ALL PROJECTS Architecture In Bangladesh Curated by Aurélien Lemonier A JOURNEY THROUGH ARCHITECTURE IN BANGLADESH (1947-2017) THE LEGACY OF MUZHARUL ISLAM Curated by AurÉlien Lemonier How to present the challenges that contemporary architecture faces in Bangladesh? The fluvial landscape of the Ganges Delta and the Brahmaputra could be a starting point. The incredible paradoxes of the country’s economic development could be another. Bangladesh is just as much concerned by the climatic changes of today as it is by the consequences of globalisation that followed the decolonisation of the Indian sub-continent and the subsequent struggle to build an independent nation. Muzharul Islam (1923-2012) was an architect who would pursue, from as early as the 1950s, a “humanist modernity” in Bangladesh’s architecture. The producer of public edifices of great quality, his commitment made him a prominent cultural figure in the country. For instance, it was he who called upon Louis Kahn to construct the Dhaka parliament building, rather than accept the commission himself. However, Islam’s achievements are not limited to simply enabling the construction of this masterpiece of modern architecture. A group of intellectuals emerged from Islam’s initiative, bringing forth in the 1980s the millenary culture of Bengal in order to contribute to the emergence of a new architecture for the country. All creative fields were summoned to partake in the reconstruction of a continuous cultural consciousness that had been affected by Partition. The “archaeology” of Bengali monuments (Buddhist, Mughal and modern), undertaken by architects, is synchronous to the regionalist theories that develop in Europe, the United States and India. For the last fifteen years, as Bangladesh has been taking part in the free market economy, a third generation of architects is now trying to redefine the terms of contemporaneity. As the urbanism of large cities demands new housing strategies, the concepts of sustainable and responsible development require the creation of new modes of action. An exhibition on the Bangladesh contemporary architecture scene would precisely respond to these ambitions: the identification and diffusion of architectural endeavours that are of great formal quality, as well as the work of the “Bengal School” which explores strategies of responsible development, through a social, economic and environmental scope. Architects: Bashirul Haq Shamsul Wares Raziul Ahsan Saif Ul Haque Jalal Ahmad Uttam Kumar Saha Nahas Khalil Chetana Rafiq Azam Ehsan Khan Nurur Rahman Khan Mustapha Khalid Palash Enamul Karim Nirjhar Kashef Chowdhurry Urbana Marina Tabassum Salauddin Ahmed Potash Stéphane Paumier

ALL PROJECTS Khoj International Workshop 2017 Goa, India Dhaka Art Summit 2016 featured artist Marzia Farhana was selected to be part of the two-month long Khoj International Workshop in 2017, held in Goa, India and supported by the Samdani Art Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS Mining Warm Data Curated by Diana Campbell “ A warm data body is a portrait, not a profile; when a warm data body is erased, the real body remains intact. Warm data is easiest to define in opposition to what it is not: warm data is the opposite of cold, hard facts. Warm data is subjective; it cannot be proved or disproved, and it can never be held against you in acourt of law. Warm data is specific and personal, never abstract. Warm databases are public,not secret. However, warm data can only be collected voluntarily, not by force; the respondent always has a choice — whether to answer or not, which questions to answer, on what terms she will answer, and if her answers will be anonymous. A warm database is distinguished from a corporate or government database not primarily by its interface or its underlying structure, but by the way its data is collected .” Mariam Ghani Mining Warm Data is a group exhibition of sculpture, installation, film and photography with roots in Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal and Bangladesh. This show is inspired by the eleven-year collaboration making up Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh’s Index of the Disappeared , whose newest chapter inhabits the central chamber of the show and brings the Index to South Asia for the first time. The works in this exhibition variously consider how an individual’s profile is defined through fantasy and subjectivity, beyond the traditional and clinical methods applied by statistical analyses, biometrics, government data agencies, economic interests, community interests, or even dictatorial censorship – “Assessment Work” to use mining terminology. Mariam Ghani’s definition of warm data is the central point on which these works revolve. Warm bodies, cold bodies, and metamorphic bodies transitioning between these states challenge the viewer in this exhibition, which seeks to give agency to the spectator’s imagination rather than reduce the artworks to their often disturbing political implications. Some of the imagery in the show is viscerally disturbing such as the decomposing “body” Lost and Found (2012) by Huma Mulji; Minds to Lose (2008-2011) documenting Neha Choksi’s removal of warm mind from cold body by means of anesthetic; and the final writings of self-immolating monks in Last Words (2015) by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam. However, the works have not been selected for their shock value, rather they raise the emotional temperature in the space to enable us to feel the pulse of warm data, rather than the cold encounter of slickly packaged statistics. Except for deliberately suppressed material, such as that investigated by Amar Kanwar, shocking imagery circulates in the media to the point that it risks desensitising the viewer - how does this confrontation translate when this imagery confronts us in the emotional space that is art? What is considered “true” depends on the story told rather than the evidence available, and data can be manipulated to tell different or even contradictory stories. Statistical data can be corrupted and skewed and statistical arguments can be used to assert falsehoods, something that warm data does not seek to do. We cannot ignore power dynamics within systems and, while in warm data we openly recognise biases, datasets have biases too, and statisticians work to remove the outliers (also known as bad actors, deviants, and contaminants) to prove their points. This statistical terminology also implies cold hostility to “points” that do not fit into the algorithm. Some statistical terms actually sound threatening: control group, finite population control, breakdown point, class boundary, rejection region... to name only a few. A person is more than the sum of the data points collected about them, although digital marketers trolling through the Internet might think otherwise. Participating artists include Lida Abdul, Gazi Nafis Ahmed, Pablo Bartholomew, Neha Choksi, Hasan Elahi, Chitra Ganesh, Mariam Ghani, Hitman Gurung, S. Hanusha, Maryam Jafri, Dilara Begum Jolly, Amar Kanwar, Huma Mulji, Nge Lay, Nortse, Tenzing Rigdol, Menika van der Poorten and Ritu Sarin & Tenzing Sonam. Tenzing Rigdol Tenzing Rigdol, Monologue, 2014, courtesy of the artist and Rossi and Rossi. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) S. Hanusha S. Hanusha, Installation view, 2015. Courtesy the artist and Saskia Fernando Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam Mining Warm Data, Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam, Last Words, 2015, courtesy of the artists. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) Huma Mulji Huma Mulji, Lost and Found, 2012, courtesy of the artist and the Samdani Art Foundation. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) Chitra Ganesh Chitra Ganesh, Black Sites I: The Seen Unseen, 2015-16, Installation shot of watercolour works. Courtesy of the artist and Gallery Espace, New Delhi. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter Menika van der Poorten Menika van der Poorten, The Real and the Imagined, 2015-2016. Courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) Amar Kanwar Amar Kanwar, The Face, 2004/ Thet Win Aung, 2004/ Ma Win Maw Oo, 2004 (from The Torn First Pages, 2004–08), courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) Maryam Jafri Maryam Jafri, Death with Friends, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Giorgio Persano Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter. (from Mining Warm Data) Dilara Begum Jolly Dilara Begum Jolly, Tazreen Nama, 2013, courtesy of the artist. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter. (from Mining Warm Data) Hitman Gurung and Nortse Hitman Gurung (left), I Have to Feed Myself, my Family and my Country (series), Collage of printed currency, 2013 courtesy of the artist and private collection, Heidelberg / Nortse (right), Prayer Wheel, Big Brother, Automan, 2007, courtesy of the artist and Rossi and Rossi. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo: Jenni Carter. (from Mining Warm Data) Installation views Maryam Jafri Maryam Jafri, Installation view, 2012, Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data) Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh, Black Sites I: The Seen Unseen, 2015-16. Commissioned and produced by Creative Time Reports, the Juncture Initiative at Yale Law School and Samdani Art Foundation for the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. Courtesy of the artists, Creative Time Reports, the Juncture Initiative at Yale Law School, Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter (from Mining Warm Data)

ALL PROJECTS Sebastian Cichocki: Art in Post Artistic (and Post Democratic) Times National Art Gallery, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 19 February 2017 Art in Postartistic (and Postdemocratic) Times Seminar with Sebastian Cichocki, Samdani Seminars 2017. Courtesy of the Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Noor Photoface. This project is supported by the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) and Arts Network Asia (ANA). This project is also supported by the Polish Institute New Delhi. Sebastian Cichocki, Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Curator of the Sculpture Park in the Warsaw district of Bródno, Poland also held a seminar discussing Art in Postartistic (and Postdemocratic) Times on 19th February, 2017. 5 Bangladeshi artists led initiatives also presented their activities. SEBASTIAN CICHOCKI Sebastian Cichocki is a curator, writer, and art critic. He is chief curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and curator of the Sculpture Park in the Warsaw district of Bródno. In the years 2005 to 2008 he was program director of the Contemporary Art Centre in Bytom. Select exhibitions curated by Sebastian Cichocki include the Polish pavilions at the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennales, with Monika Sosnowska (1:1) and Yael Bartana (... and Europe will Be Stunned) respectively, the latter project co-‐curated with Galit Eilat, Making Use. Life in Postartistic Times, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2016), Rainbow in the Dark. Part 2: On the Joy andTormentof Faith, KonstmuseumMalmö (2015), Rainbow intheDark, SALT Galata, Istanbul(2014), ZofiaRydet, Record 1978-‐1990, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2015), Procedures for the Head, Kunsthalle Bratislava, Slovakia(2015), New National Art, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2012), EarlyYears, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin(2010), Raqs Media Collective, The Capital of Accumulation, Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw(2010), Oskar Hansen. Process and Art 1966-‐2005, Museum of Modern Art in Skopje, Macedonia. Sebastian Cichocki has managed the Sculpture Parkin Bródno, a long-‐term public art programme initiated in 2009 with the artist Paweł Althamer (featuring projects by Olafur Eliasson, Jens Haaning, Monika Sosnowska, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Ai Weiwei and others). He has produced a number of experimental exhibitions in the form of books, as well as residency programs and staged lectures.Cichocki is an author and co-‐author of several books on art e.g. A Cookbook for Political Imagination (2011), and The Future of Art Criticism as Pure Fiction (2011), Earth Works! (2014), and a popular children book on contemporary art “S.Z.T.U.K.A” (A.R.T.)

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

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 2 - Dozakh-I-Puri N'imat (An Inferno Bearing Gifts) Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 2 - Dozakh-I-Puri N'imat (An Inferno Bearing Gifts) The 14th century Moroccan scholar Ibn Batuta’s description of Bengal reads as Dozakh-i-puri n'imat – an inferno bearing gifts. This Bearing Point descended into this inferno, considering the interwoven histories of Bengal to face the coming storms of ecological catastrophe and rising ethno-nationalism. Muzharul Islam once said that “independence brings in the greatest opportunity for a nation to express its thoughts, talent, and energy.” Islam designed the campus of Chittagong University, which was the birthplace of the 13-panel mural, Abahoman Bangla Bangali (The Flows of Bengal and the Bengali), painted in 1972 by members of Chittagong-based collective Oti Shamprotik Amra. These panels narrated a history of Bengal up until the birth of Bangladesh in 1971, and were part of the Bangladesh India Friendship Fest, the first exhibition of Bangladeshi art abroad in 1972 in Calcutta, which included artists, musicians and performers. The first panel is titled Ruposhi Bangla (Beautiful Bengal) after the seminal collection of poems by Jibanananda Das (1899-1954), which served as a major point of inspiration for the nationalists of the Language Movement from 1952. Music and oral performance were key in the Bangladeshi Liberation War when radio stations deemed illegal by the Pakistani government disseminated nationalist Bengali songs and troupes of performers travelled to far ends of the country to produce citizenship through music. The Bengali musicians’ collective Mohiner Ghoraguli also draws its name from a Das’s poem. Zihan Karim takes one of their songs as a point of departure to reimagine the metaphor of the body as the architecture for the soul. His 3D video installation examines what is lost when people try to erase difficult pasts, using a lens of social critique offered by the song to engage with centuries of history. Music also played a significant role in the emergence of Bangladesh into international consciousness through the 1971 Concert for Bangladesh organised by Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. The early leaders of Bangladesh were cognizant of the impoverished image of their country in the world’s eyes. Muzharul Islam once remarked: “In the 2,000 years of our history, we have been poor for only 250 years and that too, because of colonisation. If we do suffer from poverty, we suffer only from one kind of poverty– economic.” Student movements have paved the way for revolutions across history, including in Bangladesh, speaking to the role of education as a form of de-colonial practice and a vehicle for changing the course of history. One of the most radical institutions for education was Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan, where the poet and his contemporaries created an institution that focused on community-based aesthetically-oriented learning. The Otolith Group revisits Tagore’s pedagogical and aesthetic philosophy in their lecture performance which opens DAS’s talks and education programmes. Speaking to the centrality of the spoken word in the production of the law, Zuleikha Chaudhuri’s Rehearsing the Witness revisited a legal case where the identity of the presumed dead Kumar of Bhawal was disputed for over 16 years in the courts of Dhaka, Calcutta, and London. These works activated archives and oral histories, to create contexts that investigate the production of identity as a performed practice. Artists Oti Samprotik Amra (1968-mid 1970s) Sabih-ul-Alam, Tajul Islam, Syed Enayet Hossain, Safiqul Islam, Abul Monsur, Chandra Shekhar Dey, Mohammad