ALL PROJECTS Art Mediation Programme 2018 As part of our commitment to creating new strategies to open up our programme to a diverse audience, the Dhaka Art Summit 2018 launched a new Art Mediation programme, led by Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury. With the generous support of Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, and in collaboration with the Hochschule Luzern, this programme was designed to engage and expose a network of local creatives and students to new methodologies of mediation, who in turn helped the local audience navigate and access the exhibitions and programmes. Aware that the space of contemporary art was, for many members of DAS’s extremely diverse audience, quite daunting, we set out to create a series of new strategies to open up our programme. These strategies strengthened our commitment to accommodate many forms of thinking and provided space for them to flourish – to create a space where different audiences were encouraged to engage with artworks on their own terms. Creating an effective mediation programme was central to this agenda and crucial in achieving DAS’s goals in the South Asia region. This edition of DAS aimed to become completely bilingual, with all printed material presented in both Bangla and English, fostering ease of access for our Bangladeshi audience, which included the Exhibition Guide. Also included in the Guide were a series of ‘Mediation Pages’ that suggested particular tools which visitors could use to help them navigate DAS’s exhibitions. These tools were developed over the course of workshops at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (Cochin), the Hochschule Luzern (Lucerne), and in Dhaka, through dialogues between DAS’s curatorial staff, Dr. Rachel Mader and Lena Eriksson of the Hochschule Luzern, and DAS 2018’s team of 25 Art Mediators. This dedicated team of Mediators was stationed throughout the Summit’s exhibition spaces, easily identifiable by their ASK ME ABOUT THE ART t-shirts. Trained through intensive workshops, they engaged the public in conversations around the artworks, and ran tours each day for both DAS’s general audiences and visiting school groups. You cam read a post from MoMA's education department referencing our Art Mediation and other educational initiatives here .

ALL PROJECTS 'Introduction to Council'- A Presentation by Sandra Terdjman and Grégory Castéra The Samdani Residence, and Alliance Francaise De Dhaka, 21 - 22 March 2015 On 21st March 2015, Sandra Terdjman and Grégory Castéra presented Council to the Samdani Seminars participant artists in an informal gathering at Samdani Space, Golpo. On 22nd March, Introduction to Council was held at the Alliance Française de Dhaka. Council explores modes of composition through the arts, scholarly and scientific research, and civil society in order to propose new representations of social issues. The three schemes (inquiries, productions, fellows) bring together networks of concerned artists, researchers, citizens, and institutions.

The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Nadia Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT Nadia Samdani MBE is the Co-Founder and President of the Samdani Art Foundation and Director of Dhaka Art Summit (DAS). In 2011, with husband Rajeeb Samdani, she established the Samdani Art Foundation to support the work of Bangladesh and South Asia’s contemporary artists and architects and increase their exposure. As part of this initiative, she founded DAS, which has since completed five successful editions under her leadership. She is a member of Tate’s South Asia Acquisitions Committee, Tate’s International Council and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, one of the founding members of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council and member of Asia Society’s Advisory Committee. In 2017, with her husband Rajeeb, she was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. She was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2022 Birthday Honours for services to global art philanthropy and supporting the arts in South Asia and the United Kingdom. She has also received the Knight of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the Cultural Ministry of France.A second-generation collector, she began her own collection at the age of 22. She collects both Bangladeshi and international art, reflecting her experience as both a proud Bangladeshi and a global citizen. She has written about collecting for Art Asia Pacific and Live Mint and has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum, Art Basel, Frieze and Harvard University among other institutions. Works from the Samdanis’ collection have been lent to institutions and festivals including: Kiran Nadar Musem of Art, New Delhi (2023); Hayward Gallery, London (2022); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2019); Para Site, Hong Kong (2018); Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (2018); documenta 14, Kassel and Athens, (2017); Shanghai Biennale (2017); Office for Contemporary Art Norway, Olso (2016); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2015); Kunstsammlung Nordrhein, Düsseldorf (2015); Gwangju Biennale (2014); and Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2014). Rajeeb Samdani CO-FOUNDER AND TRUSTEE Rajeeb Samdani is a Co-Founder and Trustee of the Samdani Art Foundation, and Managing Director of Golden Harvest Group - one of the leading diversified conglomerates in Bangladesh. Together with his wife Nadia Samdani MBE, he established the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, and Srihatta- Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park. Rajeeb is also known for his modern and contemporary art collection. He is a founding member and Co-Chair of Tate’s South Asian Acquisitions Committee, a member of Tate’s International Council and Tate Advisory Board and Alserkal Avenue’s Programming Committee, a founding member of The Harvard University Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute’s Arts Advisory Council, Delfina Foundation’s Global Council member, a member of Art SG and a member of Art Basel Global Patrons Council. In 2017, with his wife Nadia, he was the first South Asian arts patron to receive the prestigious Montblanc de la Culture Arts Patronage Award. He has been a guest speaker at art fairs and institutions including the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, Harvard University and the Private Museums Summit. DAS 2012 Team Guest Curators Others CHAIRMAN Farooq Sobhan DHAKA ART SUMMIT, BANGLADESH Nadia Samdani MBE SAMDANI ART FOUNDATION, BANGLADESH Rajeeb Samdani DELFINA FOUNDATION, UK Aaron Cezar Organising Comittee Members

ALL PROJECTS The Asian Art Biennale in Context Curated by Diana Campbell Directly after DAS 2016, I spent two months as researcher in residence at the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, looking to trace Fukuoka’s exhibitions of modern Bangladeshi art in the 1980s. Flipping through the extensive photo albums kept by museum staff from the time, I encountered installation images of Asian Artists Exhibition II—Festival: Contemporary Asian Art Show 1980 (known from here on out as the First Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II) from November 1980 which included works of art that were familiar to me from the storage of National Art Gallery Collection at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The haunting blue geometry of Safiuddin Ahmed’s 1979 painting Fishing Net exhibited not only at the 1 st Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II, but also at the First Asian Art Biennale in 1981, and DAS 2016 in Rewind . It became apparent that the exhibition histories between the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum (FAAM), the Asian Art Biennale and the Dhaka Art Summit (both hosted in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy) were intimately intertwined in ways not perceptible on the surface. A whole generation of Bangladeshi intellectuals was brutally massacred by the Pakistani military just two days before the country’s independence in 1971, and understandably investing in the regeneration of Bangladeshi culture was high on the national agenda. The Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy was founded by an act of Parliament in 1974, and the visionary and charismatic artist Syed Jahangir joined as its inaugural Director of Visual Arts in 1977, determined for Bangladeshi art to make a mark across the country and also internationally. In 1978, Jahangir quickly organized in Dresden what would be a traveling exhibition of Bangladeshi contemporary art, which inspired him to set up the visual arts department of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy as a collecting institution via the National Art Gallery collection. He traveled to India that same year to participate (as an exhibiting artist) in the fourth Triennale-India, where he was impressed by the Lalit Kala Akademi. Nevertheless, he decided to take his own institution in a different direction, looking instead to the East for inspiration, as many artists in previous generations in Bengal had done—from Nandalal Bose (1882–1996) to Abanindranath Tagore (1871–1951) to Mohammad Kibria (1929–2011), to name but a few of those who employed new strategies in their quests to create autonomous spaces for art. Jahangir visited Fukuoka twice in 1980 to prepare for the 1 st Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II, where he consulted on the participation of 28 Bangladeshi artists, including himself. It was during his first visit to Fukuoka during the Summer of 1980 were he first had the idea to start the Asian Art Biennale, which is the oldest Biennale of contemporary art to continue to exist in Asia, recently completing its 17 th edition. With strong support from the Bangladesh government and the foreign ministry, assisted by Farooq Sobhan (who is now chair of the board of the Samdani Art Foundation), it seemed the biennale was set to succeed in its January 1981 opening date. However, when Jahangir returned to Fukuoka in November 1980, with only two months to go until the Dhaka opening of the Asian Art Biennale, only three countries had agreed to participate in the platform. Jahangir networked with his fellow artists in Fukuoka, who through a form of radical generosity, agreed to initiate their countries’ participation outside of diplomatic channels. These networks forged in Fukuoka were pivotal to the success of the Asian Art biennale under Jahangir’s leadership; seminal figures from Southeast Asia such as Raymundo Albano (Philippines), Redza Piyadasa (Malaysia), Mochtar Apin (Indonesia), and Lain Singh Bangdel (Nepal) lent their talent as organizers to bring the best of their country’s artists into the fold of the Asian Art Biennale in Bangladesh. This speaks to the energy, drive, and gumption present among artist communities at the time to set up their own alignments outside of traditional and often colonial channels. We are pleased to show photographs reprinted from the archive of the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum chronicling the beginnings of these friendships that forged inter-Asia solidarity extending into Bangladesh. The Asian Art Biennale in Context at DAS 2018 presents all of the 27 works of Bangladeshi art that the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy collected out of the first four Asian Art Biennales before Jahangir left his post soon after the 5 th edition in 1991. The acquisition committee was made up of a group of senior artists from the Academy, and therefore most of these 27 works were made by artists who were part of this system. With this in mind, the selection of works is not indicative of the spirit of the Bangladeshi participation as a whole at these Asian Art Biennales, with the exception of SM Sultan, Ratan Majumdar, Nurun Nahar Papa, Rasha, and Pramesh Kumar Mondol most of whom led more bohemian existences. Rattan Majumdar’s work stood out among the 28 artists exhibiting at the First Fukuoka Asian Art Show Part II. He was only 26 years old at the time, and also exhibited his melancholic prints at the Whitechapel Gallery that same year, and in Dresden two years earlier in the exhibition previously mentioned in this text. Notably absent from the contemporary art scene of Dhaka today, Majumdar has an incredible archive chronicling his early days as an emerging Bangladeshi artist supported by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy which we are pleased to show in this exhibition. In addition to the two bodies of work entitled Divided Society collected by the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in 1981 and 1989, we also exhibit his National Award-winning work Pleasure in Nudity from the National Art Exhibition in 1979, a testament to the kind of work the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy was supporting at the time-- which some might consider radical for the context of today. Piecing together the narratives from the catalog essays of the first four Asian Art Biennales, it became apparent that works by international