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

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

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

ALL PROJECTS Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun Curated by Diana Campbell Bearing Point 3 - An Amphibious Sun The Bay of Bengal once supported an amphibious life. Water was not a force to keep at bay, but an entity to live with, and through. In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather , mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans Delta of Bangladesh that has soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. Mud complicates the relationship to liquid, which is no longer delineated, discrete. The attempt to extract oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees as a result of the resulting effects of global warming. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them; a catastrophe on one hemisphere inevitably impacts the other. With colonialism came the attempted erasure of muddiness as condition – amorphous zones became hardened into coastlines; lines were even drawn in the muddy space between the human and the non-human. The time of stones, of tides, of swamp, of earth, became subsumed to the relentless measure of the clock. Omer Wasim and Saira Sheikh’s drawings and text in The Impossibility of Loving a Stone (2017) reconstitutes the human in geological time, where the present stretches back two million years – they soil the skin between the Earth and us, slowly moving us like shifting mud through the present. Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st century. He transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the 19th century colonial surveyor morphs into today’s corporations that are exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this haunting essay film. Moving further away from the generation of knowledge as mere data, Neha Choksi turns her attention to the sun, both as planetary sustenance and a point of reference for dialogue across generations and within the self through multiple modes of narration. The artist’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Choksi invited ten Bangladeshi children to embody a fictive dream of a child obsessively drawing suns, and to consider the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They considered the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities. They imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Each day of the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Choksi invited a different adult professional to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature drawing the visitor back to their primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as they morph from atoms into beings and back. Artists Ho Tzu Nyen (b. 1976 in Singapore, lives and works in Singapore) 2 or 3 Tigers, 2015 2 Channel CGI Video, 10-channel sound courtesy of the artist and Edouard Malingue Gallery Technology supported by Sharjah Art Foundation. Presented here with additional support from the National Art Council Singapore and Edouard Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong/Shanghai Taking inspiration from 19th Century wood engraving, Ho Tzu Nyen restages the first recorded colonial encounter between a white man and a Malayan tiger in Singapore which occurred in 1835, harnessing CGI technology to bring the story into the 21st Century. The wood engraving chronicles the story of George Dromgoole Coleman, the then Government Superintendent of Public Works in Singapore who was surprised by a tiger who was determined to attack not Coleman and his entourage of convict laborers, but rather the theodolite (surveying instrument) they were using to conduct a survey on the unexplored forests of Singapore. Post-colonial historians have noted that the imperial methods of data collection, through census reports, and land surveys, were directed at the control of the lands and bodies of subjugated populations. The creation of these data sets belied the complex inter-relationship between human and non-human inhabitants of a place. Village folklore from South and Southeast Asia describes a symbiotic relationship between humans and tigers, where tigers assume roles of ancestors, gods, protectors, and even estranged brothers of man. The powerful figure of the were-tiger, or a person who can become tigers, and a tiger who can become a person and live in the village, points to the strong bond between man and animal. Contemporary versions of these tales often use the trope of the colonial census taker who asks about the number of tigers in a particular area. In myths such as that of Haru’r Pishima (Haru’s grand-aunt) in the Sunderbans and of Tsaricho in Nagaland, the villagers respond “sometimes 5, and sometimes 6”, alluding to the presence of the were-tiger in their midst, to the bafflement of the census taker. Producing confusion through untranslatable knowledge becomes a weapon of resistance against colonial control. Introducing the were-tiger into Coleman’s story, Ho Tzu Nyen transforms the historical tiger attack into a metaphor for resistance against colonial exploitation of past and present; the Coleman of the 19th Century morphs into today’s corporations exploiting nearly the same forests. The human, animal, spirit, and machine become entangled in the suspended moments of this essay film. Ghosts and spirits can often move easily across lines drawn by man, and by transfiguring the agent of colonialism (Coleman), the tiger collapses the gap it attempts to create between man and nature. Neha Choksi (b. 1973 in New Jersey, lives and works in Mumbai and Los Angeles) Every Kind of Sun, 2017-2018 Installation activated with daily live performance involving 10 children and 10 adults Interaction from 1-2pm on February 2, 6:30-7:30pm daily Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2018 Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, and Project 88 Neha Choksi’s obsession with the sun is related to her long-standing interests in absence, loss, memory and nature. Her latest salutation to the sun, Every Kind of Sun (2017-2018) debuts as a Solo Project, bringing to life her emotional piece of short fiction, which starts: Now and then…I have a repeating dream of me as a child coming home from school and sitting down to draw. And I draw suns. I use every crayon in the box. I draw every type of sun…A rainbow sun, a hollow sun, a scared sun, a new sun, a neat sun, a dirty sun, a magic sun, a spinning sun, a poem sun, a danger sun, a boss sun, an open sun, a tired sun, a breathing sun, a clapping sun, a mirror sun, a funny sun, a sour sun. Choksi invites ten Bangladeshi children to embody these dreams, drawing suns daily in the exhibition space, considering the multiplicity of the sun as a powerful magic orb and a cursed ball of fire, both energising and overheating life on earth. They consider the sun’s power from their point of view as children, but also from the vantage point of other human and non-human entities (such as a rock, the wind, or even a lizard). They also imagine how the sun might consider us within its dominion of power as it shines down on our planet. Venturing deeper into the fictive dream that inspires this work, the mother worries about the obsessive nature of her child’s drawings, and consults an ayurvedic doctor to interpret the meaning of these stacks of suns. Choksi invites a different adult professional each day to interact with the now-embodied dream child through the lens of their skill sets as an archaeologist or a meteorologist, among others. The psychological process of animating nature draws us back to our primal yearning to reconnect with the cosmos across species and generations as we morph from atoms into beings and back. Omer Wasim (b. 1988 in Karachi lives and works in Karachi ) & Saira Sheikh (b. 1975 in Karachi, d. 2017 in Karachi) The Impossibility of Loving a Stone 2017 Drawings on paper Courtesy of the artists This work situates the makers amidst the changing peripheries of the ocean. Once porous, continuous, the coastline—carved over millions of years by the love of water for land and stone—is ravaged, pushed out, to make room for concrete. The mother—sea and adjoining land—and/or bearer is continuously mined for animate and inanimate beings. Hence, The Impossibility of Loving a Stone is indeed, or signals, the impossibility of loving the land, water, and other beings, hinting at colonial and neocolonial modes of knowledge construction and production, value, consumption, and bio-power. The desire to decipher, to fully understand, to grapple with the physicality of the stone is also informed by the need to get closer to the father—a geologist, a displaced body. His didactic words directed at deconstructing the physicality of the stone, allow the makers to traverse through boundaries, both permeable and impermeable, and make them visible on paper. And in this manifestation, with the original text next to its Bangla translation, the work comes full circle. A little part of the father returns home, albeit only as words and lines on paper for a short while. The father in this work is also a biographical reference, as Wasim’s father is a geologist and was born in Bangladesh. He lived there until November 1971—and has not been able to go back since. Ursula Biemann (b. 1955, Zurich; lives and works in Zurich) Deep Weather, 2013 Video Essay Courtesy of the artist Presented here with additional support from Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council In Ursula Biemann’s film Deep Weather (2013), mud connects the ends of the Earth: Alberta, Canada and the Sundarbans- the deltaic regions of Bangladesh that have soaked in the sea of the Bay of Bengal for centuries. The attempt to conjure oil from the muddy sands of Alberta by multinational corporations leads to massive displacement: of indigenous people in the Athabasca basin in Canada, and of local populations in southern Bangladesh who have been transformed into climate refugees. Only lines of sacks filled with mud stand between these people, and the sea that swells with rising global temperatures, as global capitalism churns the very insides of the earth to burn the remains of long-dead life forms. Rotating around the same sun, Canada and Bangladesh, as well as everywhere else on the globe, are linked by the oceans and atmospheres connecting them and naturally environmental catastrophes on one side of the earth impact the other.

ALL PROJECTS Kather Nripati at Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 20 Feb- 24 May 2024 Dhali Al Mamoon showcased his work 'Kather Nripati' (Wooden Lord) at the second edition of Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale titled After Rain. The logistics of Dhali Al Mamon’s presentation was supported by the Samdani Art Foundation. Dhali Al Mamoon is an artist whose work engages with the persistence of colonialism as a historical trauma. Al Mamoon's series of kinetic sculptures comprising Kather Nripati (Wooden Lord) derive from traditional palm-leaf puppets that made fun of the flailing movements of the sepoys, the Indian soldiers hired by the British East India Company. Originating around the time of the Sepoy Mutiny (1857-59), the dolls were a subtle form of resistance that temporarily subverted the usual hierarchical order. Life-sized, wooden versions of the toy mounted on plinths rotate periodically. Their arms and legs clatter and flare in all directions, giving them a comical but menacing presence.

