Partners The Samdani Art Foundation is proud to have partnered with the following organisations and institutions on its various initiatives.

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

ALL PROJECTS Charcha Sessions Thakurgaon, 1 - 7 Dec 2018 The Samdani Art Foundation was delighted to partner with Samdani Artist Led Initiatives forum member Gidree Bawlee on their inaugural Charcha Sessions festival in rural Balla, Thakurgan, Bangladesh from December 1-7, 2018 as part of our annual grant program. The four artists in residence for in this inaugural session were Kamruzzaman Shadhin, Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Khandakar Nasir Ahmed and Anisuzzaman, Rubel. Learn more about this program from the text below by Salma Jamal Moushum. The ‘Charcha Sessions’ came into being to facilitate continuing collaborations between visiting artists and the artists/artisans from the village to catalyze a long-term impact on both of their practices. As an organization Gidree Bawlee's aim is to create a balance of influence in the artistic processes of the visiting artists and the community art/craft practitioners. In the future, this project will be held several times of the year to support continuous projects that will be developed by the artists, and also to encourage new experimentation in regards to community engagement. We believe these frequent sessions will help both the visiting artists and the community art practitioners to find an equal ground in their collaborative practice. The sessions will bring interested artists in short-term (or long-term) residencies, or sometimes bring together only the community practitioners working with various materials to experiment and collaborate with each other. Yasmin Jahan Nupur, Shushila Rani and Somari Rani Yasmin Jahan Nupur has been researching the traditional practices of weaving in Bangladesh for several years. In this session she continued her research and practiced with her co-artists Shushila Rani and Somari Rani. Exploring the relationship of women's body to the waist loom while weaving, the artists experimented and attempted to push the boundaries of traditional jute weaving with backstrap looms. This is an ongoing project with learning and experimentation continuing past the residency. Kamruzzaman Shadhin and Prodip Roy Kamruzzaman Shadhin's interest in the traditional crafts of the region and their underlying history and relationship with communities has been a major part of his artistic research and journey. Shadhin and Prodip Roy have been working together for the last several years experimenting with various methods and techniques of bamboo craft. In this session, the artists worked together to transfer the brush strokes from an action painting by Shadhin into a bamboo canvas using traditional bamboo bending methods that Prodip specializes in. The bamboo platform was installed as part of the ceiling of a room of the residency. This is an on-going, process-driven collaborative experiment which will continue in the years to come. Nasir Ahammed, Shariful Islam and Shubesh Barman In his previous visit, Nasir Ahammed in collaboration with bamboo craftsmen from the community, experimented with bamboo twigs creating a large installation in collaboration with the bamboo craftsmen of the village. This time Nasir and his co-artists Shariful Islam and Shubesh Barman used dry branches and twigs and straw which were abundant due to the harvest season and created a dome-like structure which was installed in various spaces around the community. The experimentation will continue as the artists plan on more future explorations with bamboo twigs. Anisuzzaman Rubel, Chandra Kumar and community children Rubel, a recent graduate from the department of sculpture at Dhaka University, collaborated with Chandra Kumar, a clay artisan specialized in idol making. Combining both of their creativity and technique they experimented with clay, straw and bamboo which to create a shade providing sculpture beside a pond. The artists have plans to expand their experiment further in the next visits.

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 Today Will End 21 May – 12 Sept 2021, M HKA Antwerp !

ALL PROJECTS Jothashilpa Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Jothashilpa is a centre for traditional and contemporary arts, which considers itself ‘a melting pot where fine art, folk art, native art, and crafts are juxtaposed and create a new art language.’ The group questions the notion of ‘high art’ and believes art is an integral part of society that emerges from everyday life. They work with cinema banner painters, weavers, and ceramicists among others, and their priorities include fair trade, women’s empowerment, and community development. Through their research and making processes, they collaborated with SAVVY Contemporary and Master Artist of Cinema Banner Painting Mohammad Shoaib and his disciples to realize a timeline that contains exhibitions about collectivity within, grounding us in solidarities of the past and imagining solidarities of the future. Artists involved in this project: Mohammad Shoaib, Shawon Akand, Didarul Dipu, S. M. Sumon, Abdur Rob, Mohammad Yusuf, Rafiqul Islam Shafikul, Md. Rahim Badir, Mohammad Iqbal, Mohammad Dulal, Hamayet Himu, Aftab Alam, Mohammad Javed, Md. Selim.