artists at the early shows were donated to the National Art Gallery collection, including the entire Philippine pavilion of 1983 curated by Raymundo Albano. After over a year of searching for these work in the collection storage, we are pleased to present 5 prints on wood collage by the award-winning Filipino printmaker Romulo Olazo, who also exhibited in the First Fukuoka Asian Art Show Part II in 1980. We also present one panel of a 1980 triptych An Afternoon for Bangladesh painted by Filipino artist Phyllis Zaballero, who met Jahangir in Fukuoka one month before painting this work specifically for the exhibition at the invitation of Raymundo Albano, knowing that it would be a donation. I interviewed Zaballero in her Manila studio and archive, and we present a view into the history behind this work and hope that the other two panels will soon be found. Interestingly, while the work was created in preparation for the first Asian Art Biennale in 1981, the Philippines did not exhibit a pavilion until 1983, and Zaballero’s work did not exhibit until 1986 in the third edition of the biennale organized after Albano’s death via the Cultural Center of the Philippines. The point of this exhibition is to highlight the collection within the Shilpakala Academy building that hosts the Dhaka Art Summit, pointing to a Golden Age of the institution under Jahangir’s leadership in the early stages of Bangladesh’s nation building process. The exhibition presents fragments of continuing strands of inquiry into Bangladesh’s role within a rich network of artists across Asia who were trying to build a space for artistic exchange outside of colonial paradigms and build strong and relevant institutions in their local contexts (such as Jahangir with the Shilpakala Academy, and Albano with the Cultural Centre of the Philippines). Dhaka Art Summit benefits from the incredible legacy of the Asian Art Biennale, and we look forward to continuing this research into its institutional history with other colleagues across Asia at a key moment in time when several of the protagonists of this story are still active. The young artists of Bangladesh today benefit from the international exposure that Jahangir and his collaborators created for them via this special biennale. Traces of the Asian Art Biennale can be found elsewhere in the Summit, and this biennale is certainly among the “gifts of the inferno” alluded to in Bearing Point 2. The inaugural panel in DAS’s auditorium talks program, Another Asia , features Syed Jahangir who will speak about his experience setting up the biennale. Jack Garrity of the Pacita Abad estate will discuss this pioneering Filipino Artist who exhibited in the 3 rd Asian Art Biennale, and Juneer Kibria will discuss his father Mohammad Kibria (also present in Planetary Planning) in a panel about transnational artistic and architectural practices that included Bangladesh. Bearing Point 4, includes the provocative Hostage series of Shahid Sajjad which exhibited in the 6 th Asian Art Biennale in 1993. A workshop on “forensic art history” will give local Bangladeshi art historians tools to further their inquiries into this fascinating period of Bangladeshi art history, and the Asian Art Biennale will also be addressed in the Scholar’s Weekend via the symposium Displays of Internationalism. This presentation would not have been possible without the following individuals and institutions who supported us with time, access, and encouragement: Fukuoka Asian Art Museum Raiji Kuroda Rina Igarashi Syed Jahangir Yasunaga Koichi Patrick Flores Rattanamol Singh Johal Rattan Mojumder Marga Villanueva Storage staffs from Shilpakala Phyllis Zaballero Liaquat Ali Lucky Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Asian Art Biennale Will Smith, Art in America Md. Muniruzzaman Artists Abdus Sattar (B. 1979, Barisal, Bangladesh, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Abdus Sattar is a well-known oriental art practitioner and honorary professor at the Department of Oriental Art, University of Dhaka. In his early artistic life he has been trained by Somnath Hore as a print maker but chose to focus on the unexplored areas of oriental art in this country. Alok Roy The Man – I, (1983) Burnt clay Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Alok Roy’s The Man – I presents a study of the human condition in the fragile and difficult medium of burnt clay. Roy’s forms fold and collapse into themselves, seemingly on the verge of disappearance. The central form encompasses a human head, caught mid-scream, alluding to a sense of collective suffering and trauma. Aminul Islam (b. 1931, Tetia, Bengal Presidency, British India, d. 2011, Dhaka, Bangladesh) Reflections and Reality, 1976 Painting and collage (mirror) Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Aminul Islam was an active member of leftist political and cultural organizations, which heavily influenced his practice. Reflection and Real uses the language of geometric abstraction to produce social critique, meditating on the perceived versus the reality of a society. The collage presents a shattered surface, that reflects and multiplies itself over and over again, speaking to fractures in society that reproduce themselves in every generation. The artist presented a similar work at the first Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II in 1980. Bonizul Huq Love of Tree, 1983 Oil on Canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Banizul Huq’s Shadow – I presents an image that is fills one with both a sense of foreboding, and calm. Huq abstracts from the form of a banyan tree around which cattle are huddled; the banyan tree occupies an important position in the vernacular spiritual beliefs of South Asia, where it is seen as both a repository of wisdom, and also the dwelling-place of ghosts. The cows, which are also important symbols in Hindu beliefs, that huddle at its base seem to be ghostly presences, occupying a metaphysical realm, rather than one of reality. Hamiduzzaman Khan (b.1946, Kishoreganj, Bangladesh, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Remembrance-III ’71 (1980) Brass Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Hamiduzzaman Khan’s Remembrance-III ’71 memorializes all those who lost their lives during the Bangladesh War of Liberation. The sculpture depicts a frail yet resolute figure, clad in only a dhoti, standing a shattered door, riddled with bullet-holes, celebrating the resolve of the freedom fighters in the face of horrific violence. Hashi Chakraborty (b. 1948, Chittagong, Bangladesh- d.2014, Chittagong) Memory – 15, 1983 Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Hashi Chakraborty’s work reflects a deep romanticism, drawing on influences from both cubist and folk modes of painting. Chakraborty creates a creates a dream-like space where floating shapes interact with each other to suggest emergent forms. He explores the idea of memory and inspiration found in romantic poetry, as the space where past experiences spontaneously emerge and play themselves out. Kazi Abdul Baset (b. 1935, Dhaka, Bengal Presidency, British India, d. 2002, Dhaka) Painting-I (1980) Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Kazi Abdul Baset’s work occurs on the border between abstraction and figuration, drawing equally from his exposure to Abstract Expressionism, which he had encountered while studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1963-64, and Bengali folk forms. In Painting-I we find traces of the handling of colour by artists such as Mark Rothko, where abstract fields of pigment are layered to create a sense of depth. Baset’s painting creates an energetic encounter between different coloured fields, interrupted by a smoke-like column which imbues the work with a sense of urgency. Baset’s painting reflects a strong desire to modes of abstraction beyond those already established in the West. Mansur Ul Karim (b. 1950, Rajbari, Bangladesh; lives and works in Chittagong) Open Window and Chair, 1983 Oil painting Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Mansur Ul Karim uses both abstract and figurative modes within his paintings, which draw their inspiration from the landscape of Bangladesh. Open Window and Chair presents a vantage point from which to view a rapidly changing world; energetic brushwork and composition creates the impression of a rapidly transforming space. Karim views these changes favourably, even romantically, pointing to the openness with which artists of his generation embraced cross-cultural exchanges. Mohammad Kibria (b. 1929 in Birbhum, British India; d. 2011 in Dhaka) Painting-V (1980) Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Mohammad Kibria was a master of abstraction, whose paintings delve into the realm of pure colour. Painting-V explores the tension between hard and soft forms produced by placing various shades of earth brown side-by-side, and plays with varying levels of luminousity that appear through these juxtapositions. This work, as in most of the paintings he created, references entropy in nature found when moss or other natural materials grow on man-made structures, inspired zen philosophy that he encountered during his time studying in Japan. This painting exhibited both in the first Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II in 1980 and two months later at the first Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka in 1981 before entering the collection of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Nitun Kundu (B. 1935, Dinajpur district, Bengal Presidency, British India- D. 2006, Dhaka) Homage to the Martyrs Bronze Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Through this sculpture, Nitin Kundu pays homage to the martyrs of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971. He creates an ascendant column, which spirals towards the sky, memorializing the heavy price of freedom paid by those who were killed, and their lofty aspirations. This sculpture exhibited both in the first Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II in 1980 and two months later at the first Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka in 1981 before entering the collection of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Qayyum Chowdhury (B. 1932, Feni, Bengal Presidency, British India- D. 2014, Dhaka) My Village (1977) Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Nature plays a key role in Qayyum Chowdhury’s stylized abstract paintings. His lyrical painting My Village, depicts a romantic vision of village life in harmony with the rhythms of the sun and the tides, referencing strongly the landscape of Bengal whose lush green expanses are riddled with small, snaking bodies of water. Rafiqun Nabi (B. 1943, Chapai Nawabganj, Bengal Presidency, British India, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) The Poet (1980) Wood-block print Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Known as a painter, print-maker and illustrator, Nabi’s work references the vernacular forms of Bengal to create compositions with a strong narrative component. In The Poet, Nabi celebrates the Romantic ideal of the poet finding inspiration in nature, paying tribute to figures such as Rabindranath Tagore and Jibanananda Das whose work served as inspiration during the Language Movement (Bhasha Andolon) which ultimately led to the establishment of the nation of Bangladesh. Rasha Life II, 1983 wood Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Akhtar Ahmed Rasha, known as Rasha, uses found pieces of wood to realize his sculptural forms, which often follow the shapes of the wood itself. In this work, Rasha depicts the hardships of a new nation, and the struggles before it: a figure crouches, with an alms bowl before him, and an old man leans heavily on his staff; towering above them, however, we see the face of a man, looking ahead, illustrating the artist’s hope for the future. The work won the Grand Prize of the 3rd Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka, after which it entered the collection of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. S.M. Sultan (b. 1923, Narail District - d. 1994, Jessore) First Plantation (1975) Natural Pigment on canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka S.M. Sultan is known for his energetic style, weaving together multiple sources of inspiration, and his paintings of Bangladeshi agricultural workers, whose figures he renders with exaggerated musculature. Sultan’s First Plantation, which depicts farmers in the act of sowing seeds, bursts with a sense of anticipation and optimism, reflecting his hopes for the new nation of Bangladesh, which became independent only a few years before this painting was finished. This work marked a shift in his practice as he was previously known as a landscape painter, and this monumental and iconic figure appears in the many works he made post 1975. Safiuddin Ahmed (b. 1922, Calcutta, British India; d. 2012, Dhaka) Fishing Net (1979) Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka Safiuddin Ahmed’s work references the strong linearity and bold use of colour found in the indigenous visual practices of the