ALL PROJECTS Stitching Collective Envisioned by Gudskul, Jakarta Stitching Ecosystem Stitching Ecosystem is a mini-festival format comprised of a series of workshops, sharing sessions, and market spaces with a focus on five of Gudskul’s eleven ‘collective studies’ subjects: Collective Sustainability Strategy, Public Relations, Spatial Practices, Art Laboratory, and Knowledge Garden. Gudskul will connect and reconnect collective networks and foster inter-collectiveness in order to understand and collaborate across different themes and contexts. We take this opportunity to build a bigger ecosystem, while maintaining the valuable organic intimacy found in any collective praxis. Further, this series of activities will cultivate, foster and distribute knowledge among the participating collectives in DAS, while also expanding network and sharable resources with the general public. Collective as School Collective as School is a sharing session between over forty collectives participating in DAS 2020 from Africa, Australia, Central and South America, Oceania, and South and Southeast Asia. Each collective will share their respective stories about how and why their collectives were established, what their goals are, how their regeneration processes unfold, what they learned, what their structure looks like, how they have sustained and survived, how they self-evaluate, how knowledge gets distributed within the collective internally and externally to broader communities, and how their collectives support each member as an individual. This closed-door introductory session will produce a series of schemes/maps of potentials, strategies, and common understanding to prime the remaining nine days of DAS. Speculative Collective Speculative Collective is Gudskul’s latest iteration of a knowledge-sharing and mapping module that was conceived as a tool to explore forms of collectivising through direct practice, forming a kind of know-how. Compressed both spatially and temporally, the project extends from ongoing work within the context of Jakarta. In a loosely defined process, Gudskul invites strangers to meet and share what they consider to be ‘knowledge’ by playing the roles of both teacher and student in a quick reciprocal exchange. This newly formed pair must then couple with another pair, forming a temporary collective. Gudskul has designed a ‘tool’ to enable participants to record this process for themselves and carry it on past these random yet choreographed meetings. Gerobak Cinema Gerobak Cinema is a mobile screening station presented as part of The Collective Body curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt and Kathryn Weir. The Chattogram based collective Jog and the Jakarta based collective ruangrupa collaborate using a rickshaw, producing screening sessions in several spots around the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, taking the energy from inside the venue out into the streets of Dhaka. The equipment will be collaboratively designed by artists, designers, IT technicians and created by the community according to local aesthetics to screen their own videos/movies, or even particular Bangladeshi movies. With these activities, we are trying to strengthen the relationships and collaboration potentials with the local community who may have not arrived at the world of contemporary art. Printmaking Workshop A collaborative workshop and sharing session between Grafis Huru Hara (Jakarta) and Pangrok Sulap (Sabah) and Shunno Space (Dhaka) will explore and raise similar issues the collectives are facing through specific media: woodcut and linocut techniques. This workshop will be open to students. Loneless Market One of our central focuses in developing an ecosystem is how sustainability could be understood through different perspectives. Not only in monetary aspects, but also values and notions, network and regeneration. Loneless Market is a session designed by Gudskul to develop exchange activities in material and immaterial things, and also at the same time generating revenues to benefit all of the participants of this marketplace. This will be a celebration of the nine days of collective work built across DAS. DAS is a Non-commercial research platform that exists to support grassroots art ecosystems – and all proceeds go directly to the collectives involved in this platform. Cooking & Karaoke Tent For the last evening before DAS closes, Gudskul will collaborate with local collectives to imagine a big dinner through creating a fusion of Bangladeshi and Indonesian food recipes. A karaoke session will play some well-known Bangladeshi and Indonesian songs and the group will be open to song requests. Open to all participating collectives and artists in DAS, this event serves to strengthen the bonds and networks built up across DAS 2020.

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

ALL PROJECTS Critical Writing Ensemble Curated By Katya García-Antón, Antonio Cataldo, Diana Campbell, Chandrika Grover And Bhavna Kakar PREFACE “to reshape some histories, to bring back the forgotten others, to reassess and alter the already hazily known, to redefine some standards of writing and our understanding, thoughts and feelings of an era lost. More importantly, to allow this man to breathe his words […] Memory, collectively lost, can now be somewhat regained.” These thoughts are taken from the last pages of the publication The Art Critic dedicated to the Burmese born, India based critic and artist Richard Bartholomew. The words come from Bartholomew´s son Pablo, and they eloquently comment on the power of his father’s archive, in particular his writing, to critically build different pasts. Bartholomew’s thoughts do more than address the urgent need to fortify the interlinking of art historical narratives - many forgotten or simply unknown - within the South Asia region, but they inspire us to consider their impact beyond it. And they do more, since they demand that we persevere in new ways of nurturing critique that will strengthen regional histories of immense richness to the world. To do so we must nurture structures of empowerment, knowledge sharing and production, within which micro-histories will not just claim their place within macro-histories but also contribute to their revitalisation. It is on the wings of this impulse that Diana Campbell Betancourt, Artistic Director of the Dhaka Art Summit, together with Katya García-Antón, Director and Curator of OCA, Office of Contemporary Art Norway, Chandrika Grover Ralleigh, Head of Liaison Office India of the Swiss Arts Council – Pro Helvetia, and Bhavna Kakar, Director of Take on Art Magazine are launched the CRITICAL WRITING ENSEMBLE as part of the Dhaka Art Summit 2016. The project was curated by Katya García-Antón, Director and Curator of OCA, with the collaboration of Antonio Cataldo, Senior Programmer of OCA. Research into the processes and structures that could help to empower writers today has been a part of the curatorial practice of Katya García-Antón in recent years. She was commissioned by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council in 2012-13 to devise a programme for the discussion and activation of critical art writing in Switzerland involving cross-generation peers across the linguistic regions and traditions of the country. CWE has drawn from this valuable experience, repositioning previous thoughts and posing new questions within the context of the Dhaka Art Summit, as well as the histories and currencies of the South Asia region. CWE took a cross-regional approach and was developed in collaboration with Bhavna Kakar, who in addition to convening with the peers in Dhaka, also developed CWE-1 in an official partnership with Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, by organising a series of discussions and workshops amongst regional peers during the month of December 2015 in the lead-up to CWE II at the Summit. Finally, in 2017, CWE will be developed as a further iteration within the context of Nordic Europe through a programme held in OCA, Oslo. CWE therefore brings together peers from the South Asia region and across the globe, into different working constellations to share writing histories and knowledge with each other, experiment together, and produce new critical impulses regarding art writing, which will be compiled in a specially dedicated publication with wide international distribution. Such an endeavour is positioned within a local therefore as much as a global framework, in more ways than one, for not only is this a project of some urgency regionally, it reminds us of the fact the crisis is a global one. Art writing has for some time endured challenges which vary in nature across the world. In some parts there are fewer places in which to write critically and experimentally about art and art history, there is less and less financing for this, there is less and less time; in others whilst platforms for writing may actually be on the rise, their value and impact has declined. Writing is by nature a lonely endeavour, but under these conditions, art writing is being pushed to the margins and alienated from the central and critical position it should have in our societies, as will the immediate contact it should have with our audiences. If this decline continues, art histories around the world will homogenise and the immense richness and diversity of our cultures, essential to rewrite and re-imagine present and past histories, will lose their critical edge as the very voices that should build it, which should experiment it and reinvent it, disappear over time. STRUCTURAL SUMMARY CWE seeks to foster a community of art writing peers working together. Breaking the isolation that characterises much writing practice, the platform hopes to create a lively environment for intellectual exchange. CWE seeks to connect art writers experience and knowledge of regional and national writing histories, across the South Asian region and other regions globally. CWE II seeks to develop these relations through a four-day platform of presentations, panel discussions, lecture performances, group debates and readings, within the context of the Dhaka Art Summit, its exhibitions and talks programmes. CWE views art writing as a practice in its own right. Writing in general is strongly shaped by the contexts in which it is practiced and where it appears, and so the platform will consider discussing writing in a variety of historical and formal contexts. CWE counted on access to the Asia Art Archive that was on site in Dhaka. CWE will publish the material presented during, and derived from these sessions and distribute it internationally by Mousse Publishing. The publication will include a variety of contributions from all peers. Session 1 Discussion, part 2 Al Fresco – Writing Within and Against the Art School Date: 3 February 2016, 3.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy With Yin Ker, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Chus Martínez, Anshuman Das Gupta, moderated by Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo Session 1 Discussion, part 2 Al Fresco – Writing Within and Against the Art School Date: 3 February 2016, 3.