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

ALL PROJECTS Film Programme Curated by Shanay Jhaveri Image: Ayisha Abraham, I Saw A God Dance, India, 2011, video still, 19 minutes, courtesy the artist, ©Ayisha Abraham Passages Shanay Jhaveri Nirad C. Chaudhuri was born in 1897 in the small town of Kishoreganj in the district of Mymensing, now a part of Bangladesh. A tiny and frail man, standing at five feet and weighing just about 43 kilograms, Chaudhuri was a writer and scholar, who took himself and his experience of life as his primary subject. Chaudhuri died in 1999 three months before his 102nd birthday. He published his first book The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian in 1951 at almost precisely the halfway point of his life. Chaudhuri witnessed a flourishing empire, its decline, the birth of a ‘new’ modern nation, its initial socialist incarnation and then its eventual transition into a capitalist behemoth. Very productive, he penned several polemical books, and moved to Oxford in 1970 and never returned to India. He was 57 years old when he made that journey, one that he had prepared for his entire life. The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is a ground-zero account, apparent almost from the very first pages, of how an ordinary citizen of India interfaced with the British Empire, physically, emotionally, as well as intellectually. Chaudhuri, when writing the book, was literally the unknown man of his title, living modestly in Delhi, writing scripts for All India Radio. What makes the book so distinctive is that Chaudhuri wrote with no literary model or precedent. The life of the common Indian, unacknowledged in any sphere, had not until the middle of the twentieth century been scripted on a page. Not being born to privilege, or granted its advantages, Chaudhuri assembled his knowledge of all things European at Calcutta’s Imperial College and by purchasing books at tremendous personal cost. Committed to cultivating his intellect, Chaudhuri consciously shed certain traits and habits. For instance, once he began to live in Delhi he gave up writing in Bengali (it is completely absent from The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian ) and, for the first time in his life, started wearing Western clothes and eating non-Indian food. Chaudhuri’s book leads with a dedication to the British Empire, which occasioned much controversy on publication, but he was no apologist for the British, frustrated as he was by their resistance to Westernised Indians. On the other hand, he shared with the British little enthusiasm for nationalist leaders and Indian nationalism. His views on India were often unpleasant, and at times unjustified. Clearly, Chaudhuri was not writing for the fallen Empire, nor was he addressing the new nation: neither he nor his prose fell into a particular political or national regime. It would seem that Chaudhuri is a fitful example of Edward Said’s assertion of “gone are the binary oppositions dear to the nationalist and imperialist enterprise… new alignments are rapidly coming into view, and it is those new alignments that now provoke and challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity that has been the core of cultural thought during the era of imperialism.”1 1Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism , New York: Random House, 1993, xxiv-xxv The 1972 documentary by Ismail Merchant and James Ivory Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization commissioned by BBC, vividly and unapologetically captures Chaudhuri in England, living out his western affectations. The film is a captivating portrayal of a postcolonial intellectual and forms the primary point of orientation for my film programme Passages for the 3rd Edition of the Dhaka Art Summit, which will play across two spaces in the Shilpakala Academy. Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization will show on the hour every hour in an independent ancillary space to the Academy’s auditorium where rest of the programme, organised into thematic group screenings will be projected at scheduled times. The thematic screenings build off concerns that come to bear in Adventures of a Brown Man in Search of a Civilization. The most direct association can be made to those films in the programme that preoccupy themselves with the lives of individuals who have lived between various geographical contexts, and like Chaudhuri “challenge the fundamentally static notion of identity.” These include Ayisha Abraham’s I Saw A God Dance (2011) about the self exoticizing, transracial gay dancer Ram Gopal who popularised Indian classical dance in the West during early half of the twentieth century, an extract from Leslie Thornton’s The Great Invisible (ongoing) which focuses on Isaballe Eberhardt, a Victorian woman who dressed up as a man to travel freely in North Africa during the late nineteenth century, or Aykan Safoğlu’s Off White Tulips (2013) a semi personalised account of the queer American writer James Baldwin’s time in Istanbul in the 1960’s. The trips made by the filmmakers themselves are also integrated, as in Anita Fernandez’s Un Balcon En Afrique (1980) where Fernandez is seen living in a tree house somewhere in Bissau, observing the city from above, but not physically interacting with it and conversely Narcisa Hirsch’s dreamlike Patagonia (1976) that centers itself on a corporeal engagement with the plains and mountains of Patagonia. Alongside, these films is Mati Diop’s A Thousand Sun’s (2013) set in contemporary Dakar, which follows the cattle herder Magaye Niang who was the star of one of the most iconic films of African cinema Touki- Bouki (1973) made by Djibril Diop Mambety, who happens to be Mati Diop’s uncle. In Touki-Bouki Niang along with his then companion Mory conspired to find