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

ALL PROJECTS Moving Image Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming: Videos, Films and Talks Programme Curated by the Otolith Group (Anjalika Sagar and Kodwo Eshun) To use images, sounds, voices, gestures, expressions, noises, colours,spaces and silences to deprogram the inherited orders of temporality, chronology and history that seek to manage and encourage the form of the present and the fate of the future. To formulate audiovisual projects that operate as diagrams for reprogramming the parameters of the present. To intervene in the timelines of the present in order to hack the lines of time. To be guided by an imagination of the future that works on and in and through the present. These impulses, intimations and imperatives subtend the works of the artists selected by Kodwo Eshun and Anjalika Sagar of The Otolith Group for Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming. Works by Ayo Akingbade, Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Tony Cokes, Esi Eshun, Black Quantum Futurism, Mohammed Harb, Louis Henderson, Onyeka Igwe, Salman Nawati, Ana Pi, Morgan Quaintance, Alfred Santana, Rania Stephan, Sharif Waked and Rehana Zaman can be understood as rituals for the deprogramming of time, reprogramming in time and programming with time. Rites that aim to bring viewers face to face with the violence of images and the threat of sounds so as to intervene in the foreclosures of colonial time and racial space. Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming includes conversations with invited artists and theorists. The videos directed by Hadel Assali, Taysir Batniji, Mohammed Harb, Salman Nawati and Sharif Waked were programmed by Jasbir Puar and Francesco Sebregondi for the installation Future Lives of Return, 2019, and commissioned by Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Alfred Santana Alfred Santana is an independent filmmaker and photographer with numerous award-winning documentaries, public affairs films and videos that have aired on both network and public television. Mr. Santana’s production company, Al Santana Productions, produces documentary, narrative and experimental work for television, the web and theatrical presentation. The company also produces industrial and corporate videos. Voices of the Gods examines the Akan and Yoruba religions, two West African traditions practiced within the United States today. It looks at their cosmologies, their use of music, dance and medicine in various ceremonies and rituals. The film includes contemporary and historical examples of the influences of these religions in secular African-American culture, which in turn influenced mainstream American society, more through culture than religion, and in some ways, even politics. Ana Pi Ana Pi is an artist working with image and choreography, a contemporary dancer and pedagogue, a researcher-lecturer performer on peripheral dances and she also collaborates on projects of various kinds. NOIRBLUE opens space to fiction and an atlantic navigation of some peripheral bodies. This exercise interrogates presence, absence, speeches and time to produce an extemporary dance aligned to two specific colors: the blackness of the skin and the ultramarine blue pigment. Ayo Akinbade Ayo Akingbade is a British Nigerian artist and filmmaker who has produced a number of acclaimed artist films exploring the contemporary Black experience in London particularly in relation to housing. She is an alumnus of Sundance Ignite and New Contemporaries. The future of social housing is threatened by the AC30 Housing Bill. Dear Babylon is set in London’s East End, a trio of art students are eager to raise awareness about their neighbourhood, especially the lives of tenants and people who work on the estate. Dear Babylon, 2019, 21 min. Courtesy of the filmmaker Set in 1985 and the present day, So They Say (2019, 11 min) explores and reflects on the often forgotten histories of black and brown community struggle in the East London borough of Newham. Street 66 (2018, 13 min) chronicles the life of Ghanaian housing activist Dora Boatemah and her influence on the regeneration of Angell Town Estate in Brixton, South London. Dr. Theodora Boatemah MBE was born in Kumasi, Ghana in 1957, where her mother worked in President Kwame Nkrumah’s cabinet. In 1987, she founded the Angell Town Community Project and campaigned for the community-controlled regeneration of the Angell Town Estate in Brixton. Dora was awarded an MBE in 1994 for services to the community in Brixton and received an honorary doctorate from Oxford Brookes University in 1996. Dora died in 2001 at the age of 43. Black Quantum Futurism Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalised communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, video, and object series continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. All Time is Local, 2019, 5 min. Courtesy of the filmmaker Time Travel Experiments (Experimental Time Order) (2017, 9:30 min) documents experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. The depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies, and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. Black Quantum Futurism Black Quantum Futurism Collective is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips exploring the intersections of futurism, creative media, DIY-aesthetics, and activism in marginalised communities through an alternative temporal lens. BQF Collective has created a number of community-based events, experimental music projects, performances, exhibitions, zines, and anthologies of experimental essays on space-time consciousness. Like politics and the weather, all time is local. Considering time’s intimate relationship to space and locality, this text, video, and object series continues the work of BQF in recovering and amplifying historical memory of autonomous Black communal space-times in North Philadelphia, meditating on the complex, contested temporal and spatial legacies of