Shawkat Haider Eternal Bangla Bangali, 1972 Locally produced paint on board Titles: 1. Beautiful Bengal 2. Strayed worshipper 3. Wisdom’s flare in hand 4. Dark Skies 5. Home searching traveler 6. Sovereign power, sovereign wrath 7. Death’s index 8. Ravenous Strike 9. Voice of resistance 10. Spectrum of life 11. Horrors of 71 12. Victory all courtesy of the Chittagong University Museum Collection Oti Samprotik Amra (We, the Contemporary) was a progressive cultural group founded by the students of the Chittagong University in 1968. Their activity included organizing theatrical shows and various cultural programmes within the university. They were responsible for the first international exhibition of Bangladeshi art (after the liberation war in 1971), held in Kolkata in 1972, which celebrated the triumph of Bengali culture. The group invited seven artists, mostly students of Chittagongian origin (Sabih-ul-Alam, Tajul Islam, Syed Enayet Hossain, Safiqul Islam, Abul Monsur, Chandra Shekhar Dey and Mohammad Shawkat Haider) to create a mural 104 ft long for the Bangladesh-India Friendship Fair which was held in Gorer Math (now known as Maidan or Brigade Parade Ground) in March 1972. This recently re-discovered 13-panel mural (of which we are only able to display 12, due to deteriorated condition of the final work) that chronicles different chapters of the country’s history was collected by the Chittagong University Museum in 1976 when the group slowly ceased to exist. These panels were reunited and reexhibited at Chittagong University Museum in 2017 as part of Dhaka Art Summit’s research initiatives, and we are honoured to exhibit this important historical marker of Bangladeshi independence and artist-led initiatives at DAS 2018. Zihan Karim (b. 1984 in Chittagong, lives and works in Chittagong Various Ways of Departure, 2017-2018 4 channel video with sound courtesy of the artist Music and oral performance were key in the Bangladeshi Liberation War when radio stations deemed illegal by the Pakistani government disseminated nationalist Bengali songs and troupes of performers traveled to far ends of the country to produce citizenship through music. Soon after Bangladeshi independence the Bengali musicians’ collective, which some call India’s rock music collective, Mohiner Ghoraguli (founded in 1975), continued in this tradition and created music deeply connected to the student movements of the 1970s-80s. Inspired by the Mohiner Ghoraguli song Saattala Bari (Seven Storied House), Chittagong based artist Zihan Karim reimagines the metaphor of the body as the architecture for the soul – an idea present across Bengali, Baul, and Sufi traditions. Karim’s resulting video installation Various Ways of Departure (2017-2018) uses this spiritual framework, viewed through lens of social critique offered by the song, to survey two historically significant seven-storied buildings in Chittagong – the Adalat Bhaban (the Courthouse) and the P.K Sen Bhaban– both of which were under threat of demolition. Karim engages with centuries of history through a poetic lens, examining what is lost when people try to erase difficult pasts, using techniques of 3D imaging to show the many layers that build up the composite image we see now. Zuliekha Chaudhuri (b. 1973 in Mumbai, lives and works in New Delhi) with Anita Rahaman Ghazi, Jyotirmoy Barua, Aneek R. Haque, Shahidul Alam, Dr Nandini Chatterjee, Rahaab Allana, Ahona Palchoudhuri, Samina Luthfa, Oroon Das and Arup Rahee Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case (2016-2018) Live performance, archival photographs Commissioned and produced by the Samdani Art Foundation Additional support from the Alkzazi Foundation of Photography and Brown University Courtesy of the artist and the Alkazi Foundation of Photography, New Delhi Photographs courtesy : The Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi Both theatre and citizenship are performed practices; one’s performance as a citizen is either applauded or fails to live up-to expectations. To live with these conditions is to always be on trial and to know that in the eyes of the examining authority one is always an imposter unless proved otherwise. Zuleikha Chaudhuri’s Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case, revisits the historical court case around the Bhawal zamindari estate in Dhaka which ran between 1930-1946. She has staged previous iterations of the work at the Mumbai Art Room, as a “‘rehearsal as exhibition' ', and at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, focusing on the production of a portrait by an actor. The performance at DAS at 10am on February 3rd in the auditorium takes the form of a trial using some of the original evidence from the case. This project pulls together strands of thought from the previous iterations when moving to the “scene of the crime” in Dhaka, drawing a relationship between re-enactment and retrial; the complex tension between forensic evidence, the act of speculation/imagination and truth finding and truth making. The Bhawal Court Case takes as its point of departure a trial which revolved around the identity of a sanyasi (or Hindu religious ascetic) claiming to be the second Kumar of Bhawal (the heir of one of the last large zamindari estates in Dhaka), who was presumed dead a decade earlier. The claim was contested by the British Court of Wards and by the widow of Ramendra Narayan Roy (the second Kumar of Bhawal) Bibhabati Devi. Over the course of sixteen years, the physical attributes, birthmarks, portraits and testimony were collated as forensic evidence to establish the claimant/sanyasi’s identity as being the Kumar. Hundreds of witnesses, including doctors, photographers, artists, prostitutes, peasants, revenue collectors, tenants, holy men, magistrates, handwriting experts, relatives and passers-‐by were deposed. The case went from the District Court in Dhaka to the High Court of Calcutta to the Privy Council in London, finally ending in 1946 with a victory for the plaintiff, who died a few days after the verdict. Rehearsing the Witness: The Bhawal Court Case uses this trial about a possible impostor to re-examine the enormous archive that the case produced, through performance as a means to reconsider notions of evidence, the archive and identity. Both the domains of the law and theatre/acting frame larger questions that pertain to the production of truth and reality, assumptions of stable, consistent and believable identities and the construction of a credible narrative. It examines how identity is written into history and emerges in the domain of the law, often in opposition to the actual complexity of lived-experiences and relationships. The manner in which the State, here the British Court of Wards, one of the parties in the Bhawal case, considers identity is a central question, explored through the testimony of expert witnesses on the body as evidence (and as the site where identity is played out), in comparison to where the individual locates it. Cast Judge: Anita Rahaman Ghazi Lawyer: Jyotirmoy Barua Lawyer: Aneek R. Haque Expert Witness 1: Shahidul Alam (Artist and Writer) as J. L. Winterton (Artist and Photographer. Plaintiff's Witness No.778) Expert Witness 2: Dr Nandini Chatterjee, (Senior Lecturer in history, University of Exeter, UK.) as J.H. Lindsay (Retired ICS, Secretary of the School of Oriental Studies in London, and former Collector of Dacca. Defendant’s witness, taken on commission) Expert Witness 3: Rahaab Allana (Curator, Alkazi Foundation for the Arts, New Delhi) as Percy Brown (Artist, Secretary and Curator of the Victoria Memorial Hall, Calcutta. Defendant’s witness No.8) Expert Witness 4: Ahona Palchoudhuri (Department of Anthropology, Brown University) as Bawa Dharam Das (Defendant’s witness No 327). Expert Witness 5: Samina Luthfa (Sociologist and actor) as Bibhabati Debi (Defendant No. 1. Widow of the second Kumar of Bhawal) Expert Witness 6: Oroon Das (Actor) and Arup Rahee (Performer, activist, and writer with The Centre for Bangladesh Studies) as Kumar Ramendra Narayan Roy (Plaintiff) the second of the three Kumars, married to Bibhabati Debi.

