Dhaka Art Summit 2016

The 3rd Dhaka Art Summit will be held from 5-8 February 2016 at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, the world’s largest non-commercial platform for South Asian art, organised by The Samdani Art Foundation.

The 2016 edition will be held from February 5 to 8 in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy in partnership with the country’s National Academy of Fine and Performing Arts. With extended hours, DAS is effectively 2 days longer than the 2014 edition with a free and ticket-less format, welcoming any interested visitor to the venue.

Inviting multiple artists, curators and thinkers who have built exhibitions based on commissioned research and experience within the region, DAS provokes reflections on transnationalism, selfhood and time without being prescriptive or directive. DAS is accepted as the main meeting point for art professionals from the region: coming mostly from Bangladesh over 300 artists, curators, writers and many other art professionals have been invited to participate in the different aspects of the DAS programme, which includes new commissions, curated group exhibitions, talks, performance and film programmes, book launches and the Summit’s first historical exhibition, Rewind.

Through the unique format of the Summit, which is not a biennial, not a symposium, not a festival — but rather somewhere in-between and removed from the pressures of the art market — the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy transforms into a generative space to reconsider the past and future of art and exchange within South Asia and the rest of the world.

Programme Highlights

Including loans from the the Bangladesh National Collection, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Pinault Collection and many other leading public and private collections in South Asia, as well as partnerships with many leading institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Asia Art Archive, Asia Society, the Harvard South Asia Institute and more, DAS looks at South Asia from the vantage point of doing and becoming rather than cartography: looking at the triplet planes of imagination, will and circumstance.

The Solo Projects, curated by Samdani Art Foundation Artistic Director Diana Campbell Betancourt, will include thirteen newly commissioned works and four works reconfigured within the Bangladeshi context, reflecting the productive nature of DAS. The first DAS project commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation, VIP Project (Dhaka) by Po Po, will first be unveiled at the 8^th Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane. The solo projects will celebrate pluralism and look at the continuum of birth and experience in becoming an individual, book-ended by Lynda Benglis and Tino Sehgal and 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 is a group exhibition highlighting 12 artists from across South Asia who were active before the late 1980s.Works from various artists’ estates, the Pakistan High Commission, and other private collections will be shared with the public for the first time in over 30 years.

Read more about the programme

Asia Art Archive presents its first Live Feed Station at Dhaka Art Summit 2016 to map and reveal the many histories of 20th century art writing in South Asia’s different languages as part of AAA’s ongoing Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing project. The station acts as an on-site junction to view an array of publications, art magazines, books, and catalogues published in the past century. It is an opportunity for visitors to explore the Bibliography of Modern and Contemporary Art Writing database and share their own references in contribution to this expanding platform of shared knowledge. Open Call for Material An Open Call for Material donations will be conducted for the Live Feed Station at Dhaka Art Summit. Donations in the form of publications in printed formats, including exhibition catalogues, books, magazines, and journals across different languages are welcome. Those interested are invited to make a 'live' contribution by bringing it to AAA's Live Feed Station.