historical, liberatory Black futurist projects based primarily in North Philadelphia, such as Progress Aerospace Enterprises, Zion Gardens, and Berean Institute. Time Travel Experiments (Experimental Time Order) (2017, 9:30 min) documents experiments from an embedded time travel manual in the speculative fiction book Recurrence Plot (and Other Time Travel Tales), written and published by Rasheedah Phillips. The depicted time travel experiments employ the concept of Black Grandmother Paradoxes, which emphasise matrilineal or matri-curvature timelines that are feminine and communally-generated, where the future emerges into the past by way of omens, prophecies, and symbols, while the past is a space of open possibility, speculation, and active revision by multiple generations of people situated in the relative future. Black Quantum Futurism Visual Astrolabe (2015, 7:07 min) focuses on the mysterious Antikythera Mechanism, an astrolabe known as the first computer, that was recovered in 82 fragments from a sunken shipwreck off the island of Antikythera around 1900. Although it is widely believed to have been constructed by a Greek astronomer around 100 BCE, this origin story has not been confirmed. No other such technologically complex artifact appeared anywhere in Europe until the late 14th century. In 2015 AD, BQF Theorists unearthed rare, previously unseen records and unheard sound clips claiming to detail the true origins of the mechanism as designed and constructed by a secret society in ancient Ifriqiyah as a device for time displacement. On the occasion of the 50 year anniversary of the enactment of the United States Fair Housing Act, Black Space Agency Training Video (2018, 4:09 min) explores the chronopolitical imaginaries of the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements during the space race, particularly as it unfolded in North Philadelphia in 1968. The series follows the pattern of entanglements in the fight for affordable and fair housing, displacement/space/land grabs, and gentrification for a better understanding of its present day implications on Black spatial-temporal autonomy. Futurist Garvey // Gravity WAVES Sound Image Study (2016, 2:42 min) represents one example of futurity in the Black diaspora, which predates the coining of the term afrofuturism. Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and the Black Star Line envisioned the future of Black Americans as a return, by ship, to Africa, and took practical steps to create an alternative economy to achieve these goals. Imagine how different the course of history would be, had the Black Star Line succeeded with its stated mission. On the other hand, one can see the spread of the Garveyite waves of gravity, his impact on the future of Black America-to-come, as a catalyst and inspiration for other Black resistance movements, with an influence in name and philosophy capable of binding space-time. Esi Eshun Esi Eshun’s work encompasses poetry, performance and music making and has been presented across a number of platforms including Norway’s 2018 Radio Space Borealis Festival, Resonance FM and Wave Farm FM, and at live venues including Iklectik, New River Studios and The Intimate Space. Unfolding through a series of enigmatic tableaux, told through the artist’s poetry, voice, field recordings and improvised score, The Beast (2018, 8 min) takes the listener on a dreamlike journey through myth, collective memory and fable, to a place where dark undercurrents linking the city of London, the West African coast, muck, gold and Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial classic, The Wretched of the Earth, coincide. Francesco Sebregondi Francesco Sebregondi is an architect and a researcher, whose work explores the intersections of violence, technology, and the urban condition. He is a researcher and project coordinator at the independent research agency Forensic Architecture, as well as the co-editor of Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press, 2014). His current research examines the architecture of the Gaza blockade. Hadeel Assali Hadeel Assali is a Palestinian-American filmmaker, writer, and currently a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Columbia University. She created several experimental short films centered around the Gaza Strip, which have been screened in several small film festivals, academic conferences, and art exhibitions. Assali is currently working on her first feature-length documentary. Daggit Gaza is a play on translation, as the spicy tomato salad made in Gaza (called daggah) also means ‘the pounding of Gaza’. Preparation happens whilst a phone conversation between Houston and Gaza serves as voiceover commentary. Jasbir Puar Jasbir Puar is a queer theorist and Professor and Graduate Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Puar is the author of award-winning books Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007) and The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017). She has written widely on South Asian disaporic cultural production in the United States, United Kingdom and Trinidad, LGBT tourism, terrorism studies, surveillance studies, biopolitics and necropolitics, disability and debilitation, theories of intersectionality, affect, and assemblage; animal studies and posthumanism, homonationalism, pinkwashing, and the Palestinian territories. Louis Henderson Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who experiments with different ways of working with people to address and question our current global condition defined by racial capitalism and ever-present histories of the European colonial project. Developing an archaeological method in cinema, his films explore the sonic space of images, geologic time, haunted landscapes and voices within archives. Wandering from a study of the handwritten memoirs of Toussaint Louverture in the French National Archives to his prison cell in the Jura mountains in which they were written, Bring Breath to the Death of Rocks proposes an archaeology of the colonial history