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy With Yin Ker, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Chus Martínez, Anshuman Das Gupta, moderated by Katya García-Antón and Antonio Cataldo Rebranding Mesopotamia: The Inextinguishable Fire by Övül Durmusoglu Date: 7 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Turkish curator and writer Övül O. Durmusoglu will focus on the flow of information which builds our disjointed everyday life to address the reality of war and its virtual manifestations. Starting with the reading of contemporary cinematic and installative propositions she asks questions which are immanent upon us – Where did Daesh come from? How did the migrant population increase in Europe? Or, how did the populist right-wing Pegidas movement against non-Muslims and immigrants in Germany, started in Dresden, draw thousands of participants in 2014? – to morph on our future from within and outside the arts. Övül O. Durmusoglu is a curator and writer. She is the director/curator of YAMA screen in Istanbul. She works as a curatorial advisor to Gulsun Karamustafa's monograph in Hamburger Bahnhof in 2016. She also co-leads 'Solar Fantastic’, a research and publication project between Mexico and Turkey. Durmusoglu has recently curated 'Future Queer', the 20th year anniversary exhibition for Kaos GL association in Istanbul. In the past, she acted as the curator of the festival Sofia Contemporary 2013 titled as 'Near, Closer, Together: Exercises for a Common Ground'. She organised different programmes and events as a Goethe Institute fellow at Maybe Education and Public Programs for dOCUMENTA (13). Indian Printed Matters after Independence by Devika Singh Date: 8 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy This presentation by Paris-based art historian and curator Devika Singh (who is currently writing a book on artistic practices in India between 1947 and 1991) takes the title of this session on ‘printed matter’ as a point of departure to discuss a moment when art reviews were a critical site of transaction in India between the public sphere and contemporary art currents. For writers of the immediate post-independence period, few issues mattered more than the relation between India and the outside. Opinionated and polemical, writings on art contributed to debates on the nature of art and its dialogue with history and ideas of the nation. Commenting on Indian art of the 1950s in the pages of the review MARG in 1967, Jaya Appaswamy described this changing decade as an opening onto the world, from ‘local nationalistic idioms to a world international language’. Using the first years of MARG as a central example, the presentation explores this period of radical reconfiguration to ask what its internationalism amounted to and how we can make sense of it today. Devika Singh is an art historian, critic and curator based in Paris and an affiliated scholar at the Centre of South Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. She holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Cambridge. Singh was the Smuts Research Fellow at Cambridge (2012-2015) and has held fellowships at the French Academy at Rome (Villa Medici), the Freie Universität, Berlin, and the John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Washington DC. She has published extensively in catalogues, art magazines and journals, including frieze, Art Press, Art Asia Pacific, Art History and Modern Asian Studies and is currently writing a book on art in post-independence India for Reaktion Books. She is also curating several exhibitions on photography in India. Letters– ‘The long awaited morn’ by Salima Hashmi Date: 4 February 2016, 12.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Artist, cultural writer, activist and founding Dean of School of Visual Arts at the Beaconhouse National University at Lahore Salima Hashmi, will read and comment letters of her father Faiz Ahmed Faiz to address the power of the epistolary form as a critical tool for resistance. Salima Hashmi is an artist, curator and contemporary art historian. Professor Hashmi was the founding Dean of the School of Visual Art and Design at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore; she taught at the National College of Arts (NCA) Lahore for 31 years and was also Principal of the College for four years. Salima Hashmi has written extensively on the arts. Her book Unveiling the Visible- Lives and Works of Women Artists of Pakistan was published in 2002, and Memories, Myths, Mutations – Contemporary Art of India and Pakistan, co-authored with Yashodhara Dalmia for Oxford University Press, India, was published in 2006. She has recently edited The Eye Still Seeks – Contemporary Art of Pakistan for Penguin Books India in 2014. In addition, Salima Hashmi curated ‘Hanging Fire’: an exhibition of Pakistani Contemporary Art for Asia Society Museum, New York in 2009, which was accompanied by an extensive catalogue. The Government of Pakistan awarded her the President's Medal for Pride of Performance for Art Education in 1999. And the Australian Council of Art and Design Schools (ACUADS) nominated her as Inaugural International Fellow, for distinguished service to art and design education in 2011.She is a practicing artist and has participated in many group exhibitions and has had six solo exhibitions at a national and international level. She is Council Member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. Dislocating Authority in a Colonial Art School: critical interventions of a “native” insider by Dr Shukla Sawant Date: 3 February 2016, 4.00pm Venue: 2rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Focusing on the autobiography, periodical columns and official reports written by Madhev Vishwanath Dhurandhar (1867–1944), a ‘native’ art educator and administrator within the colonial bureaucracy of the Bombay Presidency, the presentation will examine the curricular interventions and nuanced resistance offered by him through his arguments published in English and Marathi to address different language publics. In contrast to the colonial era education policy that insisted on a revivalist typology rendered through language of academic rigor and directed towards design education for the ‘natives,’ Dhurandhar, who was to rise to the position of the headmaster of the venerable Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, while adhering to academic means, was to make his career primarily as an independent ‘History Painter,’ illustrator and landscapist. While Santiniketan’s credentials as a site of Tagore’s resistance project have been dealt with extensively in art historical writing in India, the everyday opposition of figures entangled in colonial institutional structures have received little attention. With her presentation Jawaharlal Nehru University Professor Shukla Sawant, based in Delhi, by drawing attention to rare archival material, hopes to further the discussion on the fissures in colonial structures of power that were chiseled out from within. Dr Shukla Sawant is a visual artist and Professor of Visual Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi where she has taught since 2001. She is also currently visiting faculty at the Bhau Daji Lad Museum, Mumbai. Prior to joining JNU, Shukla Sawant taught for twelve years at the Department of Fine Arts and Art Education Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi. After graduating in painting from the College of Art, New Delhi she specialised in printmaking at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and later went to the Slade School of Art and Centre for Theoretical Studies, London on a Commonwealth grant. Her research interests include modern and contemporary art, art in colonial India, photography, printmaking and new media. Shukla has ten solo shows to her credit and has published various catalogue essays and contributed chapters in books on Contemporary Indian Art. She is a founding member of the Indian Printmakers’ Guild and was a working group member of Khoj International Artists’ Association between 1998–2005. She has delivered lectures at the NGMA, New Delhi; University of Heidelberg, Germany; New School, New York and Brandeis University; and has participated in the 18th International Congress of Aesthetics, Beijing University, 2010. Her recent publications include: ‘Landscape Painting a Formal Inquiry’ in The Indian Quarterly, ‘A Question of Perspective’, The Indian Quarterly; ‘Instituting Artists’ Collectives: the Bangalore/Bengaluru Experiments with “Solidarity Economies”’, Journal of Transcultural Studies, Heidelberg University; ‘Out Of India: Landscape Painting Beyond the Picturesque Frame’ in Landscape Painting, the Changing Horizon, Delhi Art Gallery, New Delhi, 2012. Art writing from below: Transversality in the country of mistranslation by Mustafa Zaman Date: 8 February 2018, 3.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Conceiving it as a site for raising and debating issues, Depart magazine’s editor Mustafa Zaman will offer the raison d’etre behind the art quarterly published from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose principal aim is providing critical reinforcement to the burgeoning art scene of the country. Zaman will look at the state of art criticism in Bangladesh while simultaneously examining some of the crucial critical interventions as activities from below. Often subject to mistranslation in the artistic circuit, what some writings set in motion is a social/collective reaction, while others pass without notice. Thus, the coincidence of art as a critical praxis and art writing as a critique remains even more misunderstood. Born in 1968 Mustafa Zaman received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1989 from the Institute of Fine Arts (now, Faculty of Fine Arts), University of Dhaka. In the late 1990s Zaman started contributing art reviews to Observer Magazine, a weekly supplement of the daily Observer. He joined The Daily Star in 2002 and worked in the scope of a feature writer for Star Weekend Magazine for three years writing on a gamut of subject matters including art, literature and politics. He has contributed numerous art reviews and articles on major Bangladeshi artists to a number of vernacular dailies including Bhorer Kakoj and Prothom Alo. Zaman is now editor of Depart: a magazine launched in 2010 and focused on contemporary art from South Asia with special emphasis on the emerging art scene of Bangladesh. He has written numerous prefaces to exhibition catalogues of major Bangladeshi young artists. Zaman’s major curatorial efforts include ‘CrossOver’ (2011–2012), which occasioned two back-to-back workshops and exhibitions planned in collaboration with co-curator Sushma K Bahl, sponsored by Art & Bangladesh in Dhaka, and Art Mall in Delhi, with artists from India and Bangladesh as participants; two solo exhibitions in 2013 including ‘DeReal’ by Bahram, a rickshaw painter who crossed over to mainstream art circle, and ‘Gravity Free World’ by expatriate artist A Rahman; and lastly a retrospective exhibition in 2014 entitled ‘In(site)’ by Kazi Salahuddin Ahmed. As an artist Zaman had his first solo in 2002 where sourced image were placed alongside texts to interrogate the order of knowledge; his second solo showcased his large paintings on canvases in an exhibition in 2010, at Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts; and the third was a playful mix of two and three-dimensional works framed as a series of seemingly disparate yet thematically related conceptual pieces at Alliance Francaise in 2010. His most recent multimedia installations and interactive pieces were presented at Bengal Lounge in 2013, at a duo exhibition with fellow artist Rafiqul Shuvo, under the title ‘Automated Subjectivity’. Aunohita Mojumdar Date: 8 February 2018, 11.30am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Mojumdar, editor of Himal Magazine, Kathmandu, will speak about the responsibility of the writer and the theatre of war by bringing to light stories of everyday reality in territories of conflict and violence. Aunohita Mojumdar is the Nepal-based editor of Himal Southasian: the region's only long-form