Santhal communities of Santiniketan, among whom he spent many of his early years. Fishing Net speaks to the intimate relationship between man and nature in village life in Bengal, depicting the gleam of the fresh catch as is lies in the fisherman’s net. Water is a recurring theme across the artist’s work as the impact of the 1974 flood was emblazoned into his imagination. This painting exhibited both in the first Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II in 1980 and two months later at the first Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka in 1981 before entering the collection of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Shahabuddin Ahmed (b. 1950, Dhaka, lives and works between Dhaka, Bangladesh and Paris, France) First Step (1986) Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Shahabuddin Ahmed’s work is heavily influenced by the violence he saw first-hand when he served in the Mukti Bahini during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Ahmed’s energetic, almost violent, brushwork in First Step visualizes his exuberant hopes for the future of the new nation of Bangladesh, created during the 15th anniversary of its independence. Sultanul Islam Life Circle (1985) Concrete Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Sultanul Islam’s sculpture Life Circle explores the cyclic nature of life and death, and of the pain of existence, drawing from Buddhist beliefs which have become part of vernacular mythology in South Asia. Islam’s crouching figure, which seems simultaneously on the verge of life and death, becomes a representation of the notion of samsara, which binds us to our mortal desires. A similar sculpture is found in the collection of the Bangladesh National Museum. Syed Jahangir (b. 1935, Satkhira, Bengal Presidency, British India, lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh) Soul Seeker – II Oil on canvas Courtesy of the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Syed Jahangir draws inspiration from the landscape of Bangladesh, and his trips to the Rangamati in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, to produce meditative and metaphysical paintings. Soul Seeker continues this spiritual search for the heart of the country, creating forms that resist easy resolution, but rather seem to keep unfolding before our eyes, pointing to the never-ending nature of the search. Intuition and knowledge that exists outside of reason are another concern of Jahangir’s early works, which is also alluded in the title of this series of works, “Soul Seeker.” Syed Jahangir was instrumental in setting up the first Asian Art Biennale and creating networks across Asia, many of which began during his time spent in Fukuoka preparing for the first Fukuoka Asian Art Show, Part II, 1980.

ALL PROJECTS Raqib Shaw: Whitworth Art Gallery Co-Curated By Diana Campbell Betancourt, Chief Curator Of Dhaka Art Summit And Artistic Director Of Samdani Art Foundation, Dr Maria Balshaw, Director Of Tate, And The Artist, As Part Of The New North And South, A Network Of Eleven Arts Organisations From Across South Asia And The North Of England In A Three-Year Programme Of Co-Commissions, Exhibitions And Intellectual Exchanges A solo exhibition by contemporary artist Raqib Shaw at Whitworth Gallery, Manchester from 24 June- 19 November, 2017 which examined the real and imagined spaces between the East and West. Shaw ’s opulent paintings of fantastical worlds were combined with historic textiles, furniture and drawings from the Whitworth's collection. The exhibition takes the form of an installation, drawing on influences of renaissance and baroque imagery, combined with theatrical extravagance, nature and poetry, to echo the mythic space Shaw creates in his paintings. New wallpaper designed by Shaw, commissioned specially for the exhibition, created an extraordinary backdrop for his work. The exhibition was reimagined for the South Asian context, during the Dhaka Art Summit 2018. A new network of eleven arts organisations from across the North of England and South Asia announced a three-year programme of co-commissions, exhibitions and intellectual exchange to celebrate shared heritage across continents and develop artistic talent. The New North and South network, supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England’s Ambition for Excellence programme, will bring prominence to the work of leading Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan and UK artists and include new artistic commissions, exhibitions and performances in Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool and in Colombo, Dhaka, Lahore, Karachi and Kochi.

The Samdani Art Award, Bangladesh's premier art award, has created an internationally recognised platform to showcase the work of young Bangladeshi Artists to an audience of international arts professionals. Since it was founded in 2012, the Samdani Art Award has steadily developed into an internationally recognised platform, highlighting the most innovative work being produced by young Bangladeshi artists. Created to honour one talented emerging Bangladeshi artist, the award does not issue the winner with a monetary prize, and instead funds them to undertake an all-expenses paid, six-week residency at the Delfina Foundation in London: a career-defining moment for the artist to further their professional development. The award’s latest winner, Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, travelled to London earlier this year in July to undertake his residency. Providing him with the time and space to revisit old ideas, and explore new, while expanding his networks. I caught up with Chowdhury while he was in residence to discuss his ongoing practice and how winning the award has impacted his career to date. Samdani Art Award 2020 INTERVIEW: MIZANUR RAHMAN CHOWDHURY Emma Sumner: You initially studied printmaking, how did your practice evolve to become what it is today? Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury: It is very interesting for me to talk about this shift. When I studied printmaking at Faculty of Fine Art, University of Dhaka. I tried to embrace the fact that many of the printing processes I learnt were all steeped in tradition, but no matter what I tried, I never felt that the process fitted with what I wanted to achieve and communicate within my practice. While I was studying, I tried to experiment with mixing and matching various print making techniques and introducing found photography into my lithograph prints, although it was prohibited in our academy at that time, so in parallel to my studies, I continued my own experimental art practice. ES: So, printmaking did not allow you to communicate what you wanted to get across to your audience? Did this change at all after you graduated and had more freedom with the way you were able to work? MRC: Even after graduating I was never really convinced that printmaking would give me the tools to communicate what I wanted through my practice. The sensibility of printmaking was a way to develop my ideas, but the outcome always became something else, like a form of assemblage, or an installation. During my study, I became interested in the moving image—especially the genres of psychedelic and experimental film—and wanted to explore them in my practice. Later, after graduation, I also began to experiment with performance, photography, collage, object sculpture and video installation. These multiple approaches helped steer my practice into the direction it has taken today. ES: Do you still make prints now? MRC: I love woodcarving, and I did begin working in this way during my graduation but my lifestyle doesn’t allow me to practice like this anymore. Its partly for this reason, and the limitations of the media itself, which have moved my practice in a very different directioN. ES: Your practice today is interdisciplinary and embraces installation and many other media. How do you decide what media you want to work with? Do you keep objects of interest to you in stock that you feel you might use later, or you source everything after you have devised an idea for a project? MRC: My work has always been sensitive to the time and space in which I create it so my processes are never fixed and I allow my intuition to guide me when developing new works. I usually find an object which forms the basis of an idea which I then begin to ‘open-up’ through my working processes to explore its core subject in greater depth I only ever select objects that appeal to me, a process which is very subjective as the same object might not appeal to others in the same way it does to me, making the process very much about my connection to the objects I work with. ES: Where do you go to source your materials? Is there anywhere particular where you feel more inspired? MRC: I find my materials in all sorts of places but generally I never go looking for things as I tend to just come across things as I go about my daily tasks, making most of the objects I source ephemeral. For one of my more recent projects I collected a lot of boxes over the period of Ramadan. The boxes contained oranges which had been imported from Egypt, but I was drawn in by the striking logo on the front of the box. Ramadan was the only time that the boxes had been in stock in my local market. As I was already familiar with the store owners, I took the time to talk to them and gained a lot of information about how the boxes had come from Egypt to Bangladesh, making me question the ideas of globalisation and international trade and how these matters might affect the everyday person. This formed the foundation for a new work which I am still developing the work in my studio now. ES: So the conversations that you have with other people as you develop your ideas are also a key part of your working process? MRC: In my project The Soul Who Fails to Fly into the Space (2017), which I exhibited during the Dhaka Art Summit, the chairs on which the television was placed were rented from a local company in Dhaka. The man who owned the company was very open and welcoming towards me, and he was very excited to be playing a small part in my project. But when he showed the chairs to me, every chair had a very shiny sticker of his company logo placed prominently in the centre of the back rest, which wasn’t part of how I’d originally envisaged the work. I thought about it all night but slowly realised that I couldn’t remove the logos, as the interactions between us had helped us to build a relationship of respect, a love that had an impact on my decision making and led to me keeping the logos as they were and allowing in the unexpected. In the end, the logo fitted magically on that installation. All the interactions and discussions that I have with the people I meet during my working process are very important to me and often influence my work in positive ways. The curator, Simon Castets also played an important role while installing the works as we discussed at length about how my work could respond to the space to create a more meditative and playful exhibit. ES: Since arriving in London for your residency at the Delfina Foundation have you started work on any new projects? or is there anything that you are working on now? MRC: I lived in London previously back in 2014 when my wife was undertaking her MA. During that time, I was struck by how many road signs there were and I began taking photos of the streets. I had began working on a project called Land, and now I am back in London for this residency, I have had a chance to restart and develop the ideas I was working on further. While I have been here, I visited the National History Museum and I saw that they had analysed Bangladesh by looking at the structure of our land, particularly our rivers, and the types of our soil. What interested me most about this display, was seeing how Bangladesh is divided by a tectonic plate that goes through the centre of the country which means that my native land could, at some point in the future, be shifted by nature dispelling the concept of land that we conventionally perceive through mapping. Overall, I am more interested in the land inside us, our spirituality and how this connects us to the cosmos and defines who we are and which land we ultimately belong to. SAF: After you have finished your residency at Delfina Foundation and return to Dhaka, what’s next for you? Do you have any upcoming exhibitions or are you planning to work on any new projects? MRC: It’s a big question, currently I’m a little overwhelmed by the spotlight of winning the Samdani Art Award and having many curators and fellow artists wanting to meet me, but it has been a great opportunity to develop my network which I know will be helpful in moving forward with my career. I am very thankful to Samdani Art Foundation and Delfina Foundation for establishing such a valuable platform for young artist in Bangladeshi artists. While I have been here, I’ve had the time and space to open up new critical perspectives on my practice and developed my approach to research and new projects. After developing them further in Dhaka, I am hopeful to show them in exhibitions soon.