of France buried within its landscapes and institutions. If stratigraphy is the writing of strata, here we have a reading of this strata in which the fossilised history of Louverture can be brought to life through a geologic haunting. The film dramatises the escape of Louverture’s ghost from his castle prison (through the body of a young Haitian researcher) into a form of marronage and errantry within the fields of snow and a dark baroque-like cave. The film offers what Glissant described in the introduction to his play Monsieur Toussaint as ‘a prophetic vision of the past’. We hear an echo, a spiral retelling. Mohamed Harb Mohammed Harb was born in Gaza and graduated from Al Najah University, Nablus, with a BA in Fine Arts in 2001. He is a member of the Palestinian Association of Fine Artists and since 2003 has been working as a director at the Palestine satellite TV channel in Gaza. Harb has also participated in many local, regional and international exhibitions, festivals and workshops, in Europe and the Arab world. He lives and works in Gaza. Light From Gaza is a meditation on the waxing and waning of access to light and other daily necessities due to the titration of electricity in Gaza. Morgan Quaintance Morgan Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. His moving-image work has been shown recently at LIMA, Amsterdam, Cubitt Gallery, London; Jerwood Space, London; the 14th Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, London Film Festival 2018, and November Film Festival. Bataaxalu Ndakaaru (Letter from Dakar) surveys aspects of the vibrant grassroots arts and culture scene in the Senegalese capital of Dakar. Highlighting the difference between the openness and innovation of community run spaces versus the staid professionalism of established galleries and museums, the film offers the first critical look at the much touted Museum of Black Civilisations. Another Decade (2018, 26:50 min) combines archive and found footage from the 1990s, with recently shot 16mm film and standard definition video. Focusing on testimonies and statements made by artists, theorists and cultural producers that are still pertinent over two decades later, the film is propelled by the sense reality that very little socio-cultural or institutional change has taken place in the United Kingdom. While recent attention paid to the ’90s casts a largely apolitical and monocultural view over the decade, the work seeks to exhume evidence buried in the shallow grave of cultural amnesia of another, more political, iconoclastic, and confrontational decade that promised a future still yet to arrive. Onyeka Igwe Onyeka Igwe works between cinema and installation. Her research-based practice uses dance, voice, archive and text to expose a multiplicity of narratives exploring the physical body and geographical place as contested sites of cultural and political meaning. This is a story of the artist’s grandfather, the story of the ‘land’ and the story of an encounter with Nigeria –retold at a single point in time, in a single place. The artist is trying to tell a truth in as many ways as possible. The Names Have Changed tells us the same story in four different ways: a folktale of two brothers rendered in the broad, unmodulated strokes of colonial British moving images; a Nollywood TV series, on VHS, based on the first published Igbo novel; a story of the family patriarch, passed down through generations; and the diary entries from the artist’s first solo visit to her family’s hometown. Rania Stephan Rania Stephan has directed videos and creative documentaries notable for their play with genres, and the long-running investigation of memory, identity, archeology of image and the figure of the detective. Anchored in the turbulent reality of her country, her documentaries give a personal perspective to political events. She gives raw images a poetic edge, filming chance encounters with compassion and humour. The Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni is a rapturous elegy to a rich era of film production in Egypt, lapsed today, through one of its most revered actress: Soad Hosni, who from the 1960 into the 1990s, embodied the modern Arab woman in her complexity and paradoxes. Pieced exclusively from VHS footage of films starring Soad Hosni, the film is constructed as a tragedy in three acts where the actress tells her dreamed life story. Irreverent, playful, marvellous, serious, the film proposes a singular rewriting of a golden period of Egyptian cinema, enacted by an exceptional artist, tragic star, symbol of modern Arab womanhood. Entirely taken from an old Egyptian science fiction film The Master of Time (1987) about an illuminated scientist wanting to extend human life, Threshold (2018, 11:30 min) is built on the intuition that if this science fiction film were emptied of all its fictional elements, retaining only the transition shots featuring doors, gates and boundary crossings, The Master of Time would reveal its quintessence: its obsession with eternity and the extension of time. Here, the science fiction experience is doubled. This new condensed version of The Master of Time lies on the threshold of fiction and abstraction, narration and experimentation, cinema and art. Double Cross (2018, 3:40 min) reduces the intricate labyrinth of Threshold into an infernal drama of entrance and exit that condenses space and time into an infernal loop of crossing, recrossing and re-recrossing. Double Cross is Rania Stephan’s profound meditation on the power of montage: an ode to the plot twist and the fatal destiny of film noir enacted in the eternal passage from illumination to occlusion. Memories of a Private Eye (2015, 30:35 min) is the first chapter in a trilogy which investigates the filmmaker’s personal archive. Evoking the language of film noir, it foregrounds a fictional detective to help unfold deep and traumatic memories. The film spirals around a lost image: the only moving image of the filmmaker’s dead mother. How is absence lived? What remains of love, war and death with the