ALL PROJECTS Ayesha Sultana at The Delfina Foundation The winner of the Samdani Art Award for the year 2014, Ayesha Sultana completed her three-month residency at the Delfina Foundation in London as part of the award and shared her wonderful experience with us: ‘The residency at Delfina Foundation in London was an invaluable learning experience for me. Meeting and engaging with other creative people, encountering parts of the city, taking educational trips were an immersive period of reflection. The three months created some distance to pause, inquire and reassess my practice at this early stage of my career. It also gave me the opportunity to be able to tap into other, new points of interest and spend uninterrupted time doing research at public archives, which were easily accessible to accumulate and absorb material for future projects.’- Ayesha Sultana In her three month long residency, from July to September 2014, Ayesha explored through various mediums. Her work included drawings on paper, cyanotype prints, screen-prints and ongoing sound works. As part of the Dhaka Art Summit, the Samdani Art Award is given bi-annually to one outstanding young Bangladeshi artist selected from the ten finalists. The Samdani Art Foundation partners with the Delfina Foundation to give the winning artist opportunity to attend a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London. Delfina Foundation an independent, non-profit foundation dedicated to facilitating artistic exchange and developing creative practice through residencies, partnerships and public programming. For the 2nd edition of Dhaka Art Summit, There were sixteen nominators, who each elected five artists. These artists were then short listed to ten finalists. The award selection Jury panel Director of Cultural Program at Instituto Inhotin Eungie Joo (Brazil), Guggenheim Adjunct Curator Sandhini Poddar (India), Director of DIA Art Foundation Jessica Morgan (UK) and Khoj Director Pooja Sood (India). The panel was chaired by founding Director of Delfina Foundation Aaron Cezar.

ALL PROJECTS Charupith Dhaka Art Summit 2020 Many processes of social transformation may contribute to forms of profound structural change in society yet remain relatively invisible before attaining a critical mass. An extraordinary example from Bangladesh is Mangal Shobhajatra, a community procession to celebrate Pohela Boishakh (Bengali New Year) created in 1987 by Jessore-based collective Charupith. Today it attracts massive crowds who carry painted paper masks, crowns, traditional dolls, and large sculptures that integrate folk forms and motifs, and perform music and comedy from Bengali culture in public space across the country. This is not a generations old tradition. It is an initiative started as part of Charupith’s wider practice of drawing inspiration from the plurality of rural culture in Bangladesh and creating a festive atmosphere for people across generations to experience the potential of art to create spaces of freedom. Close to 10,000 young students have graduated from Charupith’s independent school of fine arts. This series of masks was created by senior artists with a long-term engagement in the festival, speaking to the role that artists in Bangladesh play in embodying secular values. Charupith lead a mask-making workshops for Dhaka school children on the children’s days of DAS.

ALL PROJECTS The River Remembers at Islamic Arts Biennale 2023 Jeddah Kamruzzaman Shadhin was commissioned to show his new project The River Remembers (2023), for the Islamic Arts Biennale 2023, curated by DAS 2023 artist Sumayya Vally. Samdani Art Foundation has supported the transportation of the project.

ALL PROJECTS Geological Movements Curated by Diana Campbell We may think of ‘land’ as fixed but it is constantly shifting: below us through erosion, volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes; swirling above us as dust clouds. The earliest signs of life, the impetus of cellular movement, as well as aeons of extinction are inscribed in stone and fossils. Fossil fuels, created from the remains of life from the deep geological past, power much of our way of life and threaten our collective future through the violent process of extracting and burning them. Geological and political ruptures often overlap, and the artists in this movement excavate metaphors to consider our past, present, and future on this planet beyond human-bound paradigms. Their works challenge us to find commonalities and to emerge from this sediment to heal, imagine, design, and build new forms of togetherness. What will coalesce and fossilise our presence on this planet for lifetimes to come? Adrián Villar Rojas New Mutants, 2017–2020 Moroccan marble floor tiles encrusted with Devonian period micro Ammonite and Goniatites fossils; blue chroma key paint; spices (turmeric, chili powder, garam masala powder); plant-based pigments (indigo, sindoor, alta), gouache; sand; potatoes and coal, on aggregate rammed earth walls Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Marian Goodman Gallery, and kurimanzutto Realised with additional support from kurimanzutto and Marian Goodman Gallery New Mutants is a new immersive installation by Adrián Villar Rojas where visitors enter DAS by walking over a marble floor encrusted with 400-million-year-old ammonite and orthoceras fossils. These now-extinct species of undersea creatures thrived for 300 million years, swimming across the super-ocean Panthalassa and witnessing the creation and breakup of the single continent Pangaea. A painting of a burned-out fireplace emerges from the rammed-earth walls that rise from the fossil floor, tracing the seismic shift that occurred in the evolution of humanity and our planet when we learned to control fire, invented agriculture, and began to settle and build civilisations. This work serves as a metaphor to think outside of human-bound time, and to consider common ground on which to come together. Villar Rojas creates site-specific installations using both organic and inorganic materials that undergo change over time. Tied to their exhibiting context, they generate irreproducible experiences relying on a ‘parasite-host’ relation. His team-based projects that extend over open-ended periods allow him to question the aftermath of the normalised production of art in the Capitalocene era. Fragments of this installation will be permanently on display at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park in Sylhet in a dedicated pavilion designed by the artist. b. 1980, Argentina; lives and works nomadically Elena Damiani As the dust settles, 2019–2020 Watercolour on handmade Lokta Barbour grey paper. Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist and Revolver Gallery ‘There is a strange sympathy between the atmospheric particles that float through the sky and the human beings who migrate across the ground and then across the sea. Each body sets the other into motion – a pattern of movement and countermovement.’ Adrian Lahoud Elena Damiani has created a collage of watercolour renditions of storming dust particles in the atmosphere as captured by NASA. Several hundred million tonnes of dust unsettle and travel through the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans from deserts to the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. We imagine land to be static, but deforestation, desertification, and climate-change-related storms distribute dust across vast distances in our planet’s atmosphere. The handmade Nepalese paper beneath the layers of paint making up this work is a surface that could be read as stone tiles, an aerial view of a desert, or even a microscopic view of human skin. Damiani creates installations, objects, and works on paper that focus on the politics of space and memory. She portrays landscapes and geological processes to reinterpret natural stages and their generative processes. Her work draws inspiration from collage techniques and historical science books, while the stone and metal in her sculptures recall the environments she studies and refracts. b. 1979, Lima; lives and works in Lima Jonathas de Andrade b. 1982, Maceió; lives and works in Recife Pacifico, 2010 Super8 transferred in HD, 12 min Courtesy of the artist and Vermelho Through the process of animating a styrofoam board model with maps and paper, Jonathas de Andrade proposes a fictional geological