ALL PROJECTS To Enter The Sky Curated by Sean Anderson To Enter The Sky Curated by Sean Anderson (Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture) Weather, when visualized, relies on the interaction of multiple forces enacting potential acts of benefit as well as destruction. Sometimes predictable, and even mapped, more often, spaces inherit weather in unpredictable patterns that suggest tumult, a conjuring or a question, in defiance of the unknown. For example, airplane pilots depend on degrees of turbulence to achieve lift, to enter the sky. Likewise, for architects and builders, turbulence presents a manifold of acts for the body and the landscape to confront, with which to bend and flex, and from which one may achieve improbable balance. With sea level rise and the increased intensity of unprecedented weather systems, the world has witnessed recent devastating floods in Northern Pakistan and Bangladesh, the ongoing strengthening of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, and the anticipated disappearance of Maldivian atolls as well as those throughout the South Pacific. The invention of land for real estate development adjacent to the oceans and seas simultaneously destroys sensitive ecosystems while displacing vulnerable human and non-human settlements. A perpetuation of cataclysmic events tear at the definitions of geography, of fixed temporalities, for an architecture and urbanism subject to extremes continually redefined on the ground, in the water and the air. Recent years have also shown us that a global pandemic can challenge nearly every aspect of humanity and expressions of collectivity. Refugees and asylum seekers traverse the planet while confronting the fixity of imposed boundaries. Architecture can be reimagined to consider how and with whom we seek common grounds among spaces of repair, comfort and joy. With livelihoods unfolding over screens large and small, and those landless and nationless continue to seek refuge, the built environment presents itself as a backdrop, stage and as an agent for change. We all share one sky. Drawings by children situate both the vulnerability and strength of future selves who, in a spirited display of potential, of beauty, of imagined spaces and buildings, can also aspire to elevate and share possible futures. Just as we navigate the unknown, architecture must activate new encounters with economies of materiality, ecology, community, sovereignty, and citizenship. How do we design and build for the inevitability of conflicts, past and future? How does architecture establish belonging in landscapes of devastation and transit? This exhibition responds to those insecure conditions that allow architects, artists and designers to engage with the dimensioning of turbulence as a catalyst for addressing how we encounter each other. To Enter the Sky brings together examples of architectures and artworks of resilience, of trust, while not discounting fear, entropy, and destruction. The exhibition centers Bangladesh as part of a broader reckoning of what it means to be human in and of the built environment today. We know that various turbulences will persist. Architecture need not be resistant. Rather, the exhibition asserts how a spatial medium, with its multitudes of hope and chance, can begin to disseminate radical stories of becoming to help us understand our own fragile inheritances as individuals, communities, nations. LOCATION: FIRST FLOOR SOUTH PLAZA Sumayya Vally Ceramic vessels activated by performance Performance 7pm daily Commissioned by Samdani Art FoundationCo-curated by Diana Campbell and Sean Anderson as an overlay of “To Enter the Sky” and “Bonna” Pavilion and performance conceptualisation by Sumayya Vally Sound in collaboration with Shoummo SahaChoreography in collaboration with Arpita Singha Lopa oletha imvula uletha ukuphila Translation: “They who brings rain, brings life” IsiZulu proverb Wielding the comings of rain is a tradition practiced by cultures across geographies. To possess the power to command rainfall is by inference possessing the power to dictate the flow of the natural cycle and climatic conditions. Across Southern Africa, rain-making rituals are directed towards royal ancestors because they were believed to have control over rain and other natural phenomena. One of these rare and powerful individuals is the Moroka of the Pedi tribe in South Africa: the traditional rain-making doctor. Here, a series of fired and unfired clay vessels are assembled as a temporal space to hold gatherings. Over the course of DAS, a series of performances which draw on the traditions of rain-making and harvest are performed in the space where the hands that formed the pots also work to un-form them. The rituals include the use of water, which allows the un-fired pots to dissolve over time, revealing areas and niches of gathering contained by the pots, as well as rhythmic drumming that evokes the sound of thunder at the end of each day. Vally’s design, research and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions. Her design process is often forensic, and draws on the aural, the performative and the overlooked as generative places of history and work. b. 1990, Pretoria; lives and works in London LOCATION: SECOND FLOOR Ali Kazim Untitled (Cloud Series) 2018 In his 1949 novel, A Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles writes about the precarities of individuals: “How fragile we are under the sheltering sky. Behind the sheltering sky is a vast dark universe, and we're just so small.” The sky, that which envelops us, is an arbiter of all life on the planet. It is that which comforts or destroys and always reminds us of where we are and where we can be. While the horizon is a measure of the sky, clouds, as condensations of molecules, are signs of life and its potentials; they signal transformations. The cloud is a sky’s signature. Detached from the ground and horizon, the clouds presented in these drawings suggest both movement and stasis. Caught in a moment of change, the clouds are suggestive of temporary presence, just as the weather conditions that they indicate and the individual lives that may be affected among spaces below. What may be discovered behind these scaleless formations? They are emboldened by forces large and small while also having the capacity to reveal new worlds. The works of Ali Kazim are embedded in the spatial histories of Pakistan’s landscapes and the civilizations that once inhabited the region. In works that use a variety of materials and techniques to evoke bodily and emotional experiences, Kazim’s work reimagines multiple narratives that are at once metaphors for human connectivities that may be hidden among unexcavated remains, long-abandoned cities, and the spaces that may be exposed or still buried. Ali Kazim b.1979, Pakistan Agnieszka Kurant Risk Management Commissioned for the New York Times 2020 Post-Fordite Fossilized automotive paint, epoxy resin, powdered stone, steel 2021-22 Sentimentite Digital NFT and physical sculpture Various pulverized objects, powdered granite stone, resin 2022 How can we redefine methods for understanding and responding to precarity at multiple scales throughout the world today? Materials extracted from the ground are but one illustration of how natural resources are continually pillaged in order to support unsustainable population growth and unfair labor practices, which is coupled with environmental devastation. The works in this exhibition speculate about the consequences of economies in parallel with digital capitalism, in which entire societies have become distributed factories of data production and exploitation, where everyone is a worker producing digital and carbon footprints. Risk Management presents a geographical map of a history of outbreaks of social contagions based on fictions spanning the last thousand years. The work draws on the inability of risk-prediction models to consider irrational human behavior and other largely impactful social phenomena. Post-Fordite takes up a recently discovered hybrid, quasi-geological formation created as a natural-artificial byproduct, through fossilization of thousands of layers of automotive paint accumulated and congealed on production lines at automobile factories since the opening of the Henry Ford Motor Company manufacturing plants in the early 20th century. Recently, these fossilized-paint configurations , named Fordite or Detroit Agate, by the former workers of now defunct factories, began circulating online and accruing value. Since Fordite can be cut and polished, it is often used like precious stones to produce jewelry. Post-Fordite embodies more than 100 years of amalgamated human labor and the collective footprints of workers, past and present, translated into geology. S entimentite is a speculative mineral-currency investigating the relationship between digital capitalism and geology in which a future mineral could become more precious than gold and become a currency. Kurant collaborated with computational social scientists who used Artificial Intelligence sentiment-analysis algorithms to harvest data from hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Reddit posts related to recent historic seismic events, including the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Brexit, the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic global lockdown, and Bitcoin’s meteoric rise. These aggregated emotions of millions of people shaped the forms of 100 sculptures, which were cast in a new mineral created by pulverizing 60 objects used as official and informal currencies throughout the history of humanity: shells, Rai stones, whale teeth, corn, Tide detergent, electronic waste, soap, beads, mirrors, batteries, playing cards, phone cards, stamps, tea, and cocoa pods. Invested in exploring how “economies of the invisible” bolster fictions about humanity’s survival in the face of such destructive socio-political and economic processes, Agnieszka Kurant’s sculptural and mapping works speculate on how value is translated and can transgress conventional definitions. Her work challenges how objects today are mutated through their global circulation and production while also questioning modernist conceptions of aura, authorship, production, and hybridity. Many of her works emulate nature and behave like living organisms and self-organized complex systems. b.1978 Łódź; lives and works in New York Aziza Chaouni Projects Rehabilitation of Modern Public Buildings in Africa Sidi Harazem, Morocco Old Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone (1827) CICES, Dakar, Senegal (1974) Throughout the world today, modern architecture, especially those examples in rapidly developing areas of the Global South, remains at risk of demolition due to economic, political, and societal forces that consider its buildings not worthy of preservation. Modern buildings are often judged unattractive, too far removed from “traditional” architecture and building types while overlaid with memories of a traumatic colonial past. How do contemporary architects reimagine the ways in which modernism is understood today? How can spaces imbued with societal traumas be rewritten with the goal of transforming