passing of time? These are the questions that are delicately displayed for contemplation. Weaving together images from different sources (private archive, history of the cinema, television, you-tube) while investigating the past, the film unfolds into a labyrinthic maze to create a blueprint of remembrance itself. Rehana Zaman Rehana Zaman is based in London, working with moving image and performance. Her work considers the interplay of multiple social dynamics that constitute subjects along particular socio-political formations. These narrative based pieces, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation and collaboration with others. How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? emerges from a nine-month collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers, a new women’s film collective made up of young women from Somali and Pakistani backgrounds. The film documents the group as they work together to create a thriller focusing on a teenage girl’s attempt to find a missing local boy. Comprised of candid footage captured during the workshop process, behind-the-scenes filming and archive footage of antiracist organising in the aftermath of the Toxteth race riots, the film questions how modes of representation and societal structures are gendered and racialised. Your Ecstatic Self (2019, 31:50 min) is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency. Salman Nawati Salman Nawati was born in Gaza in 1987. He works as a Coordinator of Plastic Art in Qattan Centre for the Child. In 2011 he worked as a lecturer in the Department of Painting within the Faculty of Fine Art at Al-Aqsa University, Gaza. His works were shown in group exhibitions internationally. Port Hour shows the artist’s vexed relationship with the Gaza port, where he struggles with the sea which acts as both freedom and barrier. Scenario (2013, 2:43 min) is a meditation on movement, and an oblique reference to maiming. Sharif Waked Sharif Waked was born in Nazareth in 1964. He studied Fine Art and Philosophy at Haifa University, Israel between 1983 and 1986. His work critically engages the prejudices, propaganda, and institutional violence that inform Middle Eastern politics. By creating striking juxtapositions between the representations of Arabs and Islam in the media and injustices experienced in reality. Waked reveals the ways that power, politics, and aesthetics are powerfully inscribed on the surface of everyday life. In 2009, two donkeys were transformed into zebras in Gaza by an entrepreneur whose zoo was badly damaged in the Israeli incursion earlier that year. The aftermath of this cross-dressing of species is the subject of Bath Time, where a donkey takes a good shower after a long day saturated with the spectator’s gaze and laughter at the Gaza Zoo. Taysir Batniji Taysir Batniji was born in Gaza and lives and works in Paris. Since the 1990s Batniji has worked mainly with video and photography, two ‘light’ mediums that fit with a career which has involved much travelling to and from between Palestine and Europe. He documents Palestinian reality in a physically vivid, anti-spectacular way by focusing on displacement, intermediate states, and the inhibition of movement. These objective issues which are part and parcel of the social, political and cultural context in Palestine also reflect the position of the artist as a witness and contributor to the life of his country, but also the Western art scene. Transit presents a silent slideshow, made up of photographic images, taken at border passages between Egypt and Gaza, reflecting the passing of time and the difficult and often impossible conditions of mobility for today’s Palestinians. Tony Cokes Tony Cokes investigates identity and opposition through reframing and repositioning. He questions how race and gender influence the construction of subjectivities, and how they are perceived through ‘representational regimes of image and sound’ as perpetuated by Hollywood, the media and popular culture. His assemblages consist of archival footage, media images, text commentary, and pop music. Face Value can be said to have started with a short text that Cokes was asked to write prior to the American release of Lars von Trier’s Manderlay in 2006. At the time he decided to focus his commentary on one section of the film the end credits featuring the David Bowie song Young Americans. The text was not published, but while writing it a friend informed him of some quotations from David Bowie that seemed to be relevant to it. When in 2011 he had an opportunity to publish a portion of the text in a new context, another friend and colleague suggested some then recent quotations from von Trier himself that might relate to the project. What started as a long epigraph to a text became a sequence of images. The text in Evil 12 (edit B) Fear, Spectra and Fake Emotions, (2009, 11:43 min) is excerpted from Brian Massumi’s essay Fear (The Spectrum Said), which discusses the Bush Administration’s terror alert colorcoding system as a method to modulate public affect via media representation. The insertion of a soundtrack by Modeselektor with uncanny vocals from Paul St. Hilaire (remixed by Dabrye) seeks to double (ghost) and thereby underline the point of Massumi’s complex media textual analysis. Mikrohaus, or the Black Atlantic? (2006–2008, 31:07 min) presents transcribed text interviews set to music. The project was inspired by the writing of music critic Philip Sherburne, who coined the term “Micro House’ to describe the conjuncture of minimal techno and house music tropes in the early 21st century. Central to the video’s intent is foregrounding how black pop cultural forms are consumed and then redeployed to produce hybrid interventions in today’s global contexts. The work also features fragmented interviews with German techno/ house producers framed by the comments of Detroit techno artists discussing the relation between their practices, which reference Afro-American musical traditions, and questions of racial politics, perception, and identity.