solution for the political turmoil and violence that normally accompanies changes of borders. A massive earthquake erupts over the Andes, detaching Chile from the South American continent. As a consequence, the sea returns to Bolivia, restoring its lost coastline, Argentina gains coasts with both the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans, and Chile becomes a floating island adrift in the seas. The aesthetic approach of the film allows the artist to touch upon topics such as the notion of truth as an ideological construction and the fabrication of mass commotion/emotion as political artifice. De Andrade works predominantly with installations, videos, and photo-research. Addressing those overlooked in the dominant cultural narrative of Brazil, the artist ponders on the relationships between different social milieus. In collaboration with labourers, indigenous tribes, the disabled, and others, de Andrade commonly points out the inequality stemming from the discourses of colonialism and neo-imperialism. The artist co-founded the artistic collective A Casa como Convém in 2007. Karan Shrestha b. 1985, Kathmandu; lives and works between Kathmandu and Mumbai in these folds, 2019 Ink on paper, three-channel HD video Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist Within Nepal’s contained geography, the landscape presents possibilities for adversity to spring from any fissure: be it a decade of revolutionary upheaval, political instability, natural disasters, economic ruptures, repressed social edifices, or perpetual state violence. Through the installation of a three-channel video and an ink drawing, in these folds addresses the resulting precariousness that has characterised Nepal’s recent past. Incorporating documentary and fiction, Karan Shreshta questions the rhetoric of progress prescribed for paving the way forward and considers how transcendental practices that have endured over time are attempts at grappling with the everyday. Shrestha’s works overlay encounters in physical landscapes on mental maps of people and spaces he comes across so as to examine and restructure notions of the present. His practice – incorporating drawings, sculpture, photography, text, film, and video – seeks to blur the oppositions that build and define our individual and collective identities. Matías Duville b. 1974, Buenos Aires; lives and works in Buenos Aires Untitled, 2019 Sanguine on paper My red way, 2019 Sanguine on paper Levitating in red, 2019 Sanguine on paper, sandpaper Courtesy of the artist and Barro Gallery Matías Duville’s earthy mud and iron-oxide-infused sanguine drawings call to mind landscapes in transition from natural disasters and also from human interference from the extraction and clearing processes needed for infrastructure development. Similar to these methods, Duville’s drawings pulse with expressive brutality, trying to represent what the end of the world might look like both in a geographical and psychological sense. These works are inspired by the mental landscapes that are created inside our heads when we look directly at the sun and close our eyes to recover from its blinding light. The artist takes us along on his journey deep into the mind, trying to connect us with the idea of a universe out of control. Duville works with objects, videos, and installations, although he predominantly employs drawing. His works evoke scenes of desolation with rarified, timeless atmospheres like those that precede a natural disaster: hurricanes, tsunamis, or situations of abandonment in the forest that act as a dreamlike vision of a wandering explorer, like a mental landscape. Omer Wasim b. 1988, Karachi; lives and works in Karachi In the Heart of Mountains, 2019 Charcoal on canvas, lacquer, wooden armatures Commissioned for DAS 2020 Courtesy of the artist In the Heart of Mountains situates us amidst Omer Wasim’s journey in the mountains of the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan, a contested terrain that he scaled with queer friends and friendships. The work, as well as his action, denounces romantic visions and imaginaries of the area perpetuated by the state, and instead relies on charcoal to make visible the mountains as witnesses to state violence, colonial and neo-colonial rule, and as sites where many death-worlds arise. These mountains anticipate their own demise, foreshadowing capital interests in the region that are in diametric opposition to nature, ecology, and people. Queer bodies and community enable this mode of inquiry, becoming, in the process, insurgents that counter state-sponsored redaction and violence. While it also stands alone as an installation, the work also becomes an environment for new readings into the future. Wasim is an intermedia artist whose practice queers space, subverting the frames of development and progress that shape human relationships to the city and nature. His work bears witness to the relentless erasure, violence, destruction of our times by staying with queer bodies as they hold space and enact desire. Otobong Nkanga b. 1974, Kano; lives and works in Antwerp Landversation, 2020 Site-specific installation and conversations from Dhaka Commissioned and produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Mendes Wood DM. Realised with additional support from Unilever Bangladesh. Project coordinator Helena Ramos Land extends beyond mere soil, territories, and earth. It relates to our connectivity and conflicts in relation to the spaces we live in and how humans try to find solutions through simple gestures of innovation and repair. As relationships with nature and people become affected, how can we find a platform to share, learn, exchange and heal? A series of tables forming a circular structure serve as the basis for an exchange between visitors and a group of people who all have close – professional, caring, vital – relationships with the earth. Otobong Nkanga weaves together strands of landversations realised in Beirut, Shanghai, and São Paulo in this project’s newest iteration in Dhaka, and her collaborators have included geologists, housing and land rights activists, farmers, and many others who transform the land itself into other realities. What is ordinarily constructed through their contact with land now forms the foundation for new situations of exchange and transmission, activating interpersonal networks that come together in DAS with the power to move the world outside the exhibition. Nkanga’s drawings, installations, photographs, sculptures and performances examine the social and topographical relationship to our everyday environment. By exploring the notion of land as a place of non-belonging, Nkanga provides an alternative meaning to the social ideas of identity. Paradoxically, she brings to light the memories and historical impacts provoked by humans and nature. Raphael Hefti b. 1978, Biel; lives and works in Zurich Quick Fix Remix, 2015/2020 Sculptures created from performance with thermite powder and sand Courtesy of the artist. Realised with additional support from Pro Helvetia Raphael Hefti uses the language of material to communicate a fascination with the behaviour of liquid metals, a material history which is part of the epic story of human civilisation across vast geographies. This performance, a spectacle between blunder and precision, is a conversation with the world of heavy industries and iron casting. The artist misappropriates thermite welding processes typically used to repair high-speed train tracks, transforming liquid steel through a blazing landscape of incisions that leaves behind a bed of solidified metal debris. Just as volcanic eruptions make visible the hidden energy properties of the molten rock and liquid metal moving deep within the earth, Hefti’s ‘artistic alchemy’ makes visible the hidden industrial practices and processes that form the machine-made landscapes powering our way of life. Working across sculpture, installation, painting, photography, and performance, Raphael Hefti explores how humans transform materials in the everyday urban landscape by pushing and testing material limits, while removing these materials from utilitarian obligations. He often works with teams of industry technicians to modify and misapply routine procedures and construction methods to open up new possibilities and unexpected beauty through guided accidents that he documents in his work.

