Summit imagines there’s no countries and the world lives as one
SHARJAH: The fifth Dhaka Art Summit (DAS, Feb. 7 – 15, 2020) is being held at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. It looks at movements, the result of pressure being released by various vectors, such as geological, social and political.
Among other highlights, it presents artists who played a dominant role in Bangladesh’s fight for independence, from the 1905 Swadeshi movement, to the Language Movement of 1952, the country’s ultimate independence in 1971 and the activism of today.
Works by Murtaja Baseer, Quamrul Hassan, Rashid Talukder and Zainul Abedin evoke this spirit, grounding the exhibition in the country’s history of protest and the artistic movements that were part of its struggle for freedom.
Bangladesh’s history, it must be noted, is parallel to similar histories of independence movements throughout Africa, South and Southeast Asia.
Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934-1975, an ongoing work begun in 2009, features over 60 archival photos culled from more than 30 archives of the first Independence Day ceremonies of various Asian, Middle Eastern and African nations, honing in on the 24-hour twilight period as these places transform from territories into nation-states.
In her ongoing project, Flowers for Africa, Kapwani Kiwanga researches archival imagery relating to African independence, while consulting with florists to re-create the flower arrangements found there. Initially fresh, the flowers run the course of their transient cycle and then wilt and dry.
In Kiwanga’s own words: “Just as the enthusiasm present during the period of independence has faded, pan-african dreams have been eclipsed by the everyday difficulties of the average African citizens.”
Chitra Ganesh expands upon gender and power in a futurist imaginary that takes the 1905 utopian, sci-fi, feminist novella Sultana’s Dream by Bengali author and social reformer Begum Rokeya, as a point of departure to consider a world where men stay home, and women innovate new ways of being by harnessing the power of the sun.
Ellen Gallagher imagines a parallel universe underwater in her Watery Ecstatic series, inspired by the legend of Drexciya (developed by the eponymous electronic music duo), which imagines a birth through death, where children of the pregnant slave women thrown overboard during the Atlantic Crossing are born with gills and don’t have to come up to the oppressive world above for air.
Nearly every society across time includes imagery of women carrying pots of water on their heads; in his performative installation, Movimientos Emisores de Existencia, Hector Zamora explores what a life emancipated from this burden might look like as women smash the pots that weigh them down with patriarchal burdens.
In an ongoing collaboration with Artspace Sydney, Taloi Havini collaborates with her community in Bougainville, transforming traditional weaving techniques to create a monumental meeting place at the centre of DAS.
The recurrent task of the Black Feminist Critic and the Black Feminist Poet, according to philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva, is to work towards “the end of the world produced by the tools of reason”.
Working towards the end of a certain kind of world, which is de-colonisation, requires the emancipation of “the category of Blackness from the scientific and historical ways of knowing that produced it in the first place.”
Emancipated from narratives of science and history, Blackness “wonders about another praxis” as it “wanders in the World” guided by the “ethical mandate of opening up other ways of knowing and doing.”
Inspired by da Silva’s Feminist Poetics of Blackness, To welcome the end of the world as we know it, The Otolith Group’s film programme for DAS 2020 assembles wandering sounds and wondering images that open up different ways of knowing and doing.
Extending across the Shilpakala Academy’s three floors, Rio based artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrane is creating his first work in Asia inspired by Islam’s Institute of Fine Arts (1953- 1955), a masterpiece in brick that dissolves in the surrounding tropical gardens. Mangrane’s film and installation mixes fiction and contemplation, exploring the past and the future specters that haunt present day Bangladesh.
On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention is a group exhibition of primarily commissioned works by 17 artists and collaboratives responding to the built and unbuilt legacy of the groundbreaking Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam (1923-2012).
Active in politics because of his conviction that “it was the most architectural thing he could do,” lslam humbly and uncompromisingly forged an architectural movement in what was East Pakistan, as part of a broader claim toward de-colonial consciousness in the 1950s, leading to the country’s independence in 1971.
His buildings and ideas influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects working today as well as international figures such as Louis I Kahn, Richard Neutra and Stanley Tigerman, each of whom contributed to ideas around modernist architecture in South Asia.
Working across photography, painting, sculpture, performance, sound and film, the artists in the exhibition present work that negotiates and builds worlds that are borne from the local environmental and cultural climate of Bangladesh.
For Islam and the artists presenting, architecture and art are conceived as benefiting all who make up the lands of any nation, no matter their origin, without the boundaries of class or caste.