Dhaka Art Summit
5–8 February 2016
Samdani Art Foundation
Level 5, Suite 501 & 502
Shanta Western Tower
186 Gulshan – Tejgaon Road
Tejgaon 1/A, Dhaka -1208
Bangladesh
info [at] samdani.com.bd
www.dhakaartsummit.org
“I came to understand place as a verb rather than a noun, which exists in our doings: walking, talking, living.”
–Simryn Gill, Full Moon, 2012
The Samdani Art Foundation is pleased to announce further details of the 3rd globally-acclaimed Dhaka Art Summit (DAS), the largest non-commercial platform for art with relation to South Asia.
DAS 2016 will be held from February 5–8 in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in partnership with the country’s National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts; now two days longer with extended hours and a free, ticket-less format, DAS welcomes any interested visitor.
DAS provokes reflections on transnationalism, selfhood and time with invited artists, curators and thinkers who have built exhibitions through commissioned research and experience within the region—without being prescriptive. It is recognised as the preeminent locus for art professionals with over 300 artists, curators, writers and others—mostly from Bangladesh—participating in new commissions, group exhibitions, talks, performances, film programmes and the Summit’s first historical exhibition, Rewind.
Neither a biennial, symposium nor festival but somewhere in between, the unique format of the Summit transforms the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy into a generative space to reconsider the past and future of art and exchange within South Asia and beyond. Including loans from the Bangladesh National Collection; the Museum Folkwang in Essen; the Pinault Collection and public and private South Asian collections as well as the Centre Pompidou; Asia Art Archive and Harvard South Asia Institute, DAS considers South Asia from the view of doing and becoming rather than cartography, occupying the triplet planes of imagination, will and circumstance.
17 Solo Projects curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt
13 new commissions and four works reconfigured within the Bangladeshi context celebrate pluralism and look at the experience of becoming an individual through the fluid continuum between birth and experience, bookended by Lynda Benglis and Tino Sehgal with Shumon Ahmed, Tun Win Aung and Wah Nu, Simryn Gill, Waqas Khan, Shakuntala Kulkarni, Prabhavati Meppayil, Haroon Mirza, Amanullah Mojadidi, Sandeep Mukherjee, Po Po, Dayanita Singh, Ayesha Sultana and Christopher Kulendran Thomas, Munem Wasif, and Mustafa Zaman.
Rewind, advised by Sabih Ahmed, Amara Antilla, Diana Campbell Betancourt and Beth Citron
Illuminating the “alternative universe offered by transnational modernism” (Ifitkhar Dadi), Rewind highlights 12 artists active before the late 1980s, including Rashid Choudhury, Monika Correa, Germaine Krull, Nalini Malini, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Bagyi Aung Soe, Arpita Singh, and Lionel Wendt, among others.
The Story of the Missing One, curated by Nada Raza
Inspired by a Bengali sci-fi story by J. C. Bose (1896), the searching or enraptured gesture of looking toward the sky becomes a thematic device, navigating from a celestial modernist watercolour by Gaganendranath Tagore to cosmological enquiry and speculative visual exploration from the turn of the 21st century by Ronni Ahmmed, David Alesworth, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Fahd Burki, Neha Choksi, Iftikhar Dadi and Elizabeth Dadi, Rohini Devasher, Marzia Farhana, Aamir Habib, Zihan Karim, Ali Kazim, Sanjeewa Kumara, Firoz Mahmud, Mehreen Murtaza, Saskia Pintelon, Sahej Rahal, Tejal Shah, Himali Singh Soin, Mariam Suhail and Hajra Waheed.
Mining Warm Data, curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt
Featuring artists from Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh and their diaspora, the exhibition exposes subjective and emotional history radiating around Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh’s new chapter of the “Index of the Disappeared,” produced by Samdani Art Foundation, Yale University Law School’s Schell Center for Human Rights and Creative Time Reports. Artists include Lida Abdul, Gazi Nafis Ahmed, Pablo Bartholomew, Neha Choksi, Hasan Elahi, S. Hanusha, Maryam Jafri, Dilara Begum Jolly, Amar Kanwar, Huma Mulji, Nge Lay, Nortse, Tenzing Rigdol and Menika van der Poorten.
Exhibition curated by Aurelien Lemonier (Centre Pompidou Curator of Architecture) and panel discussion chaired by Farrokh Derakhshani (Director of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture)
Featuring 17 Bangladeshi-based architects, the exhibition honours “the humanistic modernity” of Muzharul Islam, key in Louis Kahn’s commission to create the masterpiece National Assembly.
Film programme curated by Shanay Jhaveri
Locating South Asian concerns within a transnational conversation the programme explores colonial and post-colonial conditions through the lives and journeys of individuals but also the emotional narratives attached to objects, patterns and landscapes.
Performance Pavilion curated by Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore and Jana Prepeluh
Shifting Hands, Sifting Hands approaches contemporary critiques of performance art within the institution and an object-orientated art world, considering everything—especially the body—as in a state of flux.
Critical Writing Ensembles, curated by Katya García-Antón (Office for Contemporary Art Norway) with Diana Campbell Betancourt from collaboration led by Chandrika Grover (Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council); Garcia-Anton, Betancourt (Samdani Art Foundation) and Bhavna Kakar (Take on Art)
Meeting the need to potentiate writing across histories and working from the context of South Asia, the project gathers writers, critics, poets, philosophers and curators including Nabil Ahmed, Belinder Dhanoa, Anshuman Das Gupta, Rosalyn D’Mello, Elena Filipovic, Mariam Ghani, Nida Ghouse, Salima Hashmi, Geeta Kapur, Yin Ker, Quinn Latimer, Maria Lind, Chus Martínez, Rosa Martínez, Aunohita Mojumdar, Paul B. Preciado, Sharmini Pereira, Filipa Ramos, Shukla Sawant, Devika Singh, Mike Sperlinger and Mustafa Zaman.
Panel discussions
With 40 speakers including Suhanya Raffel, Amar Kanwar, Omar Kholeif, Dayanita Singh, Beatrix Ruf, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Sharmini Pereira, Salima Hashmi and Vivan Sundaram the discussions will consider institutional collecting of art and archives from South Asia in a non-Western context, art initiatives on the periphery, the opportunities and landmines of curating regional group exhibitions, legacy building and artists’ estates, and the rich history of exchange between Bangladesh and Pakistan.
Asia Art Archive
In its ongoing effort to map and present the many histories of 20th-century art writing in different languages of South Asia, Asia Art Archive will present its first Live Feed Station at DAS 2016. The Live Feed Station will be an on-site junction for viewing an array of some of the most interesting publications art magazines, books and catalogues that have been published in the past century, and also an opportunity for visitors to explore the database and bring their own references to contribute to this expanding platform of shared knowledge. The Live Feed Station is part of Asia Art Archive’s ongoing Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing project and is hosted by the Samdani Art Foundation at the Dhaka Art Summit.