ALL PROJECTS Independence Movements Curated by Diana Campbell The shared energy fueling movements and building constellations of solidarities across time and diverse geographies defies shallow geopolitical definitions that carve up the world. Artists played a major role in spreading the deep yearning for independence in what is now Bangladesh, as well as elsewhere in the global majority world. Creative individuals with conviction were willing to stake their position and shift the course of history by galvanising people around their work which became the images, words, and songs to rally resistance and transform mere individuals into a collective force to be reckoned with. The artists in this movement chronicle the spirit of resistance and struggle for freedom, shifting from euphoria to disillusionment and back again. Independence is a spirit that needs to be kept alive and moved and nurtured across generations. Antonio Dias b. 1944, Campina Grande, Paraíba; d. 2018, Rio de Janeiro Trama , 1968/1977 Portfolio with 10 woodcuts on hand-made Nepali paper. Courtesy of Alexandre Roesler Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory, 1968/2020 adhesive strip and lettering on floor Courtesy of Collection Daros-Latinamerica and the Estate of Antonio Dias The Illustration of Art/Tool & Work , 1977 Red clay on hand-made Nepalese paper Courtesy of Geyze Diniz Collection Untitled , 1981 Handmade paper, cellulose with clay, iron oxide and soot. Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation Demarcando Terretorios , 1982 Iron oxide, graphite, metalic pigments on Nepalese paper Working in the Furnace, 1986 Mixed media on nepalese paper The Last Houses of the man , 1987 Iron oxide and metalic pigment on Nepalese paper. Courtesy of Galeria Nara Roesler Research supported by Instituto InclusArtiz Antonio Dias’s many transnational experiences coloured his conceptual art practice. Supported by a Brazilian patron, he travelled to Nepal in 1976 ‘to buy paper for an edition.’ He soon discovered that the kind of paper he imagined could not be purchased in a store. Over an intense period of five months in 1976–77, living near the Tibetan border with Nepali artisans, Dias adapted their paper-making process by mixing in plant fibres and materials such as tea, earth, ash and curry. This presentation includes the installation Do it Yourself: Freedom Territory, whose words and motifs appear in Trama – the edition that brought him to Nepal. The Illustration of Art/Tool & Work, also from 1977, marks a shift in his practice. His process became less about the ‘illustration of art’ (a series from 1971–1978) and more about the physicality and the making of art. This work is a rare example where Dias and his Nepali collaborator’s hands both appear in the work, depicted as equals surrounded by the red Nepali clay they coexisted on. Dias returned to these papers to create works for at least a decade, layering further life experience into these remarkable collaborative surfaces that carry traces of experimentation, invention, and reinvention. Dias was one of the leading figures of 20th-century Brazilian art, working across various media to question the meaning of art and its systems. He left Brazil in 1966 and arrived in Paris in time to participate in the May 1968 protests. Because of his political involvement he was forced to move again; he settled in Milan, where he became the only Latin American member of the Arte Povera movement, and spent his career working across Brazil, Italy, and Germany. Bouchra Khalili b. 1975, Casablanca; lives and works in Berlin and Oslo The Constellations, Fig. 2, Fig. 4, Fig. 6, Fig. 8 , 2011 Four individual silkscreen prints Courtesy of the artist and mor Charpentier. Presented with support from ifa | Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Bouchra Khalili translates the illegal transnational journeys of individuals into utopian midnight-blue maps, where solidarities between people make visible the waiting, setbacks, force, and compromise found in the condition of statelessness. In her words: ‘constellations are by essence reference points located in spaces where landmarks do not exist: the sky and the sea. As maps, they were used for centuries by sailors looking upward to locate themselves below… Constellations are also visual translations of narratives: many of them are based on mythology. Translating these forced illegal journeys into constellations of stars also aims to challenge normative geography in favour of a ‘human geography’” – based on micro-narratives and singular lives. The limits between the sky and the sea blur, eventually suggesting an alternative form of orientation: the landmarks are [no longer] boundaries as established by nation-states, but the path of singular lives, from where the world can be seen. As alternative maps of the world, The Constellations suggests a counter-geography, of singular gestures of resistance against arbitrary boundaries.” Working with film, video, installation, photography, and prints, Khalili’s practice articulates language, subjectivity, orality, and geographical explorations. With her work, Khalili investigates strategies and discourses of resistance as elaborated, developed, and narrated by individuals – often members of political minorities. Kapwani Kiwanga b. 1978, Hamilton, Canada; lives and works in Paris The Secretary’s Suite , 2016 Mixed Media Installation, UN Photo Courtesy Teddy Chen Courtesy of the artist and Tanja Wagner. Presented with support from the Canada Council for the Arts The Secretary’s Suite is an installation that investigates the complexities of gift economies. Presented within a viewing environment inspired by the 1961 office of the United Nations Secretary-General, Kapwani Kiwanga’s single-channel video examines the history and tradition of gifted items within the United Nations’ art collection. Countries that are members of the UN, including Bangladesh, often donate works of art and objects of cultural value which go on display in public spaces, the Secretary General’s office, or are stored away from private view. This work raises questions about how gifts can impact power dynamics in relationships and with differing cultural significance across the course of history. Kiwanga’s work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historical narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. Her work is research-driven, instigated by marginalised or forgotten histories, and articulated across a range of materials and media including sculpture, installation, photography, video, and performance. Maryam Jafri b. 1972, Karachi; lives and works in Copenhagen and New York Independence Day 1934–1975, 2009–ongoing Sixty+ black and white archival inkjet prints Courtesy of the artist Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934–1975 features over 60 archival photos culled from more than 30 archives of the first Independence Day ceremonies of various Asian, Middle Eastern, and African nations. The swearing-in of a new leadership, the signing of relevant documents, the VIP parade, the stadium salute, the first address to the new nation – all are supervised and orchestrated by the departing colonial power. The photographic material is strikingly similar despite disparate geographical and temporal origins, revealing a political model exported from Europe and in the process of being cloned throughout the world. Although a great deal of research has been done on both the colonial and the postcolonial eras, this project aims to introduce a third, surprisingly neglected element into the debate – that 24-hour twilight period in between, when a territory transforms into a nation-state. Jafri works with video, sculpture, photography, and performance, which act as a support for her research-based, conceptual practice. Her works address and question the cultural and visual representations of