ALL PROJECTS Condition Report 4: Stepping Out of Line; Art Collectives and Translocal Parallelism Envisioned by Koyo Kouoh, Marie Helene Pereira, and Dulcie Abrahams Altass of RAW Material Company, Dakar Stepping Out of Line; Art Collectives and Translocal Parallelism Envisioned by Koyo Kouoh, Marie Helene Pereira, and Dulcie Abrahams Altass of RAW Material Company, Dakar Su sanxleẽn booloo wot wer / Ants come together to find wellbeing Béy, bu àndul ak béy, ànd ak cere / Goats who leave the herd, find themselves in the company of couscous Wolof proverbs Above our heads, this very second, thousands upon thousands of birds are flying in flocks. From the lightest shift in the incline of feathers is born a collective moment that allows for protection and efficacy whilst flying over great distances. From the ground, there appears to be perfect synchronicity within these flock movements, a marvel that scientists are still trying to understand. A flick of a wing, banal on its own, is the genesis of significant impact when performed with other, similar winged beings. This fascinating and naturally occurring activity is a useful starting point for Condition Report 4: Stepping out of line; Art collectives and trans-local parallelism, which exists as a forum for addressing practices and forms of production that take the cooperating, non-hierarchical group as a guiding principle. The fourth edition of RAW Material Company’s biannual symposium program exploring the artistic landscape in Africa and beyond, CR4 delves into examples of collectivity both historic and contemporary to assess the scope of change possible through the ignition of our interconnectedness. Dreams of cooperation are not always fulfilled, and we acknowledge that the same spirit of resistance, survival, or predation that facilitates collective action can wane or backfire, leaving members out of formation. Yet the aesthetic, physical, and social fields of intervention that are the focus and fodder of collectives merit attention, particularly given the role they play in the seismic movements that are the focus of DAS 2020. This symposium, through its form and content, opens up the different lines of inquiry that emerge from collective practice, with a particular focus on webs of international solidarities. Writers and curators are in dialogue with members of collectives, allowing both critical analysis and historical production to sit side by side with practice. We begin with an investigation into the formal aesthetic of the collective and the forms, structures, and shapes that emerge both organically and strategically when we flock together. Drawing on both traditions of Bengali ensemble music and the Senegalese Penc – a structure for community dialogue – allows us to enact collective forms and give shape to this coming together. Moreover, the space we use in Dhaka is designed to let the outside in and vice versa, an acknowledgment of the large number of collective practices that are currently threatened by the displacement of entire communities for economic or climatic reasons, who are thus separated from the material space that plays an active role in the affirmation of collective existence. Moving from concerns around form, the conversation will unpack different propositions for making histories of collective practice and collective practices of making histories. Polyphonic in their very nature, collective movements have proven complex to anchor in any one narrative. Members may tell different and contradictory stories, highlighting aspects of particular relevance to their own journey or the wider circles within which they move, beyond the sphere of the collective itself. And yet we know that these stories must be told. If we accept this reality, can we think of the generative space between the swarm behavior of two neighboring bees? What historiographical approaches are necessary for unearthing and learning from gossip, witness accounts, and inconsistency? As articulated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, how can we ‘claim history as a participatory experience’? International collectivism can at times be even harder to map, across linguistic lines and countries with differing relationships to the archive, and yet we must learn to become more supple and more creative in our historiographical methodology if we want to do justice to these histories. Engaging in a more frontal manner with the contemporary moment and the crescendo of interest within both the art world and the fields of social sciences and humanities in collectives and collectivism – indeed as a fully-fledged ‘ism’ – we will also ask questions related to the relationship between collective practice and economy. Are visions of commons and non-hierarchical labor structures purely utopian within a global, late-capitalist order? Must collectives shun capitalism completely to be legitimate, or is it that collective practice must fall on either side of a state/ private dichotomy? How do collectives create models of institutions that disrupt this opposition? How do collectives engage with informal and bartering economies to survive, produce, and endure, and what lessons can be learned from these strategies? Challenging traditional notions of authorship and therefore ownership, artist collectives also