dictatorship. Some groups even attempted to poke fun at the then military ruler. Theatrical performances served as a means to educate and open the eyes of the masses. ‘Payer Awaj Pawa Jay’ is a case in point. First staged by Dhaka Theatre in 1976, it was written by the late writer and poet Syed Shamsul Haq (1935– 2016) and was themed around the atrocities of the Pakistan army and the abuse of power by the village elite in the name of religion. Film The Short Film Movement added a decisive layer to the cultural fabric woven since the early 1980s. Morshedul Islam and Tareque Masud debuted as young filmmakers in the 1980s and were part of a greater movement centred on the Bangladesh Short Film Forum. Formed in 1986 by a group of young independent filmmakers and activists inspired and mentored by Alamgir Kabir (1938–1989), the platform was created after years of activism and campaigning for creative and aesthetically pleasing cinema by collectives called film societies. When the forum came into being it featured some of the most notable young Bangladeshi film makers among its members at the time, including Morshedul Islam (b. 1957), Tanvir Mokammel (b. 1955), late Tareque Masud (1956–2011), Enayet Karim Babul, Tareq Shahriar, Abu Sayeed (b. 1962), Shameem Akhtar, Manjare Hasin Murad, Yasmine Kabir, Nurul Alam Atique, Zahidur Rahim Anjan, N. Rashed Chowdhury, and Akram Khan. The Forum, by way of a biennial and non-competitive International Short and Independent Film Festival, kept hope alive for independent filmmaking, beyond injecting the cultural scene with much-needed optimism in favour of cultural activism. The first festival was held in 1988 and was entirely dedicated to short films. The forum is still active and it continues to organise seminars and workshops on films and film festivals all over Bangladesh, in addition to holding film shows and film-related events at their permanent venue at Bangladesh Film Centre in Shahbagh, Dhaka. Tareque Masud and Morshedul Islam played a decisive role in the development of Bangladeshi film, they made films that at once drew critical appreciation and public attention, the former for his documentaries and latter for his short-length films. ‘Adam Surat’, a documentary on the legendary artist S. M. Sultan by Tareque Masud, and ‘Chaka’ by Morshedul Islam were among the most influential films of the era, while Abu Sayeed, an early enthusiast of short-length film, later took to making feature films. Chaka carried over the idea of the ‘witness’, a theme that runs across many of his works, from the 1980s to the new millennium while Sayeed attempted to bring ‘Kittonkhola’, a popular stage play written by Selim Al Deen, to the silver screen in the year 2000. Literature The Little Mag movement was the veritable crucible of talents where writers and poets willing to break the mainstream circuit gathered. Working as a platform for literary aspirants who were willing to look beyond already explored territories, the alternative publications that gave it its shape also created space for artists and filmmakers to work in alignment with the cultural political goals of the time. Among many who played a catalytic role, poet Sajjad Sharif (b. 1963) was particularly active in threading the literary world with the world of art and film as he was behind some specific moments of convergence between members of the Shomoy group and the filmmaker Tareque Masud. Sajjad Sharif’s contributions can be traced to the early editions of the ‘Anindya’ (meaning one who lived eternally without blemish) and ‘Gandeeb’, or ‘Gandiva’ (the bow of Arjuna, the central character of the Mahabharata). Little magazines were selfpublished zines; the writers and poets involved took turns in generating funds for printing. Sometimes they were sponsored by literary enthusiasts. They were cheap and contained works of prose and poetry by emerging poets and writers. Although not directly involved with any little magazine, Ahmed Sofa (1943–2001) inspired many in the alternative literary circuit with his outspoken nature and intellectual honesty, including Salimullah Khan (b. 1958). While Sofa was stationed at Aziz Market, a place where these magazines were conceived and sold, he nurtured a new breed of young poets and writers. These were the literary creatives of the time who fought against conventional patterns of thought that then pervaded mainstream culture. Among the little magazines that worked as nodal points through which artists, writers and poets made their presence heard, Anindya saw its beginnings in 1985 and Gandeeb had its start in 1987. Together they worked as an alternative platform where the possibility of cross-fertilisation first began to appear. The editors of the two of the most influential and long lasting alternative magazines (both are in circulation now) were respectively Habib Wahid (b. 1962) and Tapan Barua (b. 1956). Of the emerging renegades who helped develop their reputation, some became part of the mainstream at a later date.