ways to migrate to France, but A Thousand Sun’s finds them 40 years later still in Dakar, no closer to Paris. The film is a heartbreaking reflection on the notion of self-exile and failed aspirations. Djibril Diop Mamberty himself makes an appearance in ‘Passages’ in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s short filmic portrait Grandma’s Grammar (1996) in which the legendary filmmaker ruminates on filmmaking and the potential the cinematic holds in telling stories of an emotional and affective nature. The subjective and intimate condition of being in exile, and the complexity in expressing these circumstances is further explored in Bouchra Khalili’s Chapter 1: Mother Tongues (2012) from her Speeches Series in which Khalili collaborated with five exiled people based in Paris and its outskirts, inviting them to translate, memorise, and relay fragments of texts from political thought and contemporary culture written by Malcom X, Abdelkrim El Khattabi, Édouard Glissant, Aimé Césaire, and Mahmoud Darwish. The film programme seeks to move beyond a literal understanding and consideration of travel - one that might focus exclusively on, say, works made by traveling artists - and consequently devotes a section to those films that relate the journeys made by objects across differing contexts and scenarios. It pairs Chris Marker and Alain Resnais’s Statues Also Die (1953) that reflects on African tribal objects that have been gathered by ethnographic museums in the West, with Bahman Kiarostami’s The Treasure Cave (2009) where the story of the The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran and its comprehensive collection of modern western art is told. Yto Barrada’s False Start (2015) is an observation on Moroccan fossils and the counterfeiting industry that has sprung up around them, while Lois Patiño’s hallucinatory Night Without Distance (2015) is a portrait of border smuggling between Portugal and Galicia. Objects like LP covers of jazz, blues and salsa in Kader Attia’s Silence Injuries (2013), the pieces of fabrics that Jodie Mack’s delightful animates in her films, kitschy dinnerwear sets in Ana Vaz’s Occidente (2014), a roll of film itself in Jennifer Reeves Landfill 16 (2011) or the collections of objects gathered by artists in their homes or studios as witnessed in Ben Rivers Things (2014) Narcisa Hirsch’s Taller (Workshop) (1975), and Kohei Ando My Collections (1988) are regarded as having expressive potential, and able to convey particular cultural and personal histories. A broader inquiry into other kinds of voyages, is part of the programmes itinerary, and while some of the aforementioned films recount literal acts of travel across territories by people and objects, it also makes room for work like Lisl Ponger’s Phantom Foreign Vienna (2004) in which Ponger does not leave Vienna, but films over seventy different cultures and nations, simply by visiting different neighborhoods in the city. In Ponger’s film Vienna becomes ‘global’, so to speak. She is constructing her own world map, reinforcing that map making itself is an ideological act, something which is further underscored by Anna Bella Geiger in her Elementary Maps No. 3 (1976), where Geiger dwells on the shifting cartographic lines that depict Latin America, and the numerous stereotypes and myths that are projected onto it. Place as an abstraction, the way it resides in memory, but also the more phenomenological and emotional experience of geography is a distinct strand of the programme, most forcibly felt in Claudio Caldini’s pulsating Vadi Samvadi (1981), Sylvia Schedelbauer’s overwhelming Sea of Vapors (2014), Ashim Ahluwalia’s subtle Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) and Alexandre Larose’s mesmerizing Brouillard – Passage # 15 (2014) in which a single unedited roll of 35mm is exposed 39 times as the filmmaker walks along the same forest path to a water body. Landscapes themselves hold emotions, those particularly that are scarred by violence, and this is suggested in a cluster of films that comprises Mani Kaul’s rarely seen but stunning film on Kashmir Before My Eyes (1989), Soon Mi Yoo’s Dangerous Supplement (2005) assembled from found footage shot by American soldiers during the Korean war, Nguyen Trinh Thi’s Landscape Series # 1 (2013) in which anonymous people are pointing to landscapes across Vietnam, Lamia Joreige’s Untitled: 1997-2003 (1997 - 2003) filmed in Beirut after the Lebanese war officially ended and Basma Alsharif’s Deep Sleep (2014) that alludes to the situation in Gaza, but by filming ancient ruins in Athens and Malta. The trauma, terror, fear, discomfort and threat that lurks in urban cities like Bangkok and Luanda is compellingly communicated in Taiki Sakpisit’s A Ripe Volcano (2011) and Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Concrete Affection – Zopo Lady (2014) respectively. There is also the unknown, the landscapes of outer space in Frances Bodomo’s Afronauts (2014), and of future Vietnam submerged underwater in Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Minh Quy Tru’o’ng’s Mars in the Well (2014). As is evident, this film programme is committed to exploring certain colonial and postcolonial conditions – belonging, difference, exile, displacement - that are part of the regions history and present day reality, but with a resolutely transnational perspective. It consciously eschews a regional focus, and presents films from across the world, hoping to manifest as an expansive constellation of shared affinities and empathies, but one where each work still retains it own specificity. Perhaps, ‘Passages’ itself can be regarded as a veritable travelogue, snippets and fragments, of images and sounds, gathered together, to evoke, provoke and trigger emotional responses and memories, and by doing so initiate a set of