independent print publication. She began her career as a freelance journalist in Delhi in the 1980s, and quickly moved onto explore the relationship between citizens and the state in Punjab and Kashmir. She worked for eight years in Afghanistan, writing on topics that ranged from the role of art in women's lives to the evolving social attitudes towards media, incarceration, and family planning. She has contributed to a wide variety of media that includes but is not limited to Eurasianet, Asia Times, Himal Southasian, The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, NRC Handelsblad (Dutch), Sydsvenska (Swedish), Al Jazeera, Times of India and Hindustan Times. The Artist’s Apostrophe by Mike Sperlinger Date: 8 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy One of the features of recent discussions of art has been the proliferation of the possessive artist's apostrophe, in phrases like ‘artists’ moving image’ or ‘artists' writing’. Thinking about the phrase ‘artists’ writing,’ Professor of Theory and Writing at The Academy of Fine Art, KHiO (Oslo, Norway), Mike Sperlinger, will briefly examine some of the practices, histories and institutional dilemmas concealed by that seemingly innocuous grammatical mark – for example, what kind of relationship between the fields of art and writing does it imply? And who is really in charge of making this kind of attribution – to whom does the possessive apostrophe itself really belong? To do that Sperlinger will present a few examples – in particular Tracks: a journal of artists’ writings, a little-known publication edited by the American sculptor Herbert George in the mid-1970s. Mike Sperlinger is Professor of Writing and Theory at The Academy of Fine Art Oslo. Before that, he worked for more than a decade at LUX: a London-based agency for artists working with the moving image, which he co-founded with Benjamin Cook in 2002. As a writer he has contributed to a variety of publications including Afterall, Art Monthly, Dot Dot Dot, frieze, Radical Philosophy and Texte zur Kunst, as well as catalogue texts for artists including Ed Atkins, Gerard Byrne and Hong-Kai Wang. He has edited publications including Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art (2005) and Kinomuseum: Towards an Artists’ Cinema (2008). He has also curated a number of exhibitions, including ‘Let's Take Back Our Space’ (Focal Point Gallery, 2009) and a solo exhibition by Marianne Wex (Badischer Kunstverein, 2012); and he was the producer of the film Crippled Symmetries by the artist Beatrice Gibson, which won the Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2015. He is currently working on a volume of selected writings by the late artist Ian White and an anthology of Tracks: a journal of writing by artists published in New York in the 1970s. The Art Critic by Rosalyn D’Mello Date: 4 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Mumbai based artist and writer Rosalyn D’Mello played a central role in the research that enabled the publication in 2012 of The Art Critic – a historic selection of the art writings of art critic, poet, writer, painter and photographer Richard Bartholomew (b. Tavoy, British Burma, 1926, d. Delhi, India, 1985). D’Mello will present a lecture performance addressing significant points in Bartholomew’s poetic and literary legacy, from the period of the 1950s up to the 1980s that offered an insider’s account of the little known story of Modern Indian Art. Rosalyn D’Mello is a widely published freelance art writer based in New Delhi. She was the Editor-in-Chief of BLOUIN ARTINFO India. She is a regular contributor to Vogue, Open, Mint Lounge, Art Review, and Art Review Asia. D’Mello was among five writers nominated for Forbes’s Best Emerging Art Writer Award in 2014 and was also nominated for the inaugural Prudential Eye Art Award for Best Writing on Asian Contemporary Art in 2014. She was the associate editor of The Art Critic, a 600+ page selection of the art writings of Richard Bartholomew from the 1950s to the early 1980s and was a member of the jury of the Prudential Eye Art Award 2015. Her first book, A Handbook For My Lover was published in 2015 by Harper Collins India. On Curating Webjournal by Dorothee Richter Date: 8 February 2018, 12.30pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Drawing from recent research and from her work as an editor of the independent international journal OnCurating, Dorothee Richter, Head of Postgraduate Programme in Curating at the Zurich University of the Arts, Zurich, Switzerland, will discuss hybrid curatorial models to address experiences of working and writing across online and offline platforms. Dorothee Richter is head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and co-founder, with Susanne Clausen, of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme: a cooperation of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating and the Department of Fine Arts, University of Reading. From 1999 to the end of 2003, Richter was artistic director of the Künstlerhaus Bremen where she curated a discursive programme based on feminist issues, urban situations, power relation issues and institutional critique. In 2005 she initiated, in collaboration with Barnaby Drabble, the Postgraduate Studies Programme in Curating. In 2007 she organised the symposium ‘Re-Visions of the Display’ with Jennifer Johns and Sigrid Schade at the Migros Museum in Zurich; in 2010 the ‘Institution as Medium. Curating as Institutional Critique?’ symposium cooperation with Rein Wolfs; and in 2013 the symposium ‘Who is afraid of the public?’ at the ICA London, cooperating with Elke Krasny, Silvia Simoncelli and the University of Reading. She was curator of Fluxus Festival at Cabaret Voltaire in 2012, and worked as curator at the Museum Baerengasse in 2014. In 2008 she initiated the web-journal OnCurating.org and has been Publisher since. Her most recent publication is Fluxus. Kunst gleich Leben? Mythen um Autorschaft, Produktion, Geschlecht und Gemeinschaft (2012) and the new Internet platform www.on-curating.org which presents current approaches to critical curatorial practice. In 2013 she produced a film together with Ronald Kolb: Flux Us Now! Fluxus Explored with a Camera. What we left unfinished: Shahrazade in the archives by Mariam Ghani Date: 7 February 2016, 11.30am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy NY-based artist Mariam Ghani will give a performative, part-text-based presentation of the audiovisual material of What We Left Unfinished – a long-term research, film, and dialogue project centered around five unfinished Afghan feature films shot, but never edited, between 1978 and 1992. Mariam Ghani is an artist, writer, filmmaker and teacher. Her research-based practice spans video, installation, photography, performance, and text. Her exhibitions and screenings include presentations at the Rotterdam, ‘CPH:DOX’ and ‘transmediale’ film festivals, the Sharjah and Liverpool Biennials, dOCUMENTA (13) in Kabul and Kassel, MoMA in New York, the National Gallery in Washington DC, the St. Louis Art Museum, and the CCCB in Barcelona. Recent texts have been published by Creative Time Reports, Foreign Policy, Ibraaz, Triple Canopy, and the Manifesta Journal. Ghani’s recent curatorial projects include the international symposium ‘Radical Archives’, the traveling film programme ‘History of Histories’ and the collaborative exhibition ‘Utopian Pulse’. Ghani has collaborated with artist Chitra Ganesh since 2004 with ‘Index of the Disappeared’: an experimental archive of post-9/11 detentions, deportations, renditions and redactions; with choreographer Erin Kelly since 2006 on the video series ‘Performed Places’; and with media archive collective Pad.ma since 2012 on the ‘Afghan Films’ online archive. Ghani has been awarded the NYFA and Soros Fellowships, grants from Creative Capital, Art Matters, the Graham Foundation, CEC ArtsLink, NYSCA, the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation and the Experimental Television Center, and residencies at LMCC, Eyebeam Atelier, Smack Mellon, the Akademie Schloss Solitude, and NYU’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute. She holds a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU and an MFA from SVA. Ghani currently teaches in the Social Practice MFA programme at Queens College and is a Visiting Artist at the Orville H. Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at Yale Law School. Forms of Address: personal testimony and public engagement by Geeta Kapur Date: 7 February 2016, 11.00am Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Art historian, curator, critic and an expert on contemporary art and theory, noted for her many accomplishments in curating and art criticism, Kapur will lecture on the importance of texts and documentation in witnessing and testimonials of the paradigmatic of the historical, political and ethical dilemmas of our times. Starting from her manuscript ‘Public Address: Citing Installation and Performance Art’ she will question the readability of texts in enhancing historical and political consciousness, and the fragility of such instances when annotating trauma, loss, and mourning. Geeta Kapur is a Delhi-based art critic and curator. Her essays on alternative modernisms, contemporary art practice and curatorial interventions in India and the global south are widely anthologised. Her books include Contemporary Indian Artists (1978), When Was Modernism: Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (2000), and Critic’s Compass: Navigating Practice (forthcoming 2016). Kapur's curatorial projects include survey exhibitions at the Lalit Kala Akademi and the National Gallery of Modern Art (Delhi and Mumbai). She co-curated the ‘Festival of India’ exhibition, ‘Contemporary Indian Art’, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1982); curated ‘Dispossession’, of Indian artists at the first Johannesburg Biennale (1995); co-curated ‘Bombay/ Mumbai’ for the multi-part exhibition, ‘Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis’, Tate Modern, London (2001); curated ‘subTerrain’, for the ‘ Body.City ’ project, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2003); co-curated ‘DiVerge: Crossing Generations’, Chemould40, 2003; and curated ‘Aesthetic Bind’, five exhibitions in Chemould50, Mumbai (2013–2014). Geeta Kapur has been a member of the International Jury for the biennials in Venice (2005), Dakar (2006), and Sharjah (2007); she was also on the Advisory Committee of Kochi-Muziris Biennale (2012–2013). She was a member of the Asian Art Council, Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007-2009 and 2014); and is currently on the Advisory Board, Asian Art Archive, Hong Kong (since 2009). A founder-editor of Journal of Arts & Ideas, she was on the Advisory Council of Third Text for two decades and is now on the Advisory Board of ArtMargin. She is an editorial advisor and Trustee of Marg. She has lectured in universities and museums worldwide and held Visiting Fellowships at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla; Clare Hall, University of Cambridge; Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi; University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. She was awarded the Padmashri in 2009. Earth Poison: Environmental Writing as Militant Research by Nabil Ahmed Date: 7 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Artist, writer, curator, and team member of the Forensic Architecture research project based at Goldsmiths, University of London, Nabil Ahmed will deliver a lecture which combines video, performance and sound art to address the writing of the world as an accumulation of catastrophic events. Nabil Ahmed is an artist, writer and researcher. His transdisciplinary research explores contemporary status of nature in spatial relation to the law, conflict and development. More recently Ahmed has participated in the Taipei Biennale (2012), Cuenca Biennale (2014) and Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin where he has been part of the two-year ‘Anthropocene Project’ (2013-14) including the ‘Anthropocene Curriculum’ (with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin) that presented a range of artistic and theoretical approaches, concepts and experimental pedagogical projects addressing climate change and widespread environmental transformations. His writings have appeared in academic journals, magazines, and various art and architecture publications recently commissioned by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA), Third Text, Volume, Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence (Routlege, 2014), Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg, 2014) and many others. Ahmed is co-founder of Call and Response, a sound art organisation based in London. He initiated the Earth Sensing Association – a research organisation for the diffusion of knowledge at the intersection of environmental change, conflict and cultural production. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London with a doctoral thesis that charted hidden narratives and evidenced the coupling of human conflict with natural environments in Bangladesh and West Papua. He is a member of the ERC funded Forensic Architecture Project at Goldsmiths, which brings together architects, artists, filmmakers, activists, and theorists to undertake research that gathers and presents spatial analysis in legal and political forums. Ahmed is a lecturer at The Cass School of Architecture at London Metropolitan and has previously taught in the department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has been a guest critic at the Architecture Association, University of Westminster Faculty of Architecture and the Royal College of Art, London. He is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never. by Chus Martínez Date: 3 February 2016, 12.30pm Venue: 2rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy In recent years Chus Martínez, curator and Head of the Institute of Art at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, has reflected upon the relation between art practice, institutions and education in the years to come. For the Ensembles Martínez will give a talk on what she calls the ‘Metabolic Era.’ She will focus on the transformation of life through physical and mental ingestion—from diets to procrastination—and explore how such metabolic processes could potentially inform the future of art. Chus Martínez has a background in philosophy and art history. Currently she is the Head of the Institute of Art of the FHNW Academy of Arts and Design in Basel, Switzerland. Before she was the Chief Curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department and Member of Core Agent Group. Previously she was Chief Curator at MACBA, Barcelona (2008–11), Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein (2005–08), and Artistic Director of Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2002–05). For the 51st Biennale di Venezia (2005), Martínez curated the National Pavilion of Cyprus, and in 2008 she served as a Curatorial Advisor for the Carnegie International and in 2010 for the 29th Bienal de São Paulo. During her tenure as Director of the Frankfurter Kunstverein she curated solo exhibitions of Wilhelm Sasnal among others; and a series of group exhibitions including ‘Pensée Sauvage' and ‘The Great Game To Come’. She was also the founder of the Deutsche Börse Residency Program for international artists, art writers, and curators.While at MACBA Martínez curated the Thomas Bayrle retrospective, an Otolith Group monographic show, and an exhibition devoted to television, ‘Are you ready for TV?’. In 2008, Martínez was the curator of the Deimantas Narkevicius retrospective exhibition, ‘The Unanimous Life’, at the Museo de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, which travelled to major European museums. Martínez lectures and writes regularly including numerous catalogue texts and critical essays, and is a regular contributor to Artforum among other international art journals. Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990): Attempts at a Tenable (Hi)Story of a 20th-Century Artist Straddling Nations, Traditions & Disciplines by Yin Ker Date: 3 February 2016, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Ker, an educator and researcher on Southeast Asian and Buddhist art based in Singapore, will explore the legacy of Śāntiniketan pedagogy in the work of Burma’s most important exponent of modernist practice, painter Bagyi Aung Soe. Following his return to Yangon in 1952 and over the next three decades, through illustration, which, in place of the virtually inexistent gallery and museum, served as the site of avant-garde artistic experimentations, he examined the linguistic rationale of a plethora of pictorial idioms, ranging from the ukiyo-e to cubism. In innovating new idioms, his non-figurative illustrations published in Shumawa Magazine in January and February 1953 provoked a furore which saw traditionalists branding his art as ‘seik-ta-za-pangyi’, meaning psychotic or mad painting – an epithet that would become synonymous with Aung Soe’s works as well as modern art in general in Burma. Ker’s presentation will share the challenges of developing an adapted narrative of his art which defies the conventions of art and art history. Yin Ker owes her training to the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV), INALCO (Paris) and the International Theravada Buddhist Missionary University (Yangon). Since 2000, she has been researching on Myanmar’s trailblazer of modern art, Bagyi Aung Soe (1923/24–1990). Her research interests also include the constructs of ‘art’ and ‘art history’ beyond the Euro-American canons; the intersections of ancient and modern methods of knowledge- and image-making; as well as innovatory ways of telling (hi)stories of Buddhist art. Yin Ker continues to paint and to investigate new modes of image-making in parallel with theoretical research within and beyond the discipline of art history. She currently teaches (Hi)stories of Arts from Southeast Asia; aesthetic manifestations of Buddhist devotion and practice; and ways of seeing and thinking about pictorial strategies from different parts of the world at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore). She previously taught Art History at Nalanda University (Rajgir) and Modern and Contemporary Southeast Asian Art at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts (Singapore), and curated at the Singapore Art Museum (National Gallery Singapore). As an independent curator, writer and translator, Yin Ker worked on ‘Video, an Art, a History, 1965-2010’, a selection from the Centre Pompidou and Singapore Art Museum collections, ‘plAy: Art from Myanmar Today’ and ‘From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar’. Her publications include ‘Kin Maung (Bank) and Bagyi Aung Soe: Two Models of ‘Modern’ Myanma Art and the Question of its Emergence’, in Modern Art Quarterly (Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 2014); ‘A Short Story of Bagyi Aung Soe in Five Images’ in Field Notes: Mapping Asia (Asia Art Archive, 2013); ‘L’ « art fou » ou l’art moderne birman selon les illustrations de Bagyi Aung Soe’ in La question de l’art en Asie orientale (Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2008); and ‘Modern Art According to Bagyi Aung Soe’ in Journal of Burma Studies (North Illinois University, 2006). Borrowing your eyes, her words, my prose—the memoirs of a memory impaired by Filipa Ramos Date: 3 February 2016, 2.30pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Writer and Curator Filipa Ramos (currently editor of Art Agenda, London) will re-imagine traditional paedagogic formats, and standard exhibition review analysis, with a reading relating to an imaginary visit through exhibition we haven’t seen, but which we can experience through the eyes of an absent spectator. Filipa Ramos was born in Lisbon and is a writer and editor based in London. Currently she is Editor in Chief of art-agenda, commissioning and publishing experimental and rigorous writing on art. She is a lecturer in Art and Moving Image at the Experimental Film MA Programme of Kingston University, and at the MRes Art:Moving Image of Central Saint Martins/University of the Arts, both in London.Ramos is co-curator of ‘Vdrome’: an ongoing programme of screenings of films by visual artists and filmmakers, which she co-founded in 2013 with Edoardo Bonaspetti, Jens Hoffmann, and Andrea Lissoni. Previously she was Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal, curator of the Research Section of dOCUMENTA (13), and coordinator of ‘The Most Beautiful Kunsthalle in the World’ research project at the Antonio Ratti Foundation, Como. Interested in the ways in which art – and in particular moving-image based work – provides a site of encounter for humans and nonhumans, she has written, lectured, and curated exhibitions and film programmes on the topic and is currently editing an anthology of art writing on Animals, to be published this coming Autumn. She has been a guest curator at several public and private institutions and her writing has appeared in diverse journals and catalogues. Location Location Location by Sharmini Pereira Date: 8 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Pereira will discuss about her organisation Raking Leaves, a complex cosmogony of forms for commissioning and publishing artists' books based in Sri Lanka. During her presentation, Pereira will open up three specific projects, one with an artist from Sri Lanka and the other two with Pakistani artists, and she will address how Raking Leaves has catalysed in relation to the socio-political and art historical context of Sri Lanka. Sharmini Pereira is the director and founder of Raking Leaves: a leading non-profit independent publishing organisation. In 2013 she founded the Sri Lanka Archive of Contemporary Art, Architecture and Design in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. The archive collects materials in English, Sinhala, and Tamil and host talks, seminars and screenings related to its contents. She curated her first exhibition in Sri Lanka, ‘New Approaches in Contemporary Sri Lankan Art’ in 1994. Selected curatorial projects have included working as co-curator (Sri Lanka) for the Asia Pacific Triennale (1999), co-curator Singapore Biennale (2006), international guest curator Abraaj Capital Art Prize (2011), and as guest curator at Aga Khan Museum where she curated ‘The Garden Of Ideas – Contemporary Art from Pakistan’ (2014). Pereira's writing has appeared in Mousse Magazine, Guggenheim’s Online, Art Asia Pacific, Groundviews and Imprint amongst others. She is currently a nominator for the 2016 Anima/AGO Photography Prize and a judge for the 2017 Geoffrey Bawa Award for Architecture. She was born in 1970 and is based in Sri Lanka and New York. Towards 2019: The futurity of a location by Anshuman Das Gupta Date: 3 February 2016, 12.