ALL PROJECTS Purposeful Goods Curated by Teresa Albor Social enterprises are businesses with a social or environmental purpose that prioritize transformative social impact-- entrepreneurship with a mission to change society. Socially engaged practice can involve social enterprise and a social enterprise can be considered process-based, socially engaged art. Bangladesh has played a revolutionary role in social enterprise. After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, new ways of working collectively emerged including more socially viable and sustainable business strategies and organizational forms. Two internationally known examples are BRAC, the largest collaborative network of social business in the world, and the Grameen Bank, which paved the way for decades of micro credit initiatives. Purposeful Goods featured social enterprises, collectives and not-for-profit groups associated with DAS 2023, their stories and their products, most of which were for sale along with our book sellers (who operate with low/no margins). 100% of all purchases go directly to the groups represented. We are grateful to the Bangladesh Apparel Exchange for their in-kind support. AFIELD The impetus behind creating AFIELD (founded 2014) was the fundamental belief that artists are essential to the fabric of society, as thinkers, visionaries and changemakers. Despite changing the world in profound ways, there is not a support structure or advocacy platform for this kind of work. By providing resources and support, AFIELD supports them to lead transformational change in their communities and society as a whole. AFIELD was initially conceived as a fellowship for social initiatives for arts and culture. It is now a transnational network of practitioners from the creative, literary, scientific, academic and legal fields from 28 different countries . Every year, AFIELD provides resources to artists in the form of discussions, mutual aid, incubation and community building, to help members deepen and strengthen their work in their particular contexts. As a nonprofit organization AFIELD receives grants and donations from individuals and international foundations, starting with a pluri-annual grant of a private foundation and now expanding, thanks to a group of engaged collectors and philanthropists who support the program on an annual basis. AFIELD wouldn’t exist without the volunteer work of many members and advisors involved at different levels of the project. Resources are used to give fellowships to artists-led initiatives, to increase the visibility of their projects, to create educational programs in the form of events and workshops (online and irl). Every challenge is greeted as an invitation to align practices within AFIELD with their ethics: they are currently exploring horizontality in the decision making in their network, specifically regarding distribution of funds and programming, trying to find the right balance between consensus and efficiency, to advance projects and represent the voices of their communities. Finding a shared language to communicate and fostering cross-cultural understanding is critical to their work, as members are located all over the world. Out of practicality, AFIELD defaults to English as the lingua franca. This perpetuates the hegemony of the English language in arts practice. For this reason, it’s a necessity to develop common language groups, so people within the AFIELD network can meet and organize in ways relevant to their cultural and language contexts. AFIELD would also like to explore more opportunities for in-person gatherings. There’s a consistent schedule of online meetings (called “Kitchen Calls”) for their network, one-on-one calls, study opportunities, and regular contact by email. After meeting some of their members for the first time at documenta fifteen in 2022, they became aware more physical presence with their community was needed. Their biggest challenge is securing funding and ensuring accessibility for members of the network. Afield.org Artpro Artpro (founded 2016) is a group of artists who want to explore various forms of making art to engage a diverse public. Aware of the impact art can have for social good, one of Artpro’s first initiatives was to mobilize artists to help marginalized segments of Dhaka’s society through workshops and art projects hosted within their local communities. Keen to expand the impact of their work outside of Dhaka, in mid-2017, the group began conducting Weekend Art Works, a series of daylong public art projects which takes a group of selected contemporary artists to work within a rural village community outside of Dhaka for one day. The group continues to organize public knowledge-sharing workshops; these have included ceramics, image manipulation, performance art, and video art. The group also organizes festivals. Each year since 2017 they’ve hosted the Artpro Winter Performance Festival (AWPF) and, starting in 2019, the Artpro International Video Art Festival. Artpro does not focus on selling products made by communities, instead, they showcase the work when there is an opportunity to do so. This gives the people who have made the work a bit of cash and validation. In most cases Artpro splits the proceeds with the maker, using their share to cover their own costs for materials and running workshops. Sales are modest, what is more important to Artpro is the process. artpro.com.bd FRIENDSHIP FRIENDSHIP (founded 2002) began working with vulnerable communities in the most hard-to-reach, climate impacted areas (chars – riverine islands) of northern Bangladesh providing healthcare services via a floating hospital. It soon became clear that to make a lasting impact on people’s lives a holistic approach was needed to address other issues including education, human rights, and poverty. Among other initiatives, handicraft training as a response to the lack of economic opportunities soon followed. Establishing prefabricated training centers locally, women are taught traditional handloom weaving techniques, dyeing - using natural ingredients, and hand embroidery. Because the chars where they live are highly vulnerable to sudden and forceful flooding as well as erosion the centers can be moved in two days, reconstructed, and up and running in a new location in a month. Although the primary goal was and is to provide skills through which women develop their own social identities, enabling them to stand for their rights, it soon became clear the beautiful eco-friendly products made by the communities had real market potential. Following some small corporate orders, FRIENDSHIP moved beyond simply providing training, and established a brand, FRIENDSHIP Colours of the Chars. Women are paid by the piece, giving them total flexibility; FRIENDSHIP sets the retail price, using any profits to provide further services. There are many challenges and costs, the training and production centers are remote, making it difficult to get raw materials in and finished products out. But unlike a commercial enterprise, a social enterprise does not aim to maximize profits… more important are its social goals. In 2019, FRIENDSHIP opened its first retail outlet in Dhaka. Today there are two in Dhaka and a shop in Luxembourg, run under separate management, partly staffed by volunteers. 