their value to communities and publics? These three rehabilitation projects are actively engaging with and responding to the design of community-centered spaces that are envisaged as cooperative, reparative and responsive for all that participate in their making. In Morocco, Sierra Leone and Senegal, like in other areas subject to the simultaneity of post-colonial transition meeting neoliberal economic drivers, buildings and landscapes are continually being questioned as productive zones for living today. Designed between 1959 and 1975 by prominent Moroccan architect of Corsican origin, Jean-François Zevaco, the Sidi Harazem Thermal Bath Complex, located near the city of Fez, is the first example of public post-independence leisure architecture designed for Moroccan inhabitants. Unfortunately, villagers whose ancestors had lived on the same land for generations were forcibly moved several miles away to accommodate the new tourist destination.Deploying a long-term phased masterplan that accounted for the memory of these historical events while also attending to environmental sensitivities with the use of water in a drought-prone area of the country, the Complex moves beyond the rehabilitation of the buildings themselves to adaptively reuse the spaces for the local population. Since 1827, Old Fourah Bay College was a laboratory and educational setting in which western ideas of governance, political organization and public service were shared as experiments with populations across Sierra Leone and West Africa. The onset of conflict throughout the 1990s radically altered this building and it was occupied by displaced families fleeing a brutal ground war. Working with local school and university groups to rethink what a “dream school” might look like, new methods of design centered in active conversations and designed interactive spatial exercises have established new shared narratives from which the College can once again return to being a space of civic and educational learning. Designed by the architects, Jean-François Lamoureux and Jean-Louis Marin, the CICES was commissioned by the first president of Senegal Léopold Sédar Senghor, who sought a universal African architectural language, shed from Western referents. The CICES complex uses Modernist principles in its circulation and layout, and simultaneously embraces Senghor’s ‘asymmetric parallelism’ theory, that he defines as "a diversified repetition of rhythm in time and space,” which allows for unique spatial experiences. Working with local stakeholders to reconsider what a “masterplan” for such an iconic complex affected by environmental and economic issues will be, ensures its continued use as a productive site for international exchange and commerce into the future. Aziza Chaouni was born and raised in Fez, Morocco and is trained both as a structural engineer and as an architect. Through the integration of users and stakeholders across the design process, Chaouni’s office, Aziza Chaouni Projects, offers alternative processes for imagining and designing empathetic spaces that move past staid aesthetics to articulate human and material-centered approaches to sensitive areas throughout North and West Africa. b.1977 Fez; lives and works in Fez and Toronto Coral Mosques of Maldives Mauroof Jameel and Hamsha Hussain Among the Maldivian atolls and islands, there are at least 26 documented mosques and compounds that have been constructed using coral stone. Assembled from porite coral stone ( hirigaa ) hewn from the reefs and integrated with interior structures fashioned from timber and crafted by lacquer work, itself a unique Maldivian artform, these buildings represent an architecture of resilience found nowhere else on the planet. Akin to other monumental structures found in India and Southeast Asia, the mosques coalesce building, material and artistic practices that point to the transit of ideas and typologies. While historical uses of coral in building construction have been discovered among the Mayan communities of Central America between 900-1500 BCE and among the coastal communities of the Red Sea between 146-323 BCE, among the Maldives, the coral used is both unique to the islands while the building conveys spatial and spiritual resonances found across the Indian Ocean and its sub-continent. These buildings illustrate how the use of localized materials at any scale can maintain long standing spaces for communities. The continued use of the coral mosques today is emblematic of a nation’s peoples and their unwavering faith in the face of environmental calamity. The images of six primary coral mosque compounds included in this exhibition are in use across the islands today and were nominated for UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 2013. Each example embodies architectural forms that are both specific to their island location while also expressing discrete art practices including exterior coral carving, calligraphy, and lacquer work that speak to the movement of Islamic artistic practices across the ocean. With carpentry techniques in the mosques no longer extant and coral mining forbidden for environmental sensitivities, these buildings are recognized for their integration of construction techniques and artforms that speak to the Indian Ocean realm as a space for visual, material, and spatial exchange. Ihavandhoo Old Friday Mosque Miskiy Magu, Ihavandhoo, Haa Alifu Atoll6º 57' 17.33" N and 72º 55' 38.33" EIhavandhoo Old Friday Mosque was completed in 16 December 1701 CE (15 Rajab 1113 A. H.) during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Muzhiruddin (1701-1705). Meedhoo Old Friday Mosque Hiyfaseyha Magu, Meedhoo, Raa Atoll5º 27' 27.80" N, 72º 57' 16.41"EAccording to local oral history, the mosque was probably built during the reign of Sultan Muzaffar Mohamed Imaduddin around 1705. It is the only surviving coral stone mosque with Indian clay roofing tiles. Malé Friday Mosque Medhuziyaaraiy Magu, Henveiru, Malé, Kaafu Atoll4º 10' 40.77" N, 73º 30' 44.57" EMalé Old Friday Mosque and its compound comprise one of the most important heritage sites in the country. It is also the biggest and one of the finest coral stone buildings in the world. The present mosque was built in 1658 during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim Iskandhar I, replacing the original mosque built in 1153 by the first Muslim sultan of the Maldives. Fenfushi Old Friday Mosque Hiriga Goalhi, Fenfushi, Alifu Dhaalu Atoll3°45′15″N 72°58′35″EFenfushi Friday Mosque was built during the reign of Sultan Mohamed of Dhevvadhu (1692-1701) on the site of an earlier mosque. It is a well-preserved compound with a unique coral stone bathing tank, coral stone wells, a sundial, and a large cemetery with grave markers of fine quality. Isdhoo Old Mosque Isdhoo, Laamu Atoll2° 7′ 10″ N, 73° 34′ 10″ EIsdhoo Old Mosque was built prior to a renovation in 1701 during the reign of Sultan Mohamed of Dhevvadhoo (1692-1701). This is the mosque where the 12th century royal copper chronicles 'Isdhoo Loamaafaanu' was kept in a special chamber. The mosque is built on a pre-Islamic site and analysis of the architectural details of the mosque indicates that the stonework could be even older. Hulhumeedhoo Fandiyaaru Mosque Koagannu, Hulhumeedhoo, Addu City0º 34' 51.6" S and 73º 13' 42" EHulhumeedhoo Fandiyaaru Mosque located in the Koagannu area in the island of Hulhumeedhoo (Addu City) was probably built around 1586 during the reign of Sultan Ibrahim III. The Koagannu area is the largest and the oldest cemetery in the Maldives with more than 500 coral grave markers, a sheltered mausoleum and 15 open mausoleums. It had six small mosques but now four small mosques remain. They are Koagannu Miskiy c.1397, Boadhaa Miskiy c.1403, Athara Miskiy c.1417 and Fandiyaru Miskiy c.1586. Felecia Davis and Delia Dumitrescu Computational textiles are textiles that are responsive to cues found in the environment using sensors and microcontrollers for the making of a textile that uses shape-shifting properties of the material itself to communicate information to people. In architecture, these responsive textiles are transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. For instance, they can be used in making temporary and more permanent manifestations of shelter in conflict and environmentally devastated areas. Davis, a trained engineer and architect, with Dumitrescu, a textile designer, asked with this project, ‘How can we design lightweight textiles for use in architecture that can translate responses to their environment? Further, how might we make textiles that dilate if the temperature surrounding the textile becomes hot, or if one wants more transparency in that textile to see the view?’ With her experimental lab, SOFTLAB@PSU, Davis creates responsive textiles that defy conventional structural and representational modes for the material itself and its applications. At the Smart Textiles Lab in Sweden, Dumitrescu has been developing responsive artistic effects in textile design that reshape an understanding of textile as a material that operates at different scales. In this project they consider ‘how’ and ‘what’ textiles can be ‘when’—much like individuals and communities. The first typology of material developed for this work was pixelated, designed with yarn that melts at high temperature; accordingly, the fabric opens or breaks when it receives current. Openings allowed the designers to ‘write’ upon the fabric making apertures, collecting foreground and background through the qualities of the material. The second material has been designed with yarn that shrinks or closes into solid lines in the fabric when it receives current. Shrinking is activated by the material while also revealing more opaque patterning in the textile closing parts of that textile off, transforming the material and the quality of space framed by that material. Davis’ work bio responsive textiles questions how we live while she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Davis and her lab are interested in developing computational methods and design in relation to bodies in locations that simultaneously engage specific social, cultural and political constructions. Her collaborative lab is dedicated to developing soft computational materials and textiles alongside industry and community partners to establish a culture of hands-on making and thinking through computational materials not only as a future but also as a holistic approach to living within uncertain circumstances. Central to Dumitrescu’s research is the topic of material and textile design, focusing on new materials expanding from computational textiles to biodesign and biofabrication. Through the notion of textile design thinking, her research expands the textile methodology; it includes systematic work with: colour, materials, texture, structure, pattern, and function to explore and propose new design futures for sustainable living from material to spatial design. b. United States and Romania; Lives and works in State College, Pennsylvania and Borås Marshall Islands Navigation Charts Beijok Kaious The Marshall Islands in eastern Micronesia of the Southern Pacific Ocean consists of thirty-four coral atolls composed of more than