reflections as to why, when and how do we travel? The experience of any place, here, there, elsewhere, is never static or fixed. It is informed and charged by our interior state of being, by a brew of reminiscences and past resonances that constantly shift, oscillate, and change, as we keep moving. Claude Lévi-Strauss has written in his masterpiece Tristes Tropiques: “the accident of travel often produces ambiguities such as these. Because I spent my first weeks on United States soil in Puerto Rico, I was in future able to find America in Spain. Just, as several years later, through visiting my first English University with a campus surrounded by Neo-Gothic buildings at Dacca in Western Bengal, I now look upon Oxford as a kind of India that has succeeded in controlling the mud, the mildew and the ever encroaching vegetation.”2 2Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, Penguin, 1974, 35. Maybe, like Lévi-Strauss, Chaudhuri found Dhaka in Oxford? Will we find Oxford in Dhaka? I - I Saw A God Dance , Ayisha Abraham, India, 2011, 19 minutes - Off White Tulips , Aykan Safoğlu, Turkey, 2013, 24 minutes - The Great Invisible (Excerpt) , Leslie Thornton, United States of America, ongoing, 20 minutes Total Running Time: 63 minutes II - Mapas Elementares No. 3 (Elementary Maps No. 3) , Anna Bella Geiger, Brazil, 1976, 10 minutes - Speeches: Chapter 1 - Mother Tongues , Bouchra Khalili, France, 2012, 23 minutes - Mille Soleils (A Thousand Suns), Mati Diop, Senegal/France, 2013, 45 minutes Total Running Time: 78 minutes III - Un Balcon En Afrique , Anita Fernandez, Guinea-Bissau, 1980, 17 minutes - Patagonia , Narcisa Hirsch, Argentina, 1970, 10 minutes - Phantom Foreign Vienna , Lisl Ponger, Austria, 1991-2004, 27 minutes Total Running Time: 54 minutes IV - Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die) , Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, France, 1952-53, 30 minutes - The Treasure Cave , Bahman Kiarostami, Iran, 2009, 43 minutes Total Running Time: 73 minutes V - La Grammaire De Ma Granďmère (Grandma’s Grammar) , Jean Pierre Bekolo, Cameroon, 1996, 9 minutes - Silence’s Injuries , Kader Attia, Germany, 2014, 13 minutes - Occidente , Ana Vaz, France/Portugal, 2014, 15 minutes - Faux Départ (False Start) , Yto Barrada, Morocco, 2015, 23 minutes - Noite Sem Distância (Night Without Distance) , Lois Patiños, Portugal, 2015, 23 minutes Total Running Time: 83 minutes VI - Persian Pickles , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2012, 3 minutes - My Collections , Kohei Ando, Japan, 1988, 10 minutes - Blanket Statement # 1 - Home is Where the Heart Is , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2012, 3 minutes - Taller (Workshop) , Narcisa Hirsch, Argentina, 1975, 11 minutes - Razzle Dazzle , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2014, 5 minutes - Things , Ben Rivers, United Kingdom, 2014, 20 minutes - Undertone Overture , Jodie Mack, United States of America, 2013, 10 minutes Total Running Time: 61 minutes VII - Before My Eyes , Mani Kaul, India, 1989, 26 minutes - Landscape Series # 1 , Nguyen Trinh Thi, Vietnam, 2013, 5 minutes - Dangerous Supplement , Soon-Mi Yoo, South Korea/United States of America, 2005, 14 minutes - Deep Sleep , Basma Alsharif, Greece/Malta/ Palestinian Territory, 2014, 12 minutes - Untitled 1997 -2003 , Lamia Joreige, Lebanon, 1997-2003, 8 minutes Total Running Time: 65 minutes VIII - A Ripe Volcano , Taiki Sakpisit, Thailand, 2011, 15 minutes - Concrete Affection , Zopo Lady – Kiluanji Kia Hende, Angola, 2014, 12 minutes - Afronauts , Frances Bodomo, United States of America, 2014, 13 minutes - Sao Hoa Noi Day Gieng (Mars in the Well) , Freddy Nadolny Poustochkine and Truong Minh Quy, Vietnam, 2014, 19 minutes Total Running Time: 59 minutes IX - Vadi Samvadi , Claudio Caldini, Argentina, 1981, 6 minutes - Brouillard - Passage # 15 , Alexandre Larose, Canada, 2014, 10 minutes - Events in a Cloud Chamber (2016) , Ashim Ahluwalia and Akbar Padamsee, India, 2016, 15 minutes - Landfill 16 , Jennifer Reeves, United States of America, 2011, 9 minutes - Meer der Dünste (Sea of Vapors) , Sylvia Schedelbauer, Germany, 2014, 15 minutes Total Running Time: 55 minutes

ALL PROJECTS Samdani Art Award Exhibition Curated by Anne Barlow The Samdani Art Award 2023 presents new works by twelve emerging Bangladeshi artists who reflect on various social, economic and ecological concerns in the midst of one of the most difficult climatic periods for South Asia. While each project is distinct in its focus and material form, collectively, the artists in the exhibition engage with critical societal issues by questioning mainstream and binary thinking, advocating for change, and imagining spaces of possibility in the future. The ongoing impact of industrialisation and climate change are key topics for Purnima Aktar, Sohorab Rabbey and Habiba Nowrose. Through references to folklore and mythology, Aktar’s work highlights the uncertain future and diminishing biodiversity of the Sundarbans, the largest contiguous mangrove forest in the world known as the ‘lungs’ of Bangladesh. Rabbey’s spatial intervention, whose forms are partly inspired by dams and barrages on the Teesta river, acts as a critical commentary on the geopolitical, topographical and ethnocultural transformation of the Bengal Delta region. Reflecting on ancient flood myths that span diverse cultures and religions, and on our current-day emergence from a global pandemic, Nowrose’s installation of photographs and objects seeks to convey a utopian world in which humans might exist in harmony with other beings after a great deluge. Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq and Rakibul Anwar consider how urban and rural environments are affected by construction that errs towards the invasive. Remnants of unfinished bridges in open fields, canals and agricultural land are seen as both symbols of ‘abandoned dreams’ and systemic corruption in Fatiq’s poignant photographs, whereas Anwar’s expansive wall drawings are informed by his observations of seemingly arbitrary urban planning that continues to alter the cityscape of Dhaka, as well as its social and communal spaces. Concerns around human rights, particularly in relation to the disenfranchised, are powerfully expressed in the work of Ashfika Rahman and Faysal Zaman. Rahman’s project resembles the interior of a home in an indigenous Santal community, and questions the responsibility of state security forces in relation to the burning of Santal homes during land ownership disputes. Incorporating extracts from interviews and archival images of victims of ‘enforced disappearance’, Zaman’s haunting installation gives material presence to victims’ own words and those of their loved ones. Through references to such acts of intolerance or brutality against people, and to the damage humans inflict on nature and its ecosystems, the topic of violence becomes a recurring subtext throughout the exhibition. Sumi Anjuman, Rasel Rana and Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin focus on the challenges faced by those with diverse sexual and gender orientation. Through her evocative photographs, Anjuman brings a human dimension to the oppression of non-binary people in Bangladesh, giving voice to their stories, while Rana encapsulates the struggles and hopes of diverse communities in a fantastical landscape in which every being is welcome. Referencing figures including the Bangladeshi artist SM Sultan whose identity was considered to be ‘elusive’, Yasmin similarly advocates for the legitimacy of sexual and gender fluidity and for individuals to be recognized and respected for who they are. Mojahid Musa and Dinar Sultana Putul share an interest in using natural or recycled materials in much of their work. Musa’s experimental and imaginative animal forms made first in clay, and then fused with other materials or ready-made objects, test assumptions around the relative value of such components in everyday life. Putul’s respect for agricultural and more traditional ways of life is borne out in the environment and hand-made objects she creates; at the same time, her work is influenced by historical figures such as engineer and architect Buckminster Fuller and utopian visions of a self-sustaining, egalitarian society. Purnima Aktar আঠারো ভাটির দেশ, A Tale of Eighteen Tides, 2022-2023 Installation Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 The Sundarbans mangrove forest, known as the ‘land of eighteen tides’, is host to a vast range of flora and fauna, including the Bengal tiger. According to local folklore, the Sundarbans is watched over by Bonbibi, a revered female deity. It is said that for hundreds of years, woodcutters, honey collectors and others whose livelihoods depend on the forest, have prayed to Bonbibi to protect them from harm. Despite being a UNESCO World Heritage site, the fragile ecosystem of the Sundarbans is increasingly under threat due to climate change and environmental pollution. A Tale of Eighteen Tides is an allegorical work that explores this loss of biodiversity in the forest alongside the cultures and traditions that are in danger of dying out with it. Comprising eighteen parts, the installation depicts the figure of Bonbibi alongside a Bengal tiger and other wild animals, with those species that are already extinct painted in monochrome. Aktar’s work is inspired by nature and the myths and symbols of the Bengal Delta, as well as by artistic source including Mughal miniatures, Tantric paintings and Bangla folk art. She often combines these in her work to address issues around social and environmental justice. b. 1997, Narayanganj; lives and works in Dhaka Rakibul Anwar মহানগর, Mohanagar, 2023 Drawings on paper Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Rakibul Anwar’s life is intertwined with the city of Dhaka where he has been living since childhood. For Anwar, the transformation of Dhaka from a former Mughal outpost to a developing metropolitan centre with its different neighbourhoods, languages, symbols and sounds, is an endless source of inspiration. His work brings together direct observations of daily life with visual imagery derived from his ongoing research into the history of Dhaka through novels, articles and archival sources. These new drawings, one of which resembles the form of a scroll, are made on dictionary pages that have been randomly joined together, creating a kind of subliminal ‘noise’ that for Anwar feels like the sensation of living in Dhaka itself. Capturing moments of daily life, they depict the shifting ‘footprint’ of the city: people, places and objects are out of proportion with one another and viewed from various perspectives from aerial to eye level. This agglomeration of images – including street scenes, bullfights, and architectural elements – present a disorientating and almost surreal ambience. Anwar also considers the loss of Dhaka’s ecological heritage that continues to occur through planning and construction projects that fail to take existing ecosystems into account, leading to a critical imbalance between the built and natural environment. Images of beehives and animals act as signifiers for a loss of biodiversity that results in part from Dhaka’s dying lakes, polluted rivers, and lost gardens. Collectively, these new drawings present a poignant reflection on the complex and ever-changing physical and psychological state of the city. B. 1993, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Rasel Rana একজন বাগানির স্বপ্ন , The Gardener’s Dream 2023 Acrylic on canvas Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 The Gardener’s Dream presents an idyllic scene