challenge and reject the vision of the mythical, singular, and historically male artist, drawing attention to the plurality of skills and efforts needed to generate and support a project. Continuing in this vein, it is worthwhile to pause on how collective practice can influence how formal institutions function, and to consider to what ends and through which channels we can create new alliances of support across domains. Many collectives also tend to have a shorter lifespan than formal institutions, and we will consider the death and dispersal of collectives as key moments in their existence. When birds disband from the flock formation, it signifies that the need that brought them together is no longer relevant; a danger has passed, or the aerodynamic support they provided one another has given sufficient time for rest. To be cognizant of how to collectively separate, shift energies, and acknowledge the end of a mission is a skill that will also be discussed; what happens after the seismic movement? Fundamentally, CR4 is an invitation to think about the ‘we’ and the forms of our relationships with one another. We will question and map strategies that allow the flock to fly and get the job done, and then to leave formation without injury, in a bid to open up this prescient field of study while learning and practising how we can live better together. Featuring Akaliko Centre for Historical Reenactment (Kemang Wa Lehulere) Chimurenga (Zipho Dayile) Cosmin Costinas Depth Of the Field (Emeka Okereke) Elizabeth A. Povinelli Gidree Bawlee (Salma Jamal Moushum) Green Papaya (Merv Espina) Hong Kong Artist Union – KY Wong Jatiwangi (Ismal Muntaha) John Tain Joydeb Roaja & Hill Group Laboratoire Agit’Art (Pascal Nampemanla Traoré) Luta ca caba inda (Sonia Vaz Borges) Marina Fokidis Mustafa Zaman Pathshala (Taslima Akhter) ruangrupa (Farid Aditama Rakun) Shawon Akand Shomoy Group (Dhali Al Mamoon) Shoni Mongol Adda (Tarana Willy) Somankidi Coura (Raphaël Grisey and Bouba Touré) The Otolith Group Opening Speech of Diana- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Ogadha' Ekattata | তরঙ্গ by Akaliko- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Keynote by Elizabeth Povinelli -Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Indigenous Resistance and Gender in South Asia and the Pacific History- CR 4 by RAW at DAS2020 Joydeb Roaja, Hill Artist Group, Greg Dvorak, Mata Aho Collective, Taloi Havini Forms of Collectives- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Jatiwangi (Ismal Muntaha), Laboratoire Agit’Art (Pascal Nampemanla Traoré), Pathshala (Taslima Akhter)- Moderated by Marina PENC on Forms of Collectives- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Moderated by Mustafa Zaman, the PENC reflects on the forms of collectives and the future of them. Making (Collective) History-Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Luta ca caba inda, Guinea Bissau – Chimurenga, South Africa – Gidree Bawlee, Bangladesh – Moderated by Shawon Akand Collective Practice and Economy- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Somankidi Coura, Mali – Hong Kong Artist Union, Hong Kong – Shoni Mongol Adda, Bangladesh – Moderated by ruangrupa The Death of the Collective- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 Green Papaya, Philippines – Depth Of Field, Nigeria – Shomoy Group, Bangladesh – Moderated by Cosmin Costinas PENC Writing Collective History- Condition Report 4 by RAW Material Company at DAS 2020 The PENC open forum discussion session on writing collective history is moderated by Otolith Group

ALL PROJECTS Manifesto of fragility, 16th Biennale de Lyon 14 September - 31 December 2022, Lyon, France Munem Wasif's works were shown extensively across three venues: The Fagor Factory, Guimet Museum, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon at the 16th Biennale de Lyon. Mostly comprising photographs, videos and sound installations, Munem Wasif’s oeuvre reflects a long-term engagement with the places and stories of his home country. The Machine Matter installation evokes the demise of the jute industry in Bangladesh following the transfer of power in East Bengal to Pakistan after the Partition of India in 1947, the widespread use of artificial materials, and the container and cargo-ship boom. Alternating long shots and close-ups, Wasif moves through an abandoned jute factory, amid immobile people. The echo of birdsong, the drip-drip of water and the rays of sunshine create an illusory sense of life in a space reduced to silence. The weight of memories, machinery and bodies underscores the fragility of the economy in post-colonial Bangladesh. The exhibition is supported by the Samdani Art Foundation & Project 88. Image courtesy Munem Wasif

