Dhaka Art Summit 2023: Bonna

Dhaka Art Summit 2023 is told through the voice of Bonna, a character who speaks from Bangladesh to the world. She is a bold young girl who expresses her dynamic personality fearlessly, refusing to be silenced by her brothers, uncles, or forefathers. Bonna is a common name in Bangladesh, and it also means ‘flood.’ In Bangladesh, a flood does not simply translate into a singular connotation of “disaster.” Rather, the DAS concept of Bonna challenges binaries—between necessity and excess, regeneration and disaster, adult and child, male and female. DAS 2023 invokes and interprets Bonna as a complex symbol-system, which is indigenous, personal and at once universal, an embodied non-human reversal of how storms, cyclones, tsunamis, stars, and all environmental crises and “discoveries” are named. Conceptualized and produced by Samdani Art Foundation, this 6th edition of DAS examines the politics of education and the many processes of colonizing the mind, which includes the act of naming. 

Bonna is an activating creative force who offers us an invitation to join her in sharing stories and asking questions. She asks why the words for weather are gendered, what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be…why her namesake has been deployed as a weapon against indigenous people for centuries across the continents. For millennia, humans have invoked their minds and bodies through prayers, rituals, songs, and dances to summon rain from the sky, and the many time-based live interventions at DAS are inspired by this energy that links the earth, the human spirit, and the blue expanse above. Bonna is learning that differently from the time of the tales from the past, humans with power today are not only filling the earth with genetically modified seeds, but are also now seeding the sky with clouds. She wonders if her name might mean something different now.

Many things, like feeling the rain, cannot be experienced from a page or a screen, and DAS was designed to be encountered as an embodied experience of togetherness. Celebrating the power of orality and the energy that can be conjured through live performance (art, music, theater, dance), with participants spanning contexts from Bangladesh to Brazil, from Guadeloupe to Guam, DAS 2023 is filled with newly commissioned time-based and participatory works. The opening panel of DAS will bring Bonna together with her sisters in conversation—Natasha, EVA, and Melly—considering the shift in how they see themselves as institutions and exhibition platforms, learning and unlearning how to be relevant in a world that shifted seismically since the closing of DAS 2020, especially in the wake of climate catastrophes pummeling the planet. A dynamic four day opening weekend program including city tours of masterpieces of 20th century architecture and a diverse array of the city’s growing number of art spaces can be found here. 

Climate change is not unidirectional. It is a systemic and episodic transformation of ecologies, systems and structures over time. “In the fight against climate change, which is the fight for our lives, we will not win by way of facts but we might by way of stories,” writes the indigenous CHamoru climate activist Julian Aguon. DAS 2023, in collaboration with its artists and curators, presents the work of organizations from across the country that apply artistic thinking to humanitarian and environmental challenges, realizing the capacity for more meaningful, just, and beautiful forms of life in situations some may misguidedly see as “hopeless.” 

How do you tell the story of multiple crises while facilitating hope? The Ghanaian-Scottish designer, thinker and educator Lesley Lokko insightfully points out, “When you are in the eye of the storm, this is often the right point to push for maximum change.” Extreme weather and the absence of state management was the tipping point for Bangladeshis to declare independence in 1971 and fight for the right to express themselves and their stories in their own language. Curator Bishwajit Goswami’s contribution to Bonna, A Duality, presents an experiential view into how 36 Bangladeshi artists have been working with and depicting climate change from a situated perspective linking words and weather, collaborating with researcher Muhammad Nafisur Rahman. Curated by Anne Barlow, the Samdani Art Award presents new works by 12 emerging Bangladeshi artists who reflect on social, economic and ecological concerns in the midst of one of the most difficult climatic periods for South Asia. 

Weather, when visualized, relies on the interaction of multiple forces enacting potential acts of benefit as well as destruction. Curator Sean Anderson’s contribution to Bonna, To Enter the Sky, brings together examples of architectures of resilience, of trust, while not discounting fear, entropy, and destruction. Just as turbulence requires us to navigate the unknown, architecture, beyond the building, can activate new ways of encountering materiality, collaboration, community, sovereignty, and citizenship. The exhibition centers Bangladesh as part of a broader reckoning of what it means to be human in and of the built environment today, asserting how a spatial medium, architecture, with its materialities of hope and chance, can begin to disseminate radical stories of becoming to help us understand our own unique capacities as individuals, communities, nations. 

Our scale to the world changes as we grow(up). We may recognize Bonna as young, but nothing is older than a child. A child sees as she sees for the first time. A child is an instinct, curiosity, play, imagination, language, future, past and much more—a whole being with joy, sickness, intuition, and memories and innumerable things passed over genetically and culturally. Very Small Feelings, a chapter of Bonna co-curated by Akansha Rastogi and Diana Campbell with Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, gently holds and hosts the figure of the child and the childhood play as a stage. Play in formative years where the self begins, and transforms; childhood as a place where one can enter and exit at will. DAS and its institutional partner the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art refer to Very Small Feelings as ‘a spread’ as it is full of stories, rituals, fables, characters, memories, actions that produce many kinds of surfaces, children’s books, illustrations, folklores, popular cartoons, and a space for intergenerational conversations and entanglements that will reveal themselves in Dhaka in February and New Delhi at KNMA in July to September 2023. 

Artists in this spread appear as provocateurs, mediators, educators, prisms and makers developing different methods in their unique milieus. Very Small Feelings boldly positions artist educators at this fulcrum, highlighting many pedagogical experiments and creative collaborations between contemporary artists and young learners, historically locating ‘other’ practices of select South Asian modernists as illustrators and initiators of platforms for learning and arts mediation. Characters who are real in how they are known in the imagination of many join Bonna, teasing out emotions, big and small through their relationship with other bodies, with siblings, family, community and the world around them and also in relation to our own bodies as participants inside the exhibition. Tripling as a playground, generative space for learning and exchange, and an exhibition, Very Small Feelings seeks to encounter the ‘inner child’ and bind us strongly to it.