of a gardener surrounded by various species of plants - a beautifully crafted universe in which all living things co-exist in harmony. The garden acts as a metaphor for a world in which everyone and everything has equal importance and equal rights, in contrast to the discrimination and trauma often faced by those who have diverse genders. This new work follows on from Rana’s Gender Bird series in terms of its lush representation of a figure in a landscape, and a sense of longing for an individual to be accepted for who they are. In The Gardener’s Dream , this also manifests itself through the work’s unique shape, which for Rana, expresses the way in which queer lives are often ‘framed’ by society as being different. Informed by various sources including Voodoo art and symbols, the bright colours of Rickshaw painting and the figure of the TEPA PUTUL (folk doll), Rana’s work presents a multi-layered and deeply personal perspective on issues of identity and an individual’s place in the world. b. 1995, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Sumi Anjuman হাওয়ায় নেওয়া চাঁদ, Winds carry moon , 2021-2022 Interdisciplinary medium Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Much of Anjuman’s photography engages with individuals or communities who have been oppressed or silenced by mainstream society. Her collaborative approach is guided by ideas of inclusivity and reflects the depth of the relationships she builds over time. Winds carry moon continues her work with those who, due to their gender identity, are frowned upon and considered unlawful in society to the extent that some have received death threats. Her photographs reflect on the restrictions and lack of equal rights that many individuals face in daily life, offering a sensitive insight into their inner psyches, and life journeys that commonly diverge from accepted norms in terms of prevailing societal and religious beliefs. Winds carry moon creates a space of possibility between this reality and a world in which LGBTQIA+ individuals in Bangladesh can concentrate on their love, hopes and dreams, instead of being in a constant state of angst and homophobic isolation, struggling to be perceived as human. Born in a conservative society, Anjuman has faced internal conflicts around being a woman that have helped her connect and empathize with others' oppression and trauma. Anjuman considers her photography practice to be more poetic than documentary in nature, verging on the abstract as a way of creating a non-violent dialogue about contemporary society. b. 1989, Bogura: lives and works in Dhaka and The Hague Md Fazla Rabbi Fatiq মরীচিকা, Mirage, 2022-2023 Photographs Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Mirage is a series of photographs that attempts to highlight the corruption that lies behind many construction projects in Bangladesh. Focusing on numerous bridges that started to be built in canals, open fields, and agricultural lands over the past two decades - but that now lie abandoned and unused – Fatiq draws attention to the ongoing impact and the sheer scale of this predicament. In several instances, his works depict bridges that have collapsed, with their approach roads in ruins if they were ever made at all. These monumental, almost surreal forms now dominate landscapes across the country, symbolising for Fatiq the systemic corruption in the construction industry where huge budgets are misused and projects left unfinished. Although this series of photographs is devoid of people, it nonetheless conveys lost hopes of connectivity between places and communities, particularly in rural areas where local populations have no option but to move around by water for much of the year. While his works can be hauntingly beautiful, Fatiq’s approach to his subject matter is shaped by an acute social and political sensibility. In Mirage , he deftly combines aspects of traditional photography with elements of abstraction, symbolism and ambiguity, giving rise to the question of what lies underneath the surface of an image. b. 1995 Cumilla; lives and works in Cumilla Sohorab Rabbey Almanac of an eroded land borrowed from our children, 2022-2023 Installation Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 ‘Blocked’ is a form of protest that indigenous and marginalised local people use to rescue their lands, rivers and natural resources from authoritarian corporations. However precarious this resistance might be, their statement is clear and powerful enough to be visible. Inspired by their actions - and reflecting on how the navigability of the rivers from the upper stream to the lower stream in the Bengal delta region has been controlled, politicised, redistributed and transformed in the last decades - Sohorab addresses the aftermaths of human-led catastrophes. Alongside, he engages with the everyday practices of the people in the region in terms of their respect for natural ecosystems and their resistance towards the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. Almanac of an eroded land borrowed from our children continues Sohorab’s interest in channelling the geopolitical, topographical and ethnocultural transformation of the river delta region of South Asia. In this new installation, fragmented ‘edifices’ traced from the blueprint of dams and barrages built on the ‘Teesta’ river conjure up an abandoned eroded site. Hand loomed textiles made using non-toxic natural dye processes with domestic ingredients, techniques learned from local people, create a muted yet strong atmospheric spatial intervention. Injecting the idea of ‘blocked’ in a prudent sculptural and material play, Sohorab draws attention to the urgency of respecting indigenous knowledge and natural resources, beyond human possibilities and interspecies entanglements. b.1994 Dhaka, lives and works in London Habiba