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Das Gupta, curator and faculty member of the Art History department in Kalabhavan, Śāntiniketan (Visva Bharati University) will discuss the singular approach of art paedagogy and its relation to text at Śāntiniketan as envisioned through its founder Rabindranath Tagore. Fostered through a pedagogical programme devised by Tagore’s right-hand man Nandalal Bose (1882–1966), Śāntiniketan represented the sum of ancient Indian theories of aesthetics, Tagore’s humanist and universalist ideals transcending demarcations of national borders, and the debates on nationalist and Pan-Asianist ideologies initiated by many a luminary in the orbit of the ashram: Okakura Kakuzō (1862–1913), Sister Nivedita (1867–1911), and Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947). Śāntiniketan as a Location/ site has many acquired dimensions to it; and this presentation will also consider the Location / site through some of its receptions by current scholars and past participants thus producing a discursive horizon leading to many possible directions for its future, in particular when looking at its upcoming centenary year in 2019 and beyond. Anshuman Das Gupta is a curator and currently teaching faculty in the Art History department in Kalabhavan, Santiniketan (Visva Bharati University) and is affiliated with the Curatorial/Knowledge programme in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London as a PhD candidate. Born in 1967 in Kolkata, India, he graduated in Art History from Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, and received post-graduate degrees in Art History from the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda in 1990 and 1992 respectively. Das Gupta’s essays and seminar papers have been published in several journals and publications such as the Marg publications: Art and Visual Cultures in India 1857–2007 (2009), Akbar Padamsee (in Press, 2009) and Contemporary Indian Sculpture, among others. Das Gupta has taken up several curatorial assignments at various times, which include an exhibition organised by the French Embassy in Delhi on the birth centenary of Antonin Artaud in 1996; Khoj International Artists’ Workshop events in Bengal in 2006; the ‘Ramkinker Baij Centenary’ exhibition in Santiniketan in 2007 (for which occasion he also organised an international seminar); ‘Santhal Family: Positions Around an Indian Sculpture’ for the Museum of Contemporary Art, MuHKA, Antwerp (a collaborative curatorial venture) in 2008. He has participated in around thirty national and international seminars, including ‘Patterns of Reflection: Writing Contemporary Indian Art’ (2009, Santiniketan- Lalit kala and kala Bhavan), ‘Periphery’ in Guwahati, Assam (2009), MuHKA, Antwerp (2008), as well as a seminar organised by ZKM and MMB in Delhi (2008). He was a Joint-Convener, collaborator and speaker in Black House: an international collaboration between artists, curators and architects, with participants from CEPT (Ahmedabad), SPA (Delhi), HCU (Hyderabad) and Dhaka (2015). Mad heart, be brave by Nida Ghouse Date: 4 February 2016, 2.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Writer and curator Nida Ghouse has been researching the Soviet-funded multi-lingual Afro-Asian magazine Lotus: a forum for short stories, poetry, reviews of books and literary essays. Lotus was a quarterly magazine that for its time was a ground-breaking literary/artistic cum political expression. The writers of the journal placed themselves in relationship to the broader social and political mechanism of imperial powers. Youssef el Sebai, was the journal’s first editor, and the journal came out of the Afro-Asian Writer’s Association, a group of African and Asian writers who spoke a multitude of languages and how met in Tashkent in 1958. Ten years later this organisation launched a journal called Afro-Asian Writings, which would go on to become Lotus. Lotus was published in Cairo and Beirut and was produced tri-lingually in Arabic, English and French. Nida Ghouse is a writer and a curator, and is currently Director of Mumbai Art Room. She has worked institutionally as co-curator for the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation in 2010; as assistant curator for the Sharjah Biennial in 2011; and as associate curator for the Abraaj Group Art Prize in 2014. Ghouse's curatorial projects include the ‘Kharita Symposium on Urban Trajectories with Pericentre Projects’, ‘Untitled Exhibition #1 ’ with Padmini Chettur and the Clark House Initiative, ‘14 Proper Nouns’ with Hassan Khan at the Delfina Foundation, ‘In the Desert of Images’ with Melik Ohanian at the Mumbai Art Room, and ‘La presencia del sonido' at the Botín Foundation in Santander. Her ongoing projects include ‘Acoustic Matters’, supported by the India Foundation for the Arts, and ‘Emotional Architecture’, the first publication of which, launched in 2014, We, started by calling it a summer of two fires and a landslide and whose second publication No Fantasy without Protest was published in Cairo in October 2015. Ghouse’s essays and interviews have appeared in publications such as Arab Studies Journal, ArtAsiaPacific, ArteEast, ArtSlant, Bidoun, Ibraaz, and MadaMasr, and in exhibition catalogues of MuKHA in Antwerp, the New Museum in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Palazzo Grassi in Venice and the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. She was the first recipient of the FICA-Delfina Research Fellowship in partnership with Iniva and Goldsmiths Curatorial/Knowledge PhD programme in London in 2011, and was a resident at Fondazione Spinola Banna per l'Arte in partnership with the Resò3 programme in Turin in 2013. A Letter From the People by Chantal Pontbriand Date: 4 February 2016, 3.00pm Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Curator, critic and Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Chantal Pontbriand will discuss how writing, editing, publishing, curating words as well as works are a continuous process in her work that seeks not to make fiction out of reality but to try to see in-between what words and reality have to offer. This way of working and of seeing is closely related to what she thinks the most relevant art practices have to offer. Pontbriand says: ‘Art or art writing is an on-going investigation into the world today and its issues, socio-political as well as individual. Art has relevance if it succeeds in articulating issues, what is to be worked through in order to go beyond what is known, categorized or classified. Art is the unknown. As such, it is of relevance, in producing knowledge, in advancing knowledge. As such, art writing functions as an open letter. A letter which seeks to understand the world and propose that interpretation to others. It should not be however a letter to the people, but taking the form of an investigation, a mapping of emerging ideas, concepts and forms, it is in that sense a “letter from the people”. Our task is not to dictate a pre-formated way of thinking, but to be enabling, in the sense that we, together with others, as this cannot be done alone, seek to see what lies in-between, as that which lies ahead.’ Chantal Pontbriand is a contemporary art curator and critic whose work is based on the exploration of questions of globalisation and artistic heterogeneity. She has curated numerous international contemporary art events: exhibitions, international festivals and international conferences, mainly in photography, video, performance, dance and multimedia installation. She was a founder of PARACHUTE contemporary art magazine in 1975 and acted as publisher/editor until 2007, publishing 125 issues. After curating several major performance events and festivals, she co-founded the FIND (Festival International de Nouvelle Danse), in Montreal and was president and director from 1982–2003. She was appointed Head of Exhibition Research and Development at Tate Modern in London in 2010 and founded PONTBRIAND W.O.R.K.S. [We_Others and Myself_Research_ Knowledge_Systems] in 2012. In 2015, she was appointed CEO-Director of MOCA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto, and curator and advisor of Demo-Graphics 1 (Greater Toronto Area, May-July 2017).In 2013, she received the Governor General of Canada Award for an Outstanding Contribution in the Visual and Media Arts, in 2014, an Honorary Doctorate from Concordia University, Montreal, and the distinction of Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in France (Officer of the Arts and Letters Order of France). Most recent exhibitions include: ‘I See Words, I Hear Voices, Dora Garcia’, The Power Plant, Toronto; ‘Mark Lewis Above and Below’, Le Bal, Paris, 2015; ‘PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words’, CA2M, Madrid; ‘The Yvonne Rainer Project’, Jeu de Paume, Centre d’art de la Ferme du Buisson, and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; ‘Photography Performs: The Body as the Archive’, Centre de photographie d’Île-de-France (CPIF); co-curated with Agency, ‘Dora Garcia, Of Crimes and Dreams’, Darling Foundry, Montreal, 2014; ‘Higher Powers Command’, Lhoist Collection, 2010; ‘HF|RG [Harun Farocki | Rodney Graham]’, Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2009. Recent publications include: Mutations, Perspectives on Photography, Steidl/Paris Photo, 2011; The Contemporary, The Common: Art in A Globalizing World, Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2013; PER/FORM: How To Do Things with[out] Words, CA2M/Sternberg Press, Madrid/Berlin, 2014; PARACHUTE : The Anthology, JRP/Ringier, Zurich, 2012-2015 (4 Volumes). Readings from Anthology: Essays or Poems, a book in process by Quinn Latimer Date: 4 February 2016, 11.30am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Latimer is an American poet and writer based in Basel and Athens, and currently editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. Her work pays special attention to the literary format of the letter as a space of criticality and community occasioned by the intimacies of its address. In this session she will read from and discuss the work that comprises Anthology – a forthcoming collection of critical prose, poetry, and more hybrid texts that move between genre, and pull from history letters and fiction. She will specifically explore the form and function of the refrain, its serial ecstasies and political possibilities. Quinn Latimer is an American poet, critic, and editor based in Basel and Athens. She is the author of Rumored Animals (2012); Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013); and Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2014). A regular contributor to Artforum and a contributing editor to frieze, her writing also appears in recent publications for Michel Auder, Ida Ekblad, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Joan Jonas, Julia Wachtel, Kelley Walker, and in Time, for MIT Press. Her writings, readings, and video collaborations have been featured widely, including at Chisenhale Gallery, London; Serpentine Galleries, London; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, France; the German Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy; Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; and Qalandia International, Ramallah/Jerusalem. Additionally, Latimer is coeditor of No Core: Pamela Rosenkranz (2012); Paul Sietsema: Interviews on Films and Works (2012); Olinka, or Where Movement Is Created (2013); and Stories, Myths, Ironies, and Other Songs: Conceived, Directed, Edited, and Produced by M. Auder (2014). A Pushcart Prize nominee and a recipient of an Arts Writing Grant from Creative Capitol/Warhol Foundation, Latimer has taught and lectured at Geneva’s Haute école d’art et de design (HEAD); FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel; and The Banff Centre, in Alberta, Canada. She is currently Editor-in-Chief of Publications for documenta 14. Metabolistic Writing by Maria Lind Date: 7 February 2016, Venue: 2nd Floor Seminar Room, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Drawing from her curatorial research on abstraction, and from a number of texts by various intellectuals and artists, Maria Lind, Director of Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, and Artistic Director of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, has analysed how in the past few decades economic abstraction was primarily dealt with by art as a subject matter or theme which increasingly mirrored the economic, social and political condition of the world. She also analysed how this system affects spatial and temporal concepts, and the writing of a future within it. In Dhaka, Lind is taking as a starting point the writing of Keller Easterling, Paul B Preciado and Matias Faldbakken, to talk about ‘metabolistic writing.’ Such an approach implies digesting and in other ways dealing with specific material at the same time as the process of writing and the use of language make up a performative and generative way of producing text. Maria Lind has been the Director of the Tensta Konsthall since 2011 and was appointed as the Artistic Director for the 11th Gwangju Biennale 2016. She was the director of the graduate programme at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College from 2008-10. Before that, she was the director of lASPIS in Stockholm (2005–07) and the director of the Munich Kunstverein (2002–04). Previous to that she was the curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (from 1997–2001) and in 1998 co-curated Manifesta 2, Europe’s nomadic biennial of contemporary art. Responsible for the ‘Moderna Museet Projekt', Lind worked with artists on a series of 29 commissions that took place in a temporary project-space, or within or beyond the Museum in Stockholm. She is currently a professor of research at the Art Academy in Oslo. In terms of publications, she is the co-editor of the following books: Curating with Light Luggage (2005) and Collected Newsletter; Taking the Matter into Common Hands: Collaborative Practices in Contemporary Art (2007); European Cultural Policies 2015; and The Greenroom: Reconsidering the Documentary and Contemporary Art (2008). Lind’s recent co-edited publications include Contemporary Art and Its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (2012); Performing the Curatorial: With and Beyond Art (2012); and Art and the F Word: Reflections on the Browning of Europe (2015), all with Sternberg Press. She edited Abstraction as part of MIT’s and Whitechapel Gallery’s series ‘Documents on Contemporary Art’. In 2010 a selection of Maria Lind’s essays, Selected Maria Lind Writing, spanning from 1997-2010, was published by Sternberg Press, edited by Brian Kuan Wood. Furthermore, Maria Lind won the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement in 2009 and was a board member of IKT from 2006–2011. Notes on Process: Writing a Life by Belinder Dhanoa (Read by Sabih Ahmed in Belinder’s absence) Date: 4 February 2018, 11.00am Venue: 3rd Floor Auditorium, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy Dhanoa is a writer and an artist, and currently teaches Creative Writing at the School of Culture and Creative Expression at the Ambedkar University, Delhi. With a brief introduction on her singular approach to the writing of a life, Dhanoa will read excerpts from the script she wrote for artist Vivan Sundaram’s exhibition-as-play 409 Ramkinkars that opened in Delhi in the spring of 2015. The performative exhibition paid homage to one of India’s most charismatic artist, Ramkinkar Baij, and his work as innovator of sculptural form in the space, revisiting the creative milieu of sculptor-painter-scenographer-theatre artist Baij. Sabih is an art historian and currently a Senior Researcher at Asia Art Archive (AAA). With AAA, he has overseen numerous research initiatives pertaining to modern art which include putting together personal archives, digitisation projects, and bibliography compilations of vernacular art writing. Ahmed is stationed in New Delhi and has co-organised and participated in workshops and conferences in various institutions that include the Clark Art Institute Massachusetts, the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Jaffna University, and Jawaharlal Nehru University among others.His recent writings have been published in volumes such as the Sarai Reader and Marg Publications, and he also delivers lectures on art and technology in Ambedkar University's School of Culture and Creative Expression in New Delhi. Sabih’s research interests include institutional histories of art, and in particular the shaping of the art field through second half of 20th century with changes in infrastructures, technologies, and shifting centres of authority.

ALL PROJECTS ART BASEL HONG KONG 2018 RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN 27-31 MARCH 2018 | ART BASEL HONG KONG HAVING NOTICED THAT THERE ARE NOT VERY MANY PUBLIC MONUMENTS THAT CELEBRATE NON-WHITE OR NON-COLONIAL FIGURES, RAMESH MARIO NITHIYENDRAN TRIED TO ENVISION A DIFFERENT KIND OF WAY OF MEMORIALISING PEOPLE WHO SLIP THROUGH THE CRACKS OF WHAT IS CONSIDERED ACCEPTABLE. Following their debut at the Dhaka Art Summit 2018, Ramesh Mario's, Idols (2016-2018) travelled to Art Basel Hong Kong where they formed part of the Art Fair's Encounters , curated by Alexie Glass-Kantor. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace, Sydney for DAS 2018 with support from the Australia Council for the Arts. Courtesy of the artist, Samdani Art Foundation, Artspace Sydney, and Sullivan + Strumpf.

ALL PROJECTS Collective Movements Curated by Diana Campbell We have been witnessing movements of people of all ages from Chile, to Lebanon, India, Hong Kong and beyond, all voicing a desire for forms of agency in the context of persistent repressive colonial and authoritarian structures. DAS was formed through the collective building of a grassroots transnational civil space where culture can be shared beyond the limits of the nation state. Together with artists who create situations, build relations, and organise events and institutions, we aim to create a strong sense of community rooted in Dhaka. The word body can also be read as individuals who come together as a group. Like antibodies, individuals within any body need to maintain the ability to disagree with the group and contribute to the dynamic evolution of the fragments, situations, and personalities that make it up. A powerful aspect of groups is that they are dynamic and fluid; they can come together, break up into two or more groups, move when they need to, and dissolve when their work is done, reforming if/when they are needed again. Damián Ortega b. 1967, Mexico City; lives and works in Mexico City Sisters; Hermanas, 2019–2020 Bricks, Corn, Squash, Chiles, Beans Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation for DAS 2020. Courtesy of the artist, kurimanzutto, White Cube, and Samdani Art Foundation. Realised with additional support from kurimanzutto and White Cube. A portion of the corn was grown and donated by Shakhawat Hossain In an empty, uninhabited lot covered by wild weeds and grass, a big conical figure is raised. It is made of red bricks and could be described either as a stupa, or a pre-Colombian pyramid. It is a sculptural silo, containing an offering with a sample of one of the native corn species of Mexico, a single seed. Seeds can be deposited on any land, and with some luck and under the right conditions, they multiply in a micro-explosion of fertility. Limits of private property are tested when rituals, knowledge and products are taken from one place to another. A ‘milpa’ is a piece of land that grows from using ancient Mesoamerican agricultural practices that are necessary to produce products to meet the basic needs of a family. A milpa contains a diverse ecosystem that produces corn, beans, squash and chile working in solidarity. This ecosystem is, to a certain point, what has fed us, and one of the most valuable gifts that Damian Ortega wishes to share from Mexico. Ortega uses sculpture, installation, performance, film, and photography to arrive at events of deconstruction, both material and conceptual. In his work, the familiar is altered and re-purposed, leading the viewer to inspect the unexpected interdependence of the components involved. Ortega highlights the complex social, political, and economic contexts that are embodied in every-day objects. Fernando Palma Rodríguez b. 1957, San Pedro Atocpan; lives and works in San Pedro Atocpan ‘Language programmes us’, shares Fernando Palma, indicating that it is possible to be a different person in different languages. Palma is an expert in programming; he has a background as an electrical engineer and he is interested in the transmission of systems, knowledge, and electricity. Part of Palma’s work is preserving the Nahua language, a group of languages related to the Aztec people, settled mainly in the central part of Mexico. ‘It is through indigenous languages that we begin to see a different relationship between people and their environment, their art and culture’, writes Palma. For example, the word for artist in Nahua language is derived from the word for the number five – because the artist is the fifth point connecting the four points on a compass: North, South, East, West. This definition does not contain the triangular axes of fame, power or money. The artist had a formative experience in Bangladesh visiting the Chakma community during a residency at Britto Art Trust in 2003, understanding that the condition of his community in Mexico was linked to that of indigenous people on the other side of the world. He returns to Bangladesh to catalyse transmission of indigenous knowledges of language and ecology through workshops related to his body of work creating Nahua inspired pictograms (found in The Collective Body). Palma makes robotic sculptures that perform narrative choreographies, addressing issues faced by Mexican indigenous communities, such as that in the agricultural region of Milpa Alta in Mexico. These include human and land rights, violence, and urgent environmental crises. He runs Calpulli Tecalco, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the preservation of Nahua language and culture as well as Libroclub Fernando Benitez In Cualli Ohtli, a book club active for over twenty years with Nahua reading groups for children, and Maspor Nosotros AC, an organisation constituted in order to prevent, mitigate and compensate for the environmental and social impact caused by industrial and consumer waste. Olafur Eliasson b. 1967, Copenhagen; lives and works in Berlin Your Uncertain Shadow (Black and White) , 2010 HMI lamps, glass, aluminium, transformers Courtesy of the artist and Samdani Art Foundation Several spotlights project light on a white wall, however these lights only become perceptible when visitors enter and move across the space, blocking the light source and filling the void of the room with the presence of their shadows. The moving shadows of visitors create a sort of choreography and stretch and contract in tones ranging from grey to black, varying based on the movements of bodies in the space. Differences in race, religion, age, and class are flattened in this work as details used to identify individuals are reduced to moving outlines, and we become more aware of the present moment and the patterns we can build by engaging with people around us. Olafur Eliasson’s art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self. He strives to make the concerns of art relevant to society at large. Art, for him, is a crucial means for turning thinking into doing in the