350 women work on a regular basis and over 1700 have been trained. There are eight rural production centers, and in Dhaka, a separate management team including specialists in sales and marketing, production, design, accounts and so on. Annual fashion shows draw large crowds. Having their own ‘bricks and mortar’ outlets provides a steady revenue flow and steady work for producers, which means they maintain their manual dexterity. FRIENDSHIP is committed to ethical practice and fair trade, fair wages, and creating healthy and women-friendly working environments, ethical sourcing of raw material, and overall responsible product offerings. friendship.ngo JAAGO Foundation JAGGO Foundation (founded 2007) is committed to eliminating poverty and social inequality through providing free, quality education to underprivileged children. Influenced by the new development paradigm, which puts people before things, JAAGO Foundation follows a participatory approach in every sphere of its work. For example, volunteer and youth groups are established to empower young people and others living in the communities where they work. Besides education, JAAGO also runs climate change, governance and women’s projects. Starting with 17 students and a chalkboard; today 4500 children are in education and 50,000 youth leaders operate in 64 districts of Bangladesh. JAAGO’s innovative Digital Schooling Program, brings quality education to remote areas and others with access challenges. Its alternative learning opportunities project reflects the special needs of children and adolescents. JAAGO also provides nutrition, hygiene and health programs for their students, families and the wider community. The products on sale as part of Purposeful Goods were made specifically for the Dhaka Art Summit by JAAGO students. Taking every possible opportunity to empower the children and young people they work with, JAAGO also worked with curator Sean Anderson as contributors to ‘To Enter the Sky’, another DAS 2023 show. jaago.com.bd Jothashilpa Jothashilpa (founded 2016) is a center for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language. The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society which emerges from everyday art. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. The concept of social enterprise is central to their vision. It was not easy at first. The team had no business experience and without any investment planning they spent over a million taka in six months and had no products or sales. They had the mistaken idea that if they could somehow work with artisans to produce products someone would buy them. They now say that having a marketing strategy is critically important along with the reality of understanding operational basics. Working with and supporting over five hundred artists, artisans, and craftspeople from across Bangladesh, the group makes sure their collaborators are paid fairly and acknowledged for their work. They maintain a showroom and small shop where work made by collaborating artists can be purchased, as well as an online shop. They believe that every artist produces something that is a product, and can be sold, whether it’s an expensive painting or a notebook. They believe that we are all just doing our work as producers and they have no problem leaning into the reality of the capitalist world if it means continuing traditions. Jothashilpa wants to be a bridge between the contemporary and traditional, urban and rural, grassroots and elite and the processes of creating and selling. They believe one can be an artist and an entrepreneur. jothashilpa.com Re/DRESS Re/DRESS (founded 2021) is a response to the fact that less than 1% of the world’s textile waste is recycled into new clothing. It’s an environmental non-profit disguised as a responsible fashion brand. It has three goals: to promote cotton recycling in Bangladesh, to make sure textiles made from a high percentage of recycled fibers are readily available at factories for buyers, and to promote responsible fashion to the Bangladeshi consumer. The first task was to work with factories to develop lightweight textiles made of 100% recycled fiber. This led to developing a clothing collection made from these textiles. The clothes are retailed in both Dhaka and London and all profits support responsible fashion. In collaboration with Reverse Resources the project tracks and makes information available about cotton recycling in Bangladesh. Since the project started there’s been considerable investment in this industry, and Bangladesh is poised to become a global hub for cotton recycling. Along the way, Re/DRESS has faced many challenges: how to make a robust new textile from recycled fiber, working within the limited availability of very busy research/development departments of factories and having an all-volunteer staff. In addition, Re/DRESS’s commitment to making technical successes (i.e., the ‘formula’ for new responsible textiles) freely accessible goes against the competitive nature of the textile/garment industry. This is further complicated since, on the other hand, Re/DRESS needs to protect its designs and brand to have impact. Re/DRESS has been able to take advantage of opportunities, especially