Fabric(ated) Fractures

Group exhibition featuring Bangladeshi, South Asian and Southeast Asian artists 

Alserkal Avenue will collaborate with the Samdani Art Foundation on Fabric(ated) Fractures, an exhibition set to open at Concrete, Dubai in March 2019. The group exhibition will feature works by Bangladeshi, South Asian and Southeast Asian artists, and will explore “sensitive spaces”—spaces that challenge ideas of nation, state, and territory.

On show from March 9–23, 2019, Fabric(ated) Fractures will provide a platform to amplify the voices of artists from Bangladesh and South and Southeast Asia, and will build on the exhibition There Once was a Village Here held at Dhaka Art Summit 2018. Curated by Samdani Art Foundation Artistic Director Diana Campbell Betancourt, Fabric(ated) Fractures will also introduce new works from artists with a connection to Bangladesh. 

Alserkal Avenue and the Samdani Art Foundation both champion homegrown talent in their respective regions, and this exhibition will further highlight the importance of patronage in creating a springboard for dialogue. Building on the longstanding cultural connections between the Middle East and South Asia, this collaboration will help highlight Bangladesh and the artists related to it. This collaboration serves as a bridge to Dhaka Art Summit 2020, which shifts its focus to explore Bengal’s position at the crossroads of historical exchange between Africa and Asia. 

Presented at Concrete, the OMA-designed building located in Alserkal Avenue, Fabric(ated) Fractures considers contexts that anthropologist Jason Cons describes as “sensitive spaces” in his 2016 book Sensitive Space: Fragmented Territory at the India-Bangladesh Border. Though often razed, with their people forced to succumb to the state, subdue to its needs, and submit to the domination of majority forces, the social fabric of these spaces often remains intact even if its people are displaced and their dwellings levelled—a testament of human resilience. The artists and works featured in Fabric(ated) Fractures respond to the complexities of these sensitive spaces. 

Divides in South Asia were fabricated by the British as a colonial tool for subjugation. When the British carved out Pakistan from an independent India in 1947, establishing East and West wings, they created a country united only by its common majority religion, Islam—ignoring the plurality of cultures. This is especially true when considered from the perspective of village rituals that inspire much of Bangladeshi modern art.

The name Bangla Desh means the land where people speak Bangla (Bengali) and Bangladesh was born in 1971 on the back of the Language Movement in the 1950s, when people fought for the right to speak, live, and work in their own language. Linguistic lines offer far more room for cultural diversity; there are at least 42 other languages spoken within this territory, and regional lenses, such as overarching headers like “MENASA”, tend to filter out the many strands of difference found on a local level. This exhibition aims to weave a more complex picture of the vibrant and diverse facets that comprise a yet-to-be crystalised Bangladeshi identity in a country less than fifty years old. 

The artists in this exhibition bear witness to violence unfolding in their communities, and their work often acts as a register for this trauma, grounding the constricting present in a more porous past. Despite carrying the weight of enormous pain, the deeply poetic practices of these artists are able to create spaces of empathy through which new modes of solidarity might be imagined.  

Fabric(ated) Fractures is a collaboration between the Samdani Art Foundation and Alserkal Avenue at Concrete, Dubai. 

Press enquiries:
Charlotte York, charlotte [​at​] alserkalavenue.ae, T +971 56 418 7999