one thousand islands and islets spread out across an area of several hundred miles. The islanders have mastered an ability to navigate between and among the almost-invisible islands—since the land masses are all so low that none can be seen except from a short distance away. In addition to closely observing wave and swell patterns, the Marshallese used the celestial constellations to navigate the ocean. They also determined the locations of the islands by observing the flight of the birds that nested on them. Song was also used to estimate the distance that the navigators traveled. Navigation is a form of storytelling and placemaking. For thousands of years Marshall Islanders used complex navigation techniques with charts made from coconut midribs and seashells. There are three kinds of Marshall Island “stick charts”: the Mattang , the Rebbelib , and the Meddo . The mattang was specifically designed to train individuals in the art of navigation while the Rebbelib covered a large section or the entirety of the islands. The charts consisted of curved and straight sticks. The curved sticks represented ocean swells and the straight sticks represented the currents and waves around the islands. The seashells represented the locations of the islands. Marshallese navigators memorized the charts and did not take them with them on their canoes. Each chart was unique and could only be interpreted by the person who made it. Today, different configurations of the charts are still being produced across the islands and used by young navigators learning to “read” the ocean. Beyond maps, the charts are thus built stories that speak to the past, present and future simultaneously. The examples of charts ( meddo ) presented in the exhibition, while made as souvenirs on the island of Majuro by Beijok Kaious and facilitated by others, still speak to the continuities and difficulties of navigating across oceans and territories that are rapidly disappearing with the onset of global climate crises. Olalekan Jeyifous How can one envision and design potential? Rather than observing historically overlooked areas of cities such as Crown Heights, Brooklyn or within megacities such as Lagos, Nigeria as impoverished, exclusionary, and open to demolition, as is commonly depicted for underserved areas throughout the world, Jeyifous’s immersive images and spaces speak to the potential for questioning present conditions and future possibilities. Many of the spaces in such locations are also subject to the extremes brought about by environmental instability. Such alternative futuristic visions are simultaneously based in real spaces and conditions while also shifting the gaze of top-down “development” efforts in the same cities that gentrify, displace and erase. These works recenter individuals and collectives as plural complex communities understood as fundamental contributors to the forging of the built environment. The politics of architecture is presented as an extension of how people build themselves as much as their communities. Recognizing that architecture can be built and imagined by these communities, buildings and infrastructures are configured not in opposition to each other but appended to and effectively built among existing real estate projects, socially-constructed spaces and historical monuments. Trained as an architect, and now working at the intersection of art, spatial practices, and public art, Nigerian-born Olalekan Jeyifous explores how the conventions of immersive digital renderings, collages and videos open spaces for critique and revelation of the contemporary built environment. b.1977 Lagos; lives and works in New York Rizvi Hassan Collaborators: Minhajul Abedin, Khwaja Fatmi, Prokolpo Shonapahar, Rohingya Artisans: Kamrunnesa & Jaber, Khairul Amin, Aminullah, Hosna Akhter & Shofiq, Nurul Islam, Shahabuddin, Imam Hossain, Ali Johor, Faruk, Artisans from Sylhet & Shonapahar: Rehana Akhter, Khatun begum, Rita akther, Nikhil Architecture, for Rizvi Hassan, has the capacity “to connect life, to strengthen mental health, to enhance culture, to mitigate conflicts, to enrich the ground, or just to ensure the basic but very important needs to have a better quality of life.” Among the sustainable structures constructed in the world’s largest refugee camps housing Rohingya refugees in and around Cox’s Bazar, Hassan approached these community-centered designs that amplify quality of life for both non-human and human beings. Each of the buildings is responsive to regional climate and environmental precarities, including cyclones, while also establishing safe spaces for vulnerable women and children. Collaborating with members of these communities as well as those building the structures often without the aid of technical drawings, Hassan deploys tools and processes that may be considered antithetical to conventional Western-based architecture practices. His work is as much a facilitator as a designer. Rather, utilizing regenerative materials such as bamboo and thatch, but also overlooked products including mattresses for insulation, Hassan’s buildings emphasize how the use of non-extractive materials alongside minimal industrial intervention encourages sympathetic design processes, dynamic interior spaces, and much-needed shelter and respite for countless individuals. Rizvi Hassan and his collaborators established their practice to work in precarious zones including camps as well as flood-prone districts in Bangladesh. He has stated that “the nation didn’t prepare me to be just an architect, but to be an educated person who can contribute to society. For that, it is important even just to be present, in places where people will need us.” His work reimagines buildings and spaces that empower all community stakeholders while also creating inclusive spaces for the perpetuation of beauty, belonging and survival. b. 1993 Dhaka; Office based in Dhaka and Cox’s Bazar Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) Camp Life, 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestry with stories of Rohingya refugee camp in BD. Participating Artisans: Yasmin, Shobika, Shomima, Roshida Facilitator: Sadya Mizan, Khurshida Permanent collection of RCMC Future Life, 2022-2023 Hand-embroidered tapestry with dream of future life of Rohingya refugee’s in BD Participating Artisans: Yasmin, Shobika, Showmima, Fatema, Ajida, Hosne Ara, Setara, Shamsunahar, Rokeya Facilitator: Rowson Akter, Asma Permanent collection of RCMC British physician and geographer, Dr. Francis Buchanan-Hamilton, published an article in 1799 that states, “the Mohammedans, who have long settled in Arakan, call themselves ‘Rooinga’, or natives of Arakan… the other are Rakhing … who adhere to the tenets of Buddha.” This early description not only establishes that there was an indigenous Muslim minority in the Arakan province of present-day Myanmar with the name Rohingya, but it further distinguishes them from the majority Rakhine Buddhist population. In 1982, the Burmese government enacted the 1982 Citizenship Law with a document that identifies 135 ethnic groups, which the government asserts had settled in Burma prior to 1823. The Rohingya, however, are not included as one of them. Subsequent decades of displacement and discriminatory policies incited by military coups and political brinkmanship has led to more than a million Rohingya refugees settling across numerous camps in Cox’s Bazar. Underlying their mass exodus into a country and spaces that are not their own, is the risk of negative psychosocial impacts stemming from, among other factors, a loss of cultural identity. Rohingya people have many stories, knowledge and wisdom that are rooted in mutual cooperation and care. “There is a dominant narrative that the Rohingya are poor and simple village people who don’t really have art or a developed material culture, and we want to show the world that this is not true,” describes Shahirah Majumdar. In 2022, the estab lishment of the Rohingya Cultural Memory Centre (RCMC) in Camp 18 was designed in tandem with extensive community participation and led by architect Rizvi Hassan. The RCMC is a Rohingya-led institution that collects, preserves, and disseminates the importance that knowledge narratives create goodwill among displaced communities. Even in the most unsettled conditions, cultural practice expressed through art is a significant mode through which generations of displaced communities can maintain their identity. The RCMC encourages empowerment across gender and social lines. Embroidery workshops provide an essential outlet for women artists, who gather to share personal experiences that are subsequently then stitched into tapestries. These are stories of being and becoming that further confer Rohingya histories into tangible forms. Women are trained by Bangladeshi artists who have helped them expand their artistic repertoire beyond traditional floral and faunal motifs, to even include human depictions. The embroidered tapestries presented here are powerful evocations that move past fear, anguish, and insecurity to illustrate stories of building that cannot be erased or forgotten. Sarker Protick jxb, OF RIVER AND LOST LANDS 2011 – 2023 [Ongoing] Inkjet Prints on Archival Paper ‘Of River and Lost lands’ is a series of photographs that surveys the River Padma (Ganges) and the waterborne land of Bangladesh. Made over a period of 12 years and continuing, the series describes a complex relationship of intimacy and ruthlessness between nature and humans on the margins. The life and ecology of rural Bengal, like much of both non-urban and urban worlds, have seen a continuous slow decay. It is a story of loss which begins with a hostile river resulting in devastating frequent erosion. With these occurrences, the landscape disappears and along with it, its many ways of life. Residents witness the river making abrupt changes in its course, drowning their villages, and resulting in forced migrations to other parts of the banks which too can erode without warning. Overnight, a stretch of land, and with it houses, farmlands, and livestock, will collapse and flow off in different directions. As uncontrolled sand mining proliferates, erosion increases at a fast pace. Now the River is not only a potential source of hostility, but also of casualty. Masses of land vanish and the river’s ecosystem changes in ways that cannot be undone. Shallow mud banks (chars) will emerge along with the influx of new sediments. The shore forms new land with the possibility to restart and build new communities for environmental and ecological refugees. Most places seen in these photographs have ceased to exist. As a result, the photographs survive as visual documents of these vanished and vanishing lands. Protick's works are built on long-term surveys rooted in Bangladesh. To make decaying memory tangible, to define the disappearance of a place without confining it, Protick’s often minimal, suspended, and atmospheric photography, video, and sound, explore how form and materiality often morph into the physicality of time. Accompanying its raptures and our inability to grasp or hold time, the process of image-making is a way to expand time, to make space for more subdued moments, or hint at