Nowrose Salvation , 2023 Photography Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 In Salvation, Habiba Nowrose reflects on ancient flood myths that span diverse cultures and religions as a way of critically examining the times we live in today. In Hindu mythology, Lord Vishnu reincarnated as a fish to warn King Manu of a great deluge. The fish instructed Manu to build a boat and take with him every living creature that ever existed on Earth, in a male and female pair. When the flood came, the fish grew into a giant one and asked Manu to tie the boat to its horn, and the fish navigated the flood, taking them to safe land. Thus the world was saved from total destruction. Similarly, according to Abrahamic religious texts, Prophet Noah received a warning from God about a great flood that would be a punishment for the wickedness of humanity. Eventually, the great deluge came and washed away the wicked, leaving only the righteous to repopulate the Earth. In our current era, often referred to as the Anthropocene, Nowrose questions how humans have become the single most destructive species, causing an existential threat to the earth, and whether another deluge is needed in order to salvage the world. Habiba Nowrose explores human relationships and gender identities through photography. She makes photographic portraits that introduce different interpretations and perspectives on topics such as the life of HIV positive patients or mourning the death of a loved one. Nowrose takes careful mental note of objects, colours, patterns and locations that attract her on a repeated basis, which she then re-introduces in her carefully constructed compositions. These elements play a fundamental role in her interactive and psychologically poignant image-making process. b. 1989 in Sirajganj, lives and works in Dhaka Mojahid Musa Assimilated Musing VI , 2022-2023 Sculptural installation using recycled materials, clay, machinery parts, wood, metal, hair, jute, ornaments, found objects from nature, adhesive Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Assimilated Musing VI is a juxtaposition of the natural and manmade. A meticulous process of clay modelling is combined by Mojahid Musa with found materials to make extraordinary creatures that are ambiguous in their form. Merging traditional motifs through the techniques of assemblage, they fuse such disparate elements as jewellery, twigs, bird feathers and various types of metal. These ‘composites’ intend to suggest that an earth consisting of diverse naturally occurring substances exists. Musa’s artistic language draws on the enormously rich history of clay culture, as well as Bangladeshi traditional motifs and folk art, but it does so in a way that actively connects with contemporary issues. For Musa, these sculptures of animal forms play with notions of ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’; they also implicitly critique the position of the domestic animal as an industrial by-product of our time. Overall, his work aims to challenge assumptions about what we require, how we utilize it, and how we value it in society – looking critically at how we assess these shifting factors, and how the decisions we then make affect our daily lives. As a way of interrogating these questions, Musa draws on his own experience of his surroundings, as well as on his interest in how, more broadly, human social behaviour relates to its environment. He often speaks about a ‘robotic’ cosmopolitan and materialistic lifestyle, where people yearn to return to their roots, but how, in the rush of life, they miss out on the innocence of nature. b. 1990, Narshingdi; lives and works in Dhaka Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin In association with Md.Solayman, Md. Dulal & Jagannath Das ঠাউর, Gaze , 2022-2023 Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 In Gaze , Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin presents an installation of paintings, several of which were created in collaboration with cinema and rickshaw painters. In society, Gaze is established on the basis of a 'higher power key'. Who do we make a hero, what will the hero look like? Have we thought about the politics of power behind the ‘gaze’ of all these things? Cinema banner painting is one of the mediums of popular culture in Bengal. Gaze is an attempt to deconstruct the male protagonists seen in movie banners or rickshaw paintings. Cinema banner artist Md. Dulal, rickshaw painter Md. Solaiman and Jagannath Das worked with her on this series. Gaze continues Yasmin’s interest in SM Sultan, a key figure in modern Bangladeshi art, and more specifically, in how his identity has been perceived primarily through the heteronormative gaze. While many books and films have focused on his life, SM Sultan nonetheless remains an intriguing figure, particularly as he spent many years living as a recluse. For Yasmin, Sultan’s way of thinking was ahead of his time. Sultan used to wear saree often, and there are many documentary photographs and movies that show him in shirt/pant/lungi at a young age. When his art began to be appreciated in the West, and his paintings exhibited, photographers in Bangladesh showed him in suits/coats/pants. Has a picture of SM Sultan wearing a saree ever been seen in this country? Would it have been insulting to do so, and is it still too much to question the politics of 'respect' and 'insult' in our way of thinking? We have seen the convergent gaze of society. Are we not yet ready to accept the divergent gaze? Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin works across disciplines from photography, collage and installation to film and animation. She often collaborates with people from communities of different gender and sexual identities and has established a safe space gallery for artists who work with queer issues. b.1990, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Dinar Sultana Putul A space without a ship , 2023 Mixed media Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 Putul adopts an almost archival, quasi-scientific method of categorizing and documenting various hues, forms, textures, surfaces, as well as materials such as clay, coal, graphite, pulp made from newspapers (to demolish written language and establish visual language), and a slew of other discarded ephemera found in nature - all in pursuit of understanding its materiality. Putul’s respect for traditional ways of life is borne out in the hand-made objects she creates, and many of these elements are like fossils to her. At the same time, she is influenced by historical figures such as the engineer and architect Buckminster Fuller and utopian visions of a self-sustaining, egalitarian society. These new works draw on ideas expressed in Fuller’s book Grunch of Giants and the formal characteristics of cartographer and architect Bernard J. S. Cahill’s Butterfly map, which she then merges with her own artistic language and world view. Her interest in cosmology and imaginative cartography is inherently connected with pressing concerns around income and resource inequality. A space without a ship alludes to Fuller’s concept of ‘Spaceship Earth’, a phrase Fuller used to describe the entire planet. In this case however, the title implies that our trajectory is adrift, as we forge ahead without adequate care for the planet itself or humanity. Her work advocates, as Fuller did, for a collective rebalancing, or global cooperation around human intelligence and the earth’s resources, in a way that allows for an ‘integrated regenerative system’. b. 1988, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Ashfika Rahman Death of A Home , 2023 Installation Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 The eviction of ethnic minorities in Bangladesh is highlighted as a major concern in Ashfika Rahman’s Death of a Home , as the authorities find different excuses to uproot communities from the lands they have been living in for centuries. Created in dialogue with Santals (l ower caste Hindu communities), this installation brings to mind the interior of a lost home. A boot and ethnic poetry carved on the traditional Sil Batta (an age-old home appliance collected from a Santal village) lies on the ground, while protest songs from the community play on an archival radio that once aired protest songs for the Bengali nation during the Bangladesh Liberation War. The rhythm of the space questions the freedom of such ethnic groups within Bangladesh after half a century of liberation. Rahman’s practice explores and experiments with photography, using media ranging from historical techniques from 19th century printmaking to documentary approaches and contemporary media. Photography is the predominant medium that she uses to express her views on complex systemic social issues such as violence, rape, and religious extremism – often overlooked by the administrative machinery of the state. In her practice, she creates a conceptual timeline of the stereotypes of victims, repeated across history, notably with regard to minority communities in Bangladesh. b. 1988, Dhaka; lives and works in Dhaka Faysal Zaman (অ )পূর্ণ , (un)filled , 2021-2023 and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2023 (অ )পূর্ণ, (un)filled , brings together a distinctive materialistic procession that evokes the sense of limitlessness, conveyed through cyberspace-sourced archives, of the sufferers of enforced disappearances in Bangladesh. In parallel, extracts of re-collected interviews with their loved ones outline their endless condition of agony and uncertainty. At times, the trajectory disturbingly blinks yet invites the onlookers to consider the tale of 'Enforced Disappearances' in Bangladesh from spiritual, material and emotive perspectives. Zaman’s artistic practice investigates the psychical compass of socio-political currency, which is often rooted in implied experiences. At the same time, his practice confronts and criticizes the socio-political structures rather than simply demonstrating or elucidating them. Thus, his artistic landscape synthesizes a sense of abstractness and translucent reality conveyed by a transdisciplinary manner that encircles research-led archival components, moving snippets, digital and found imagery along with individual photographs that are often scorched, burned, scratched, and re-photographed. b. 1996 Madaripur; lives and works in The Netherlands

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

ALL PROJECTS Let me get you a nice cup of tea Tate, London Yasmin Jahan Nupur’s work "Let me get you a nice cup of tea' 2019-2020 acquired by Tate, is currently on display at the Tate Modern. While she joins a great group of Bangladeshi artists in the collection, she is the first Bangladeshi artist whose work is being displayed at Tate as part of their permanent collection. This is a historic moment we are proud to be a part of - especially when it comes to mediums like performance which are not always the most simple works to collect. SAF worked on this project curatorially to support Yasmin Jahan Nupur from the start of an idea as one of the first DAS 2020 commissions to a presentation in our Artisitc Director Diana Campbell’s Frieze London program for Frieze LIVE in 2019 developed in partnership with a research residency DAS facilitated with Peabody Essex, further working with the artist as her ideas expanded into what was experienced at DAS 2020. Exhibit320 supported the initial presentation in London and so many people from around the world contributed to the development of this live piece through sharing their research knowledge.

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.