ALL PROJECTS My Rhino is not a Myth, Art Encounters Biennial 19 May- 16 July 2023, Timișoara, Romania- Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury We are delighted to partner with the Art Encounters Biennial to support DAS 2018 Samdani Art Award winner Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury (Sakib) to further develop his practice as he prepares to create a new installation for Srihatta , our permanent space. The curator of the biennial, Adrian Notz shares: "I got to know Sakib in late 2021 in Zurich during his residency there, where I saw his installation “Fear of Social Bin” in real life. Immediately, I was triggered to write a small text about it. So much even, that I thought I need to be a bit poetic about it. On a skiing lift, where we went sledging in the mountains Sakib told me about how he mixes different realities and spiritualities in the research for his work. I like to call his works community based performative installations. For the 5th Art Encounters Biennial Sakib expanded the collaborative and performative community to the whole European cultural capital Timisoara. Using the eternally stretched time in his installations Sakib got to know Timisoara and its hidden stories and treasures in no time. Like a detective and forager, a hunter and gatherer he brought back small precious ingredients from different personal archives and stories around the town that composed his “Weltraum” (German for outer space, literally meaning “world room”) under the title “Waiting for the Becoming Song”. Ganda, the rhino we referred to in the title “My Rhino is not a Myth”, may have the same Bengali homelands like Sakib, but it is the subtitle “art science fictions” that describes best, what he was doing. He created a real world artistic and scientific fiction of our present and future world and reality. It was a great honour and pleurae to be working with Sakib thanks to the support of the Samdani Foundation."

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

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. Khaled Hasan was the winner of the 1st Samdani Art Award in 2012, along with Musrat Reazi. Samdani Art Award 2012 INTERVIEW: KHALED HASAN 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. SAF: You describe photography as a force that gives you a deeper understanding of human beings and life in general. Could you explain how photography has changed your understanding of life and the way you experience it? KH: I find it very difficult to explain exactly what I mean by this as it is something that is related to the practicalities of my everyday life. As a tool, photography has made it simpler for me to share my daily experiences, and gives me a very positive outlook on what is happening around me. For example, if you see a leaf that has dropped into a pool of water, it is a very normal scenario, but when I see it, I try to find the beauty by capturing the best visualisation of it through my camera. If anything, photography has taught me to see that every flower must grow through the dirt before it blooms. However, if I am talking about how photography has changed my life as a human being, I would go as far as expressing that it is the best thing that has happened to me. When I was working on projects documenting a home for the old-aged, or with acid victims or valiant women, every single person I met during my documentation process taught me something, which, at the beginning of each project, was a something I did not expect. Just listening to the hardships that each person had endured made me a stronger person. This might sound a little far-fetched, but if you have not experienced something like this personally, it would be difficult for you to understand exactly what I experienced during each of these projects. SAF: Your early work concentrated on telling the narratives of your native country, Bangladesh. Since moving to the USA, how have your new surroundings changed the way you work? KH: When I lived in Bangladesh, I was travelling all the time to different countries for my work, so I don’t feel that my move to the USA has changed the way I work as a photographer or the way I document my subjects. My passion for the work I make remains that same wherever I go, and the concepts I choose to work with are a bit like my shadows: they follow me wherever my work takes me. Although life in the USA is very different to Bangladesh, I maintain my own unique way of working which will not change because I am living in a new place: although I am trying to cut back on my travel to allow myself time to concentrating on improving my skills to add value to my career. SAF: Seeing yourself as not just a photographer but also as a socially responsible person, how do you ensure the work you make also has a positive contribution to the communities you document? KH: When I first started working as a photographer, it was a priority for me that the work I did would contribute to the communities I worked with, but I also knew that by working as a photographer and documenting other people’s experiences, I would be able to experience the lives of others in a way that most other people are never able to. The contribution I can make to other people’s lives through my work might be very minimal but I believe that every little bit of effort made contributes to a greater change. I feel grateful that I am able to make the work I do, and that the images I create make other people think more deeply about what they can do to help change society for the greater good. SAF: During your career has there been a community or subject that you have documented which has had a real impact on you as both a photographer and a socially responsible person, and if so, why? KH: All of the work I make stays close to my heart, and each and every image I shoot has its own individual