the possibility of an embodied life. b. 1986, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Storia Na Lugar / [un]Grounding NarrativesPatti Anahory and César Schofield Cardoso Among the islands that comprise the nation of Cabo Verde in the eastern Atlantic Ocean, increasing territorial segregation, socioeconomic disparities, a general lack of quality of the built environment, are all present despite development indices for the country indicating one of the best performances in Africa. Ongoing phenomena including the rapid and asymmetrical growth of cities, large investments in mass tourism, the lack of alternatives of materials and construction techniques, are having an irreversible effect on people’s lives throughout the world. Coupled with an increasing desire to build tourist resorts on already environmentally sensitive areas of the archipelago, this video work explores how both sea and sky are becoming compromised in the pursuit of unsustainable, destructive economies. Given this, [un]Grounding Narratives focuses on communities facing exclusion, insecurity, or marginalization, while engaged with various forms of negotiation that reflect how social and natural environments can be repaired through cultural practices of affirmation and belonging. Storia Na Lugar merges the analytical visual languages of an architect and a visual artist alongside a joint pursuit of social and environmental ethics with multidisciplinary art and architectural works that explore forms of environmental and structural precarity in West Africa. Through engaging an international network of researchers, social activists, artists and professionals to engender action, Anahory and Schofield Cardoso seek to influence policy makers and promote a more inclusive development approach for the world’s cities and islands. Patti Anahory b. 1969 aboard a ship at Latitude 26o 50’ N Longitude 17o 05’ W; Based in New York City and Praia César Schofield Cardoso b. 1973 Mindelo; Based in Praia, Cabo Verde Suchi Reddy Reddymade Architects Between Earth and Sky Experiences found within architecture and the (built) environment play an essential role in shaping our capacity to engage with agency, equity, and empathy. Suchi Reddy’s guiding principle is “form follows feeling,” privileging human engagement as a mode for conceiving, designing, and building architectures that invite wonder and discovery. While working toward broader yet critical notions of “design justice,” alongside investigations of machine learning, the holistic design of spaces is recognized as an asset for the benefit of all and not just for some. Reddy considers how we, as individuals and collectives, encounter space as both a constructed and imagined phenomenon. The “mirages” installed as part of this exhibition are an exploration of how belief and the reimagining of boundaries through architectural intervention may contain limitless possibilities. Mirages become metaphors for societal rupture and repair. What is a building or space but an extension of who we are and who we wish to become? Uniting the architect’s wide-ranging portfolio of architecture and artistic work is a multidisciplinary approach guided by a belief in the power of architecture and spatial experience to impact how we feel, how we shape society, and the positive contribution we can offer through design. Interested in the complexities of uniting scientific studies of neuroaesthetics with overt spatial and haptic experiences found in building, the experiential works of Suchi Reddy and her office Reddymade, are at once built manifestations of extensive research of the interplay of human behavior with the material, metaphysical and structural forms that build us. b. Chennai; lives and works in New York We Are From Here Collective Conceived with the collective We Are From Here based in the Slave Island (Kompannaveediya) area of Colombo, Sri Lanka, this work highlights how deeply interconnected communities continually find their homes threatened by gentrification for State and corporate interests. Focused on Slave Island, a rapidly developing location in the center of Colombo where Rahman grew up and now resides, the ongoing project explores the threat of socio-political intersections that are gradually being erased for inequitable economic and political drivers that subsequently are displacing residents. While many residents are of Malay origin, the suburb has been home to multiple cultures, languages, and religions for generations. The area was first described under British Colonial rule as a holding area created by the Portuguese to hold slaves from the African continent. Such historically rich yet seemingly overlooked areas are not only disappearing throughout Colombo but also across cities throughout the world due to the misalignment of definitions of value based on land and property and not for humans. The collective’s multi-media work spotlights how entangled threads of multiple narratives that offer both sources for and representations of intimacy, precarity and memory. The project focuses on mobilising a creative peace-making movement that would help participants and beneficiaries alike to socially engage in their own unique realities through artistic and spatial production. We Are From Here is a multidisciplinary artist’s collective formed by Firi Rahman in 2018 including Parilojithan Ramanathan, Manash Badurdeen (and earlier including Vicky Shahjahan) whose work includes drawing, photography and sculpture, considers the threatened codependent relationships that people and endangered species have with their natural, lived and built environments. Their work has questioned the rise of endangered species in Sri Lanka. The collective and Rahman are particularly interested in the interactions between animals and urban environments, and the responsibility societies share in protecting biodiversity. b. 1990(Firi Rahman), Colombo; Collective established in 2018; lives and works in Slave Island (Kompannaveediya), Colombo Jaago Foundation One Thousand Futures Drawing has been a universal language that both children and adults share since time immemorial. From one’s first attempts at drawing, including the random marking with lines and scratches, and even after the first representations of the world around them, individuals are communicating to establish reciprocal meanings through images. Children of all ages use drawing to express their individual interpretations of experiences near and far. Yet, drawings, as language, can also be “read” and translated. For architects in particular, drawings are tools with which to imagine, capture and define ways of inhabitation. They possess scale, contain volumes, indicate varying temporalities, relay environmental considerations and “speak” to multiple audiences through commonly accepted forms. Our eyes and bodies can occupy the spaces found in a drawing. The project at the heart of this exhibition relies on drawing, as both an artform and as perhaps the most widespread language in the world, to transcend age, gender, background, culture, and other markers of identity. One thousand school-age children from schools across Bangladesh were asked by the Curator to respond to one question with their drawings: What might the future look like? According to governmental agencies in 2022, with around 98% of Bangladeshi “children of primary school age” enrolled in school, many students still have difficulty with basic reading skills. While education is essential to improving the economy of any nation, many people lack foundational lessons for living if they do not receive proper schooling. But all children, when provided with the materials, can draw—or at least create a visual means by which to communicate and thus establish complex meanings for both themselves and others. The drawings presented here are not fictional as they are responsive to an individual’s personal experience and vision while also sharing in multiple images of hope, of joy, of the possibility for becoming and living without the fear of environmental catastrophe. The drawings are active reminders that beyond the structures and boundaries that continually define us, we can draw a future for and about ourselves. JAAGO Foundation began in a single room in the Rayer Bazar slum area of Dhaka. In April 2007, Korvi Rakshand and a group of friends rented a room in Rayer Bazar, with a vision of improving the lives of the local youth. Rakshand and his friends began teaching 17 local children from the area. The first project of the JAAGO Foundation was born from providing relief supplies in response to a flood that destroyed part of the Rayer Bazar in 2007. Since then, the JAAGO Foundation has expanded to actively work toward the integration and participation of all youth in nation building through activities that support inclusion, transparency, and accountability. More than 50,000 volunteers today are working across the country in 11 schools and other sectors to ensure the participation of youth to support and ensure equitable access to education, environmental stability, and women’s rights throughout Bangladesh. Neha Choksi Sky Fold 2, 2013 Sky Fold 8, 2013 Folded paper and light cyanogram Collection of the Samdani Art Foundation What might be the dimensioning of the sky? Across time and geography, the sky has been both a backdrop and a foreground for countless civilizations. Centuries of song and poem have accessed the sky as an arbiter for the faithful and is never complete. It can be made invisible and while at other times, it is a preface for events to come. For some, the sky is a limitless expanse, continuous, open. And yet, for many others, the sky cannot be accessed, it is felt as the origin of sorrow, or even imminent danger. These works at once suggest the fragility and difficulty to contain the sky, its temporalities, and its power. While the grid may be understood as an ordering system, a mathematical invention that is supposed to relay equanimity while also potentially demarcating both economic and political conditions upon the ground; when imposed upon the sky, one is confronted with the possibility of its boundaries, both real and imagined. Choksi’s interest in forging temporary presence is, for the artist, “an affirmative act of destruction.” The Sky Fold cyanograms are photographic works that are embodiments of the means of their own production, folded paper, and light. Like a blueprint of the sky, these photographic prints capture those creases in time—perhaps moments of rupture—when the sky which we all share is made a reflection of the multiple worlds in which we live and dream. Neha Choksi deploys interdisciplinary approaches including performance, video, installation, and sculpture to redefine the poetics and transience of everyday life. Often reflecting on absence, her works employ an uncertain gravity that suggests an uneasy groundedness. Centered among logics that respond to the dialectics of socio-cultural contexts and their variable scales, Choski’s interdisciplinary multi-format works are both interventions into and responses to intersections of time, consciousness, and context. b.1973, USA and India

ALL PROJECTS Crafting Togetherness 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.