the access to and the generosity and willingness of factories who participate in the project. redress-recycle.com Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre and Artolution In the world’s biggest refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, a cultural renaissance is in swing. Fighting back against the brutal violence and attempted cultural genocide inflicted on their people, who were forced to flee their homes in Myanmar, this renaissance is led by Rohingya artists, storytellers, musicians and artisans who create healing, hope and community, reviving tradition through art. The Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) and Artolution are at the movement’s forefront. A project of the International Organization of Migration (IOM), the RCMC is a community center, artist workshop, and safe space for cultural expression. Located in the heart of the Kutupalong-Balukhali megacamp, it is home to a collection of cultural artifacts made by Rohingya artists and craftspeople, including embroidered tapestries, model boats and houses, farming and fishing tools, recordings of folk songs, folk tales and proverbs, themed gardens, and more... Telling their stories in their own words and making these objects promotes positive cultural identity, challenges stereotypes, and reconnects Rohingya men, women and children to their ancestral language, land and traditions. A natural next step would be for the center to evolve into a social enterprise project, connecting skilled artisans to livelihood and market opportunities making them less dependent on humanitarian aid. However, despite initial hopes that refugee-made products could be sold on a small scale, this is now on hold: the Government of Bangladesh has not approved social enterprise projects for the Rohingya, and IOM policies prohibit staff from engaging in ‘business transactions’. Moving forward will require policy shifts at governmental and organizational levels. Also on display are works by Rohingya artists who have participated in community-based art programmes run in the camps by Artolution, a global organization that, in partnership with UNHCR, strengthens communities experiencing crisis through collaborative art-making. Although not a social enterprise, the RCMC team wanted to share the platform of Purposeful Goods with these artists, a good example of working collaboratively vs. competitively, a feature of social enterprise initiatives. More work by Rohingya artisans is on display in two other shows here at DAS 2023: ‘ Very Small Feelings’ and ‘ To Enter the Sky’. Rohingyaculturalmemorycentre.iom.int artolution.org Stools and mats This is the newest project participating in Purposeful Goods … so new, in fact, it is yet to have a name. This is the first time these products are available for purchase, and in part, their existence is the result of ‘To Enter the Sky’, another DAS 2023 show, which, amongst other considerations, looks at how architecture navigates notions of community. Architect Rizvi Hassan, whose practice explores the role of design professionals in unconventional fields, responded to the provocation of curator Sean Anderson, by seeking out artisans whilst in the field with the Institute of Architects on a flood response project in Sylhet and in Chittagong for a private client. He was intrigued by the process, planning and vision of the women who weave mats– from harvesting the inputs, to planning the design through to execution. He is currently working with less than ten artisans. The intention is to continue to explore how this work can be framed as an art form. Watch this space! TransEnd TransEnd (founded 2019) aims to support the marginalized and underrepresented hijra, non-binary, gender queer, transgender and intersex community in Bangladesh. Besides their focus on social and economic empowerment through skills development, they aim to sensitize society, providing visibility with the ultimate goal of achieving broader acceptance of these communities. TransEnd did not initially consider setting up a social enterprise. However, with economic empowerment as a goal it seemed an obvious option; secondly, as a small group with a young leader it was easier to set up a social-enterprise than register as a foundation or society. To date they’ve provided life skills such as cycling, basic computer, English Language, communication, leadership, and digital literacy skills. They’ve helped people find work as paid models, and with Pathao, FoodPanda, ChalDal, and Hyundai. Their public awareness campaigns are innovative using comic strips and animation. It is TransEnd's handicrafts project that is at the center of their social enterprise work. Making things and preferring more open-ended livelihood schemes (vs. having 9-5 jobs) appeals to many in these communities. In 2020, the first 40 tie-dyed T-shirts which were produced were featured on instagram and Facebook and sold out in five days. Profits went to a person who wanted to start poultry farming. The group immediately produced 200 more T shirts, only to discover that scaling up was challenging– sales, for some reason, slowed down. Most of TransEnd’s products are upcycled, eco-friendly and sustainable: macrame bags, beaded jewelry, tote bags, tie-dye, scented candles, and handmade soap and are featured on TransEnd’s social media and e-commerce platform. Customers can pay cash on delivery or through Bkash. They also showcase work at different craft fairs– but stall fees are going up and TransEnd is determined to pay fair prices to their makers. Without an office, and no regular core funding, everything operates on a temporal basis. One of the things TransEnd has learned is the value of a unique selling point. In their case it is their transparency about how they use their profits to uplift the communities they work with. Transendbd.org