impact. However, documenting residents in an old-aged home made me realise how cruel many people are to their parents and as someone who is very family orientated, it was difficult for me to accept the situation that many of the residents had been left to live with. If anything, the experience made me more responsible towards my own mother and the rest of my family. Although the old-aged home was a fairly depressing environment which could understandable make anyone feel very low, my time there increased my motivation to work harder as a photographer and help raise the residents’ voices through my camera. SAF: Can you tell us about the projects you are currently working on and what we can expect to see next? KH: I am currently working on a project titled ‘Living Odd’ through which I am documenting both the past and present situations of Bangladeshi non-residents and immigrants living in the USA. I want the series to capture the truth behind the mental trauma and various difficulties that many migrants go through to survive in unfamiliar surrounds while documenting the cultural gaps between different races in America. My other ongoing project is focused on women and aims to help visualise the many different characters o women—their appearance, uprising, depressions, beauty, aggression, loneliness, fear, revolution, frustration, and more—and is a project I am excited to see come to fruition. As my documentation of the women I am working with grows, I can see how the project will be one of great strength. 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 2012 INTERVIEW: MIZANUR RAHMAN CHOWDHURY

ALL PROJECTS The Missing One The Office of Contemporary Art Norway, 27th October 2016 – 15th January, 2017 The Missing One was curated by Nada Raza for the 3rd edition of the Dhaka Art Summit in 2016 and the Samdani Art Foundation was proud to support this exhibition's journey to the Office of Contemporary Art Norway to be realised once again. The exhibition was on display from the 27th of October 2016 to the 15th of January 2017.

ALL PROJECTS Modern Art Histories in and across South Africa & South Asia Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 12 - 21 Aug 2019 The Dhaka Art Summit, Institute for Comparative Modernities(ICM) at Cornell University, and Asia Art Archive, with support from the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories initiative, launched a new research project entitled Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia. The project began by convening 21 emerging scholars and 5 faculty members in Hong Kong in August 2019 to begin an ongoing research project connecting art histories outside of western frameworks. This group later reconvened at DAS 2020.

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

ALL PROJECTS Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen 6 Nov 2022 Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman FICA and Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) delighted to present a collaborative online performance, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen" by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman, launching their project, "A time comes when we hear nothing." The artists were awarded a grant for their project through the aegis of Stitching Screens, a platform instituted by FICA and SAF for supporting artistic collaboration across India, Bangladesh and the digital space in 2020 - 2021. Having worked on the project for over a year, Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman shared the final iteration of "A time comes when we hear nothing." The project was imagined as a means of solidarity for global working-class people. An expression by two artists across borders reflecting on the collective experience of social divides during lockdown. The projected connected them through common concerns and emotions for people. Common deep pain ran through the veins of Bangladesh to India despite a geographic border. As part of our virtual launch event, we screened an online performance by Amol K Patil and Ashfika Rahman titled, "Voice to Voice, Screen to Screen," realized in 2022 as an addition to "A time comes when we hear nothing." The performance was a cross-national conversation between two artists, a conversation symbolic of what might be shared between two laborers from Bangladesh and India. Questions of communication in two different languages. This conversation was inspired by the theatre script of Amol K Patil, referring to a long distance conversation between a migrant labourer and his wife. Here is a mundane conversation of people of different nationalities and different genders transcending borders through screens evoking the monotony of a digital life. Getting into the deeper feeling of the working class. A conversation between two digital voices, two screens. The performance followed by an interaction with the artists. Details for the screening: Date: Sunday | 6 November, 2022 Time: 7 PM IST / 7:30 BDT

ALL PROJECTS Speak, Lokal Kunsthalle Zurich, 4 March – 7 May 2017 Rafiqul Shuvo and Samsul Alam Helal were selected to participate in the group show Speak, Lokal curated by Daniel Baumann, Director of the Kunsthalle Zürich and guest curator for the Samdani Art Award 2016. Samdani Art Foundation supported their participation.