ALL PROJECTS Prisoners of Shothik Itihash Kunsthalle Basel The Samdani Art Foundation supported Naeem Mohaiemen's First European Solo Show at the Kunsthalle Basel curated by Adam Szymczyk. For many historians, the subject of their research is often made of, and defined by, events that have a specific cause, and set in motion a specific series of effects. This way of telling history adds up to a chain of historical facts that seem to explain themselves. Nations, figures, wars, treasons, and alliances build up the seeming only order, in which history can be read and taught. The difficulty of such history writing becomes apparent when it comes to the interpretation of the sheer mass of source material any historian has access to. Contradictions begin to amass and the history that previously might have been taken for granted changes its course. In his first solo show in Europe, Bangladeshi writer and visual artist Naeem Mohaiemen deploys the Kunsthalle Basel as a staging ground for what he calls the “exploded history book.” Trained as a researcher (he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University), Mohaiemen’s films, photography, mixed media objects, and essays are based on the commingling of major and minor histories in relation to the subcontinental triangle of nations (Bangladesh, India, Pakistan), and the particular histories of multiple partitions of borders. Mohaiemen’s arc takes in a pre-history of the modern nation state, by looking at Bangladesh’s “first” coming to postcolonial independence in 1947 as one of the two “wings” of Pakistan. In fact, this “first” moment was already foretold in the earlier 1905 British partition of Bengal into East and West Bengal (an event that was reversed in 1911 after sustained protests). In his narrative of this early era, Berlin and Rabindranath Tagore enter the stage; later we also find W. G. Sebald making an appearance within the war years. The country’s journey as “East Pakistan” proved precarious and new country borders were again drawn up after a brutal war in 1971—leading to full sovereignty for Bangladesh, and separation from Pakistan. From that point on, Mohaiemen develops a fragmentary history of the radical left in the 1970s, starting in Bangladesh, but radiating out to parallel underground left movements in Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. Throughout, there is the idea that this is not a narrative specific only to one set of nations. The title of the exhibition at the Kunsthalle and the accompanying publication—Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (which translates to “prisoners of correct history”) refers to the problematic of many histories, reflected in the constant alterations made to history books as governments, academics, and institutions change. The position of the citizen in relation to these official yet fluid versions of history remains in flux. Mohaiemen considers minor “unimportant” histories particularly relevant in regard to contested national identities, constantly changing based on the state’s fluctuating approach. His academic research and the archival material he has been collecting over the years, including his father’s photographs and great uncle’s novels, enable him to put into crisis the idea of singular history. At the Kunsthalle Basel, the sprawling history of South Asia through two partitions (1947 partition of India and Pakistan, and the 1971 separation of Pakistan and Bangladesh) is played out through a distribution of works, with a focus on particular protagonists in crucial years. Blending family and national histories, the projects construct an ongoing archive out of a series of unlikely objects: vintage stamps acquired from a puzzled philatelist, sandstone molds that reverse the first ever photographs taken by Mohaiemen’s father, expired polaroids that document the ghostly residue of victims and assailants, secret military recordings of hijack negotiations, fragments from interviews with US Embassy officials, incomplete blueprint drawings, timelines, and, always, copious amounts of text– elliptical, but also carrying “clues” of an actual event to be unraveled. GALLERY 1 [1948] Kazi in Nomansland tells the story of iconic Bengali poet Kazi Nazrul Islam, a figure some believe could have also won a Nobel Prize like the poet Rabindranath Tagore, if not for the silent biases that left the work of this Muslim poet from a subalternized rural background internationally unrecognized. A staunch opponent of the plan to partition British India into Muslim and Hindu nations, Nazrul was rendered a mute, helpless witness to the madness of 1947 when a mysterious neurological disease destroyed his capacity for speech. Gradually Nazrul lost all his power of speech and memory, surviving another thirty years as an empty husk. Throughout this period, his “presence” was deployed numerous times for ceremonial purposes—first by post-1947 India, and then by post-1971 Bangladesh. In a series of images sliced out of official press photos of Nazrul, Mohaiemen constructs a monologue that Nazrul may have spoken if his power of speech had ever returned. The final image is of Nazrul at his funeral; here the perspective is flipped, so that the sunglass-clad eyes of President Ziaur Rahman come to the forefront. Nazrul’s family wanted to take him back to India to bury him, but the request was refused by the Bangladeshi state. History’s ironies—President Zia did not know, at that time, that five years later the next grand funeral would be his own, after a brutal assassination. Unable to speak (and therefore defend himself), Nazrul became a blank canvas for competing fantasies of the place of the Muslim “citizen” after 1947—did he belong to the “pure” homeland of Pakistan or was he an equal claimant to India? All of these ideas waged war over Nazrul’s mute body. Small wonder then that Nazrul is the only figure honored by the national stamps of all three countries (India, Pakistan, and then Bangladesh)—represented here through three delicate towers made entirely out of vintage stamps collected from post offices and obsessive philatelists. [1947] Schizophrene draws on the poetry of Bhanu Kapil, who ties together the partition of India, contemporary migrant lives in Europe, and mental illness as a metaphor for the displacements of modernity. Mohaiemen draws inspiration from the origin story of Kapil’s book of poetry, derived from recovered fragments of her abandoned novel on 1947. GALLERY 2 & 3 [1953] Rankin Street, 1953 constructs a melancholic portrait of a sprawling home, and an extended, multigenerational ekannoborti (“those who eat each meal together”) family that has been pulled apart by the ruthless rush of capital that has rendered contemporary Dhaka into a relentless real estate speculative bubble. The core of this project is a set of hundreds of negatives that Mohaiemen’s father shot around the family home in 1953 with his first camera. The negatives for this year are meticulously preserved, each in a separate sleeve. But all subsequent years are missing, possibly thrown away during the family’s move away from this fabled Rankin Street house where the extended family lived in the 1950s. Does it matter to history that Mohaiemen’s grandfather, Emdad Ali, received this land as part of the post-1947 Pakistan government’s attempt to create a new Muslim middle class? Or that Ali, as the first Bengali Muslim to receive a “gold medal” in Sanskrit language, represented a vanishing way of being Muslim and syncretic? Or, telescoping forward, what is the significance of the year 1953, a mere twelve months after the 1952 Language Riots that first shook apart the Bengali peoples’ faith in their place in united Pakistan? These event histories lurk unspoken in the background, while in the foreground Mohaiemen is seemingly focused on reconstructing a family and a home that is theoretically his, but in actuality scattered all over the world long before he became an adult. In fact, the noble patriarch figure of Emdad Ali, ruling with a stern hand over an extended family, gently dictating choices of school (he was an obsessive fan of Jadav’er Patigonith mathematics), career, and marriage are a way of life that vanished in contemporary Bangladesh with the arrival of neoliberalism. Here, a film gives kinesis to the discovery of a forgotten box, line drawings build a blueprint of the house on top of faded photographs, and sandstone molds “speak back” to his father’s work—and all along, there is a tangential imagining of the larger histories. GALLERY 4 [1971] Der Weisse Engel is a short film that continues Mohaiemen’s experiments with using text on screen to narrate story, almost in the mode of inter-titles such as were used for the silent era (these explorations reach a fuller intensity in the 70 minute film United Red Army). The brutal 1971 war that ruptured Pakistan and created Bangladesh is an ongoing haunting figure for the region, and much of Bangladeshi cinema and literature oscillates around the war in increasingly ritualized, performative ways. In a conscious move away from that exhausted national discourse, Mohaiemen deliberately makes very little visual work about the war (although he has addressed it extensively in his academic writing). Here too, he has approached the war in a tangential way, using artifacts that are in no way familiar to historians of 1971. The film repurposes one scene and the orchestral soundtrack of John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man (1976), in order to draw an oblique contrast between the rich popular vein of stories of delayed justice for individual German perpetrators of the Holocaust and the absence of any similar narratives directed toward the Pakistan army after 1971. The accompanying photographs pair dialogue from the Kafkaesque “dentist torture” scene in the same film with a contemporary staging of a moment of violence in Bangladesh. Hanif Kureishi’s film about London burning, a famous cameo in Casablanca (1942), and Lars Von Trier’s Zentropa (1991) are all referenced, but with a speed that refuses to let the viewer settle on the details. GALLERY 5 [1974] Afsan’s Long Day is the latest film in a cycle of projects (The Young Man Was) about the 1970s ultra-left. Each chapter explores a different facet of the radical left of the 1970s in Bangladesh, but also with linkages to Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. In this film, Mohaiemen builds a series of interconnected vignettes that travel with Jean Paul Sartre, Joschka Fischer, Rote Armee Fraktion, and finally settles on the diaries of a Bangladeshi journalist who recounts an almost-execution. GALLERY 6 This room builds the show to a peak, as it brings together multiple projects that mark the turbulent 1970s. [1973] The Year Brought Many Problems for Imperialists, derives from a Bangladeshi magazine story from that period that hints at the convulsions that were shaking the world from Chile to India. However, as Allende’s tragic end in the Presidential palace showed, the forces of global Imperialism struck back quickly against the “problems,” and by the end of the decade hopes for global revolution had been crushed, replaced by authoritarian regimes. Though this Bengali magazine’s optimism seems tragically misplaced, the questions of what that dream was and how it came together that year remains relevant. [1975] I have killed Pharaoh, I am not afraid to die reconstructs another violent assassination of a state leader, this time one that seemed to be the chronicle of a death foretold but not prevented. The exploded Polaroids in resin that accompany the text and photograph pairs stage the deaths of two sets of people. In one, we can make out the outline of newspaper photographs (captured on Polaroid) of the assassination victims. In the other, the assassins themselves, executed after a trial twenty years later. [1976] Red Ant Mother, Meet Starfish Nation extracts a series of “key phrases” from a journalists’ report on the alleged CIA connection to the coup and pairs them with a lonely vigil at the graveyard of the slain leader. The other two pieces in this room lead up to Gallery 7’s film. [1977] You Will Roam Like a Madwoman is a single issue of a popular Bangladeshi magazine of the 1970s. This is the special issue that came out during the 1977 hijack of Japan Airlines to Dhaka. Mohaiemen has built an annotated archive of the entire magazine, translating one phrase from each page for his extended “footnotes” on the wall. The arc traced here ranges from a stern list of the number of dead during an attempted airport coup to a spurned lover’s letter where he tells a woman she will one day be mad in grief for him. [1977] United Red Army::Timeline charts two timelines, of Bangladesh’s journey to 1977, and the arc of international hijacking over the same ten years—the two streams merge to land the crisis of the Japanese Red Army on a Dhaka Airport runway in 1977. GALLERY 7 [1977] United Red Army is Mohaiemen’s most ambitious and widely seen film. Building entirely off the recorded negotiation tapes between the Air Force chief in Dhaka control tower and the lead Japanese hijacker on the plane, the film slaloms between tense one-upmanship and moments of surreal humor. The work looks at a time when hijackers made proclamations such as “we hurt bourgeois people,” but the unintended finale on the runway shows that global south nations often paid a heavy price in “collateral damage.”For the last ten years, Mohaiemen has practiced forms of history writing that escape the journal, the book, and the classroom. He does this by staging interventions that bring together photography, film, and mixed media objects, in order to play out the lacuna, bylanes, and diversions from the “main events” of large historical events. Inspired by the recent research on the Haitian slave rebellion as a possible source of Hegel’s idea of the dialectic, Mohaiemen works on bringing the history of decolonization, and post-liberation antimonies, into the main narrative frame. While Mohaiemen’s exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel can be understood as an expanded history book, the accompanying publication becomes a simultaneously concentrated and expanded version of his work as an artist. We, the readers and viewers, become witnesses of a past that imprisoned people within history, while also liberating them from other, even more limited horizons. This publication brings together essays and images by Naeem Mohaiemen. The experience delivers a counter-history of minor events that shaped the artist, his family, and the nation. Click the link below for more information: http://www.kunsthallebasel.ch/en/exhibition/naeem-mohaiemen-prisoners-of-shothik-itihash/

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

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

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