history, politics, and economics, such as the politics of food production and consumption, the highly coded performance rituals of nascent nation-states, and cultural memory and copyright law. Murtaja Baseer b. 1932, Dacca; Lives and works in Dhaka Untitled (Dinosaur Drawings) , 1971/2020 Archival Newspapers and Mural by young artists Courtesy of the artist How does a living artist share his historically important work with his people when the person keeping it for decades is not willing to sharea it publicly in exhibitions or publications? Murtaja Baseer created a powerful series of drawings between 1971 and 1972 in Dhaka and in Paris, depicting the Pakistani military as prehistoric figures towering with physical might over Bengali people. The work violently alludes to the wartime atrocities of famine and rape as well as the colonial efforts to subjugate the Bengali language. The magazine ‘The Express’ where the particular work was edited by Zahir Raihan. Zahir Raihan was a writer, novelist and filmmaker, most notable for his documentary ‘Genocide’ on the killing of citizens by the Pakistani Army on 14 December 1971. Baseer first began these dinosaur drawings for mass dissemination in East Pakistani newspapers. Now 88 years old, the artist is working with archival material and a younger generation of artists to reimagine this series of work as a mural for all to see at the entrance of DAS, emblazoning it in public memory. Murtaja Baseer is known for his ‘abstract-realist’ paintings reflecting his daily experience of Bengal. In 1967, he started ‘Wall’ series, his first step towards abstraction, which depicted the entropy and layers of textures and colours on the walls of old Dhaka, a reflection on the society under the dictatorship of Ayub Khan (1958–1969). He actively participated in the Language Movement of 1952 and pre-liberation war demonstrations. He was sent to jail throughout the East Pakistani period for his leftist political views and later left for Paris. He demonstrated his solidarity with the Liberation Movement through his work by changing the spelling of his name from Murtaza Bashir to Murtaja Baseer, adjusting the letters to suit the Bengali language. Baseer is also a writer, poet, numismatist, and acted as an academic at the University of Chittagong until 1998. Pratchaya Phinthong b. 1974, Ubon Ratchathani; lives and works in Bangkok Waiting for Hilsa , 2019 Photographs, Book, Election Ink, Gill Net Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY, and gb agency. Produced with additional support from BANGKOK CITYCITY GALLERY Installation activated by a discussion at 2pm on 8 February Stories of the Hilsa fish and its migration across salty and sweet waters have been inscribed in South Asian culture for centuries as they historically swam from the Bay of Bengal up the Padma river and into the Ganges. In 1975 the Farakka Barrage (dam) was completed on the Indian side of the Bangladesh–India border, disrupting this migration. Pratchaya Phinthong draws a mental map of this cross-border conflictual reality, combining photos taken at the Farakka Barrage, reconstructed images, books, and objects – taking into consideration geopolitics, science, spirituality, and human relationships. Using Bangladesh’s ‘national fish,’ the artist metaphorically examines nation-state powers, but also presents to us an example of water as a source of life and the ability of sensations such as taste to transcend ideas relating to national identity. Phinthong creates situations without predetermined forms that rely on an element of viewer participation with the aim of creating a shared experience. He addresses financial fluctuations, media alarmism, and the global labour market, commonly employing them as metaphors for human behaviour. Interested in creating dialogue, he often juxtaposes different social, economic, or geographical systems. Rashid Talukder b. 1939, Pargana; d. 2011, Dhaka. Arms drill by women members of the Chatro Union (students union), 1st March, 1971, 1971/2020 . Photograph, Inkjet Print Outraged artists hold placards bearing the Bangla letters Sha Dhi Na Ta (independence) protesting the postponement of the opening of the National Assembly by President Yahya Khan, Dhaka, 1st March, 1971, 1971/2020, Photograph, Inkjet Print A sea of people move towards Ramna Racecourse, now Suhrawardy Udyan, to attend the historic speech of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Dhaka, 7th March, 1971, 1971/2020 Photograph, Inkjet Print. Courtesy of Drik Picture Gallery Fed up with being oppressed linguistically, economically, and culturally under the rule of West Pakistan (1947–1971), masses of people in what is now Bangladesh rallied in support of an independent sovereign country. People coming from all walks of life engaged in protests finally leading to the liberation war. This bloody war was catalysed when West Pakistan refused to hand over power to Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in 1971, despite his having received the majority of the democratic votes in the general election of Pakistan. Rashid Talukder dedicated himself to capturing the mass revolution of the East Pakistani people and their fight to maintain freedom as a newly independent nation. His images of empowered female activists, artists (including Murtaja Baseer whose drawings of resistance and independence are installed near this work) and students who participated in the making of Bangladesh greet visitors at the entrance of DAS, grounding us in the history of public assembly in Bangladesh that makes the Summit possible. Rashid Talukder was a photojournalist whose images represent a significant contribution to the collective memory of Bangladesh. Among many other defining events in the history of the nation, he documented the struggles of East Pakistan in the 1960s that led to the liberation war and the formation of Bangladesh. His photographs immortalise mass uprisings, resistance movements, and the participants, of whom many were killed by the Pakistani army. Talukder also photographed artists, highlighting their role in the liberation. As a photojournalist, he worked at the Daily Sangbad and The Daily Ittefaq successively, reaching wide audiences. Dedicated to expanding the field of photojournalism in Bangladesh, he founded the Bangladesh Photo Journalists’ Association in 1972. S. M. Sultan b. 1923, Narail; d. 1994, Jessore First Plantation sketch , c. 1976 Ink on brown paper Courtesy of the collection of Farooq Sobhan While South Asian art history describes him as a landscape painter, S.M. Sultan is remembered in Bangladesh for his energetic paintings of strong farmers made after 1975. These are primarily large-scale paintings made with natural pigments on unprimed jute canvases, celebrating the strength of Bengali peasants, both male and female, in their struggle against colonial and ecological disasters. Famine had been plaguing the country across generations from the era of the British Raj until just the year before Sultan first painted these icons of physical might. In this context, his depiction of the weak and downtrodden as invincible forces can be seen as subversive. In this sketch for the First Plantation, Sultan created a mythical environment where a larger-than-life figure demonstrates power, yet maintains a humble and protective gesture cherishing a single seed, a metaphor for all of humanity. The nude angels in the background speak to the plurality and liberalism found within the Bangladeshi art community who recognizes this work as one of the country’s most iconic contributions to Bangladeshi art history. After travelling extensively as a celebrated artist both internationally and within South Asia, Sultan retreated from urban life, moving to his home village of Narail, where he founded the Shishu Shwarga art school. His devotion to rural art education has had a lasting legacy, inspiring