world. Eliasson’s works span sculpture, painting, photography, film, and installation. Not limited to the confines of the museum and gallery, his practice engages the broader public sphere through architectural projects, interventions in civic space, arts education, policy-making, and issues of sustainability and climate change. Taloi Havini b. 1981, Arawa; Lives and works in Sydney. Reclamation , 2019–2020 Installation, mixed media Co-Curated by Diana Campbell, Alexie Glass-Kantor, and Michelle Newton. Commissioned and Produced by Samdani Art Foundation and Artspace, Sydney for DAS 2020 with support from the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. Realised with additional support from the Australian High Commission of Bangladesh Reclamation is a new work by Taloi Havini created in collaboration with her Hakö clan members. The artist draws from recent historical movements of conflict as well as acts of resilience and self-determination experienced within the social fabric of her inherited matrilineal birthplace, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. Reclamation is a site-specific assemblage of natural materials, harvested from the artist’s own matrilineal Hakö clan land. Here, Havini traces the significance of impermanence in traditional Hakö architecture. Individual panels have been shaped, cut and lashed within an arched form to reference formal Indigenous knowledges and map-making, echoing temporal spaces created for ritual and exchange to assert aspace for collective agency. Reclamation speaks to notions of lineage and navigation. Underlying the ephemeral installation of cane and earth are questions about the ways in which we relate within temporal spaces; how borders are defined and claimed as well as the value of impermanence and embodied knowledge over fixed historical understandings. Havini weaves together the tensions of precarity and resilience, vulnerability and activism to create a space of encounter and transmission. Havini speaks through geographic and cultural specificity of situations with global implications, working at a time when communities across the globe find themselves at the tipping point of environmental and social change. Havini works with photography, sculpture, immersive video and mixed-media installations. She considers the resonance of space, ceremony, and how material culture can be defined and translated through contemporary practice. Vasantha Yogananthan b. 1985, Grenoble; lives and works in Paris The artist Vasantha Yogananthan photographed SECMOL’s moving Ice Stupa project in Ladakh . Yogananthan's work straddles fiction and documentary, and this project shows how an imagined idea for a utopian future can come into being through creativity and institution building. Yogananthan’s photographic approach has been developed over the last 10 years whilst working on the major independent projects Piémanson (2009–2013) and A Myth of Two Souls (2013–2020) which have been published, exhibited and awarded internationally. Yogananthan is deeply attached to analogue photography for its slow – almost philosophical – process. His interest in painting led him to work around the genres of portrait, still life and landscape. SECMOL/Ice Stupa The Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL) engages scientists and engineers with young people growing up in Ladakh (a highly border-contested mountainous zone of northern India bordering China), especially those from rural or disadvantaged backgrounds. SECMOL equips young Ladakhis with the knowledge, skills, perspective, and confidence to choose and build a sustainable future in a high desert, which is increasingly lacking in water. Temperatures in the Indian Himalayas are rising as a result of climate change, causing snow from glaciers to melt faster, negatively affecting local communities that rely on springtime meltwater for agriculture. Resulting from two years of experiments at SECMOL, ‘Ice Stupa’ is a local solution to a local problem. ‘Ice Stupa’ is an artificial glacier created by piping a winter mountain stream down below the frost line, and then cascading it out of a vertical spout in the desert plateau. When gushing water encounters freezing ambient temperatures, it transforms into a conical ice formation with minimal surface area exposed to direct sunlight. The artificial glacier lasts late into the spring, allowing communities extended access to water for irrigation, as opposed to normal ice, which melts much faster. This is a local solution at a human scale. These photographs were taken by the artist Vasantha Yogananthan in 2019 for the New Yorker. SECMOL’s travel to DAS was generously supported by the Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation.

ALL PROJECTS Rasel Chowdhury At The Delfina Foundation During the Dhaka Art Summit 2016, an international jury, comprised of Cosmin Costinas, Catherine David, Beatrix Ruf, and Aaron Seeto, selected Rasel Chowdhury as the recipient of the 2016 award. Announced during the DAS 2016 Opening Dinner on the 5 February by Kiran Nadar , Chairperson of the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art and Trustee of the Shiv Nadar Foundation in New Delhi, Chowdhury received a six-week residency with the Delfina Foundation in London which he undertook in the Autumn of 2016. Rasel Chowdhury is a Dhaka-based artist whose passion lies in documenting environmental issues using camera. Born in Jamalpur, he started working in photography without a conscious plan, and eventually became addicted and decided to document spaces in and around Bangladesh. He obtained a degree from Pathshala, South Asian Media Institute in 2012. His body of work deals with unplanned desperate urbanization, the dying River Buriganga, the lost city of Sonargaon, the Mega City of Dhaka, and newly transformed spaces around Bangladesh railroads to explore the change of the environment, unplanned urban structures and new form of landscapes.

Statement from the Artistic Director Diana Campbell ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Welcome to the new web portal of the Samdani Art Foundation! We thank you for being here, as your visit speaks to a desire to connect with our work in Bangladesh, and a commitment to widen your worldview by including points of view that institutionalized knowledge historically belittled or omitted entirely. We see our role as being interlocutors in this ongoing process of learning unlearning and relearning; where we elevate histories of Bangladesh and other contexts from the global majority world (i.e. the world outside of Europe and North America) above the space relegated for footnotes (a nod to DAS 2018 participant Nancy Adajania). We call ourselves a research platform – which we build through the careful acts of collecting, producing, convening, mentoring, and sharing. We created this platform through a unique collaborative process linking the passion and dedication of collectors with the creativity of artists, architects, designers, curators, writers, historians and educators executed through the hard work of our team, our partners, and our volunteers, encouraged by the enthusiasm of our growing number of participants and visitors. We recognize that what is happening outside of the room is often the site of the most radical reimagining, where artists come together to create the conditions for great art to be made, and also activate tremendous social change in the world. At Samdani Art Foundation we are interested in art on the scale of life , far bigger than any exhibition in a gallery space can contain. Life in Dhaka pulses with a collaborative, hopeful, and can-do energy unlike anywhere else in the world; it is one of the most densely populated cities on the planet, the front line of where we feel the impacts of the world’s climate catastrophe. Dhaka Art Summit 2018 speaker Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak hit upon that when commenting that “Unless this kind of wonderful effort [of Dhaka Art Summit] is supplemented by another kind of effort, we cannot achieve the impossible possibility of a socially just world.” Our work at Samdani Art Foundation seeks to blur those boundaries between what is in the room and what is outside of the room – seeking to make a freer and more porous atmosphere for dialogue, understanding that beauty can change the world. Beauty can be impact, and impact can be beauty. This portal is an entry point to our ongoing and evolving work fostering connections between artists and architects of the past, the present, and the future with the Bangladeshi public, and welcoming in sensitive collaborators and visitors from all over the world to learn how to connect differently with cultures and geographies that they might not yet be familiar yet. Tied to our desire to strengthen and re-establish links that colonialism tried to sever between humanity and nature, we work to cultivate, maintain, and grow relationships, and to build confidence that these relationships can create the conditions to change how the (art) world functions. This is why Dhaka Art Summit can best be described as a family reunion, where more and more members join in, and you can see how this familiar family friend named DAS grows up more and more each time you visit her, but retains her childlike wonder, curiosity, and joy. One of the best compliments we’ve ever received at Samdani Art Foundation is that “Dhaka Art Summit is where the art world goes and they turn into people – accessible human and vulnerable.” Dhaka Art Summit is also a place that launches many careers, partially because international CVs hold no meaning where most of our visitors are unfamiliar with traditional markers of prestige, making it possible to really talk about the work and the intentions of the artist in ways that are difficult to do on the international art circuit. As we grow, acknowledging the limitations of communicating in English, we work to build our work around concepts and words in Bangla, making them accessible to both Bangla and non-Bangla speaking audiences. We are working to step off of the institutionalized timelines of biennales and step closer into life’s rhythms – and long-term collaborative projects related to culture and agriculture that will soon be visible at Srihatta, the Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park – will give a glimpse into our stretched-out timelines of the future, inspired by projects in the previous bi-annual (but not ‘a biennial’) format Dhaka Art Summit such as Otobong Nkanga’s Landversation and Damian Ortega’s work Sisters, where we learned first-hand that nothing you can possibly try to do can make a cornfield grow in less than 90 days. We are drawn to acts of imagination informed by knowledge. Since day one, we have been planning for what does not exist yet -- trying to design a space where anyone from any background can come and have a profound encounter with art and culture, and imagine that they can play a part in building a more beautiful, socially, and environmentally just world. We would be delighted if you were to join us and our growing number of collaborators in this endeavor. Read more about the thinking behind Diana's vision: Forging Artistic Connections_Stories from the Dhaka Art Summit by Diana Campbell from the upcoming publication of Frame Contemporary Art Finland . Considering Dhaka Art Summit from a CHamoru Perspective by Diana Campbell from the book American Art in Asia: Artistic Praxis and Theoretical Divergence . “It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ ), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way." https://www.routledge.com/our-products/open-access-books/publishing-oa-books/chapters