many initiatives to promote personal growth outside of urban centres through art. Sultan’s activities highlight the importance of rural culture in the collective identity of Bangladesh. Tuan Andrew Nguyen b. 1976, Sai Gon; lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City Solidarities Between the Reincarnated , 2019 Digital pigment print on Hahnemuhle paper and graphite on paper, two-channel video Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery Solidarities Between the Reincarnated interrogates the place of the archive document in a personal re-appropriation of history at the crossroads between echoes that persist amidst institutional amnesia and gaps in transmission within collective memory. At its core, this project considers the movement of people through (post-)colonial violence and the obscuring of its legacy in the context of France’s use of colonial troops in global and colonial conflicts and of communities born from it. Tuan Andrew Nguyen offers imagination and creation as ways in which to connect the gaps and fulfil a desire for connection through imagined lines of solidarity whose absence in the historical canon are brought to clash against expanded possibilities for the means by which we can remember. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s practice explores strategies of political resistance enacted through counter-memory and post-memory. Extracting and re-working narratives via history and supernaturalisms is an essential part of Nguyen’s video works and sculptures where fact and fiction are both held accountable. He initiated The Propeller Group (f. 2006), a platform for collectivity that situates themselves between an art collective and an advertising company. Dr. Zahia Rahmani b. 1962, Les Attouchs; lives and works in Paris and Heilles Seismography of Struggles – Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Journals , 2017 Video and sound installation, 59 min Courtesy of INHA, Paris Seismography of Struggle is an inventory of non-European critical and cultural journals, including those from the African, Indian, Caribbean, Asian, and South American diaspora, produced in the wake of the revolutionary movements of the end of the 18th century up to the watershed year of 1989. The sound and visual work included here reflects populations who have experienced colonialism, practices of slavery, Apartheid, and genocide. The struggle against slavery is at the root of many critical and cultural journals. Colonialism impacted the social and cultural cohesion of a number of communities and was also fought against in both writing and gesture by constantly renewing the modalities of political action. The oldest material evidence of this eminently modern exercise is L’Abeille Haytienne, a critical journal that was founded on the island of Haiti in 1817. The journal expresses the constant desire for emancipation. Christopher Columbus landed in Haiti in December 1492 and named it Hispaniola. The island later became a French territory and was renamed Dominica and, over time, more than 400,000 slaves live there and were subjected to France’s ferocious rule. C.L.R. James noted that, in 1789, this territory alone accounted for more than two-thirds of French foreign trade. In 1804, the revolt of subjugated populations gave rise to the birth of a small independent state of Haiti. Even though this cause was won, the struggles continued. For over two centuries, print media has been a space that has accommodated varied experiences. Born out of a sense of urgency in response to colonialism, journals have aligned with a critical, political, aesthetic, poetic, and literary ambitions and helped sustain graphical and scriptural creativity. They have appeared with regularity in the struggles that women and men have waged for their emancipation. Consisting of formal singularities and political objectives that support human communities and their aspirations, the journal, this fragile object, often pulled together difficult material that was motivated by noble causes and the determination of committed authors. The journal reveals a rare aesthetic power. In this all-digital era, we must re-establish and qualify its formal, aesthetic, and political function on a global scale. Zahia Rahmani is one of France’s leading art historians and writers of fiction, memoirs, and cultural criticism. Rahmani curated Made in Algeria, genealogy of a territory (2016), dedicated to the role of cartography in the colonial expansion. Rahmani founded the Global Art Prospective (f. 2015), a collective of young researchers and actors within the art scene who are specialists in non-European territorial and cultural spaces.

ALL PROJECTS The Missing One Curated by Nada Raza Gaganendranth Tagore, Resurrection, c. 1922, courtesy the Samdani Art Foundation Collection. Photo courtesy of the Dhaka Art Summit and Samdani Art Foundation. Photo credit: Jenni Carter “…the deeper we seek, the more is our wonder excited, the more is the dazzlement for our gaze”Dr. Abdus Salam, Nobel Prize banquet speech, Stockholm 1979 Nirrudesher Kahani or The Story of The Missing One – written in 1896 by Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858-1937) is thought to be one of the first tales of science or speculative fiction in Bangla. It was a tale of miracle; a cyclone quelled with physics, by pouring oil on water. Bose was a pioneering inventor of instruments for wireless technology and the study of nature, and a crater on the moon was named after the research scientist. The encounter with modernity and scientific progress at the turn of the twentieth century generated lively intellectual debate in South Asia. Its influence sparked radical ideas and encouraged fresh approaches to religion and culture, particularly in Bengal, even as the idea of freedom and self-governance took hold. Bose was close to the Tagore family who were central to the intellectual world of what is called the Bengal Renaissance, generative for art, music and literature; Gaganendranath Tagore painted a portrait of him that now hangs at the Bose Institute in Calcutta. It would have been against this backdrop that the artist painted Resurrection around the early 1920s. It is an ethereal painting, with a circular vortex of clouds and rays of light circulating around a raised central formation, as if we are staring up at the heavens. And here is the enigma; at the centre of this futuristic work is a religious icon. A celestial cross is clearly visible within an arch, and a saintly glowing figure, refracting the light. Tagore’s vision confronts us from almost a century ago and presents modern progress and religious faith in cerulean blue harmony. We time-travel a hundred or so years to the turn of the millennium in South Asia, from the late 1990’s to the present, to see how the experiences of artists who benefited from the advancements of the modern age might respond to the themes of science and spirituality central to our genre. The exhibition is arranged in three broad movements, united by the visual metaphor of looking up at the sky. The first is enchantment, the second, alienation and the last, dystopia and the possibility of redemption. It follows, in some loose sense, the plot of a generic science fiction novel or film – a happy,innocent world, the hostile appearance of a foreign or extra-terrestrial being and finally, at the climax, apocalyptic threat with the potential for salvation via faith and human will. Participating artists include Ronni Ahmmed, David Alesworth, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Fahd Burki, Neha Choksi, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi, Rohini Devasher, Marzia Farhana, Aamir Habib, Zihan Karim, Ali Kazim, Sanjeewa Kumara, Firoz Mahmud, Mehreen Murtaza, Saskia Pintelon, Sahej Rahal, Tejal Shah, Zoya Siddiqui and Janet Meaney, Himali Singh Soin, Mariam Suhail, and Hajra Waheed.