Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020

Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 is the fifth edition of the biennial research and exhibition platform. The Dhaka Art Summit 2020 (DAS 2020) aimed to provoke us to reconsider (art) histories, movement, borders and fault lines, inspired by a geological reading of the work “summit” as the top of a mountain. Mountains such as the Himalayas – rising north of the delta of Bangladesh and spanning across South Asia from Afghanistan to Myanmar – were born out of the collision of the Eurasian and Indian tectonic plates. Metaphorically, DAS 2020 initiated from and looked at similar seismic movements, or movements generated by energy released from pressure – geologically, politically and socially.

Spanning four floors of the Shilpakala Academy in the city’s vibrant University belt, Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 included contributions by 500 artists, curators, scholars and thinkers from across Africa, Australia, South and Southeast Asia, as well as Europe and the United States. The exhibition, panel discussions, performances and symposia focused on one broad theme: “what is a movement and how do we ignite one beyond the confines of an art exhibition?” As explained in the press release, DAS 2020 was

a summit of humanist potential rising above the boundaries that geopolitics hold us to. Just as seismic movements don’t adhere to a singular timeframe or scale and build up slowly or erupt in an instant, the exhibition plays with time in non-linear ways and builds on layers of ideas and collaborations born in DAS’ previous four editions.

For Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020, Samdani Art Foundation Artistic Director Diana Campbell Betancourt returned as the Chief Curator. In her curatorial statement, she writes:

DAS 2020 is about shaking up our understanding of the present and the past, creating opportunities to come together and make and write (art) history from new perspectives. We continuously work to break down barriers between art, film, craft, architecture, design, research, and institution production to think of new forms of togetherness. […] DAS 2020 touches upon planetary movements, geological movements, colonial movements, independence movements, social movements and feminist futures, spatial movements, the conditions that move us to act and the power that comes with moving collectively. We do not just consider forms of artistic production, but also forms of ‘institutional’ production, that enable artistic practices and pedagogies, generating new vocabularies of socially organization and building better ways to create and live together.

As Betancourt explains, DAS 2020 is interested in seeing what happens to ideas moving from Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy to outside in real life. Betancourt goes on to pose the question: “What does a movement look like while it is being made and how do we learn from the lived experience of making one?“

Addressing Geological Movements, Adrián Villar Rojas’ new commission was an immersive installation located in the heart of the Academy, made of 400-million-year-old ammonite and orthoceras fossils that can be found in the Himalayas. The now extinct species of undersea creatures thrived for 300 million years, swimming across the super-ocean Panthalassa and witnessing the creation and breakup of the single continent Pangea. The work also hints at climate change and the future of our lands, such as the projection that much of Bangladesh will be underwater in 50 years like the Himalayas once were.

Through Collective Movements, DAS 2020 looked at the work of over forty collectives and collaborative platforms active in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and Central and South America. Included in Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 were groups such as Art Labor (Ho Chi Minh City), Center for Historical Reenactments (Johannesburg), Gudskul (ruangrupa, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara) (Jakarta), Mata Aho Collective (Aotearoa), The Otolith Group (London) and Uronto Artist Community (Dhaka).

Within the Collective Movements, “The Collective Body” was an exhibition co-curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt and Kathryn Weir crystallised concerns pertinent to collaborative practice in Bangladesh, drawing parallels and creating unprecedented exchange with other collective movements emerging across Asia, Africa, Central and South America, and Oceania. More than thirty collectives and initiatives presented puppet shows, concerts, debates, installations and performances, collaborating around issues ranging from land rights and resource extraction, to strategies of visibility and contestation, to analyses of the intersection of gender, caste and ethnicity.

Also part of the Collective Movements, “Nobody Told Me There’d be Days Like These” was a historical exhibition curated by Bangladeshi writer Mustafa Zaman, exploring the work of art, architecture, film, literature and theatre collectives active in Bangladesh around the 1980s years of martial law. In addition, “Stepping Out of Line; Art Collectives and Translocal Parallelism” was a symposium curated by RAW Material Company, Dakar, Senegal.

DAS 2020 also looked at Colonial Movements, through works like a newly commissioned performative installation by Kamruzzaman Shadhin in collaboration with the artist-led initiative Gidree Bawlee. The work considers the role of the British-era railways in changing Bengal’s lands from growing food (rice) to producing cash-crops (jute) through migration stories found in traditional folk songs from Bangladesh. Vietnamese artist Thao Nguyen Phan explores a similar history in Vietnam in her three-channel film Mute Grain (2018), which led to a little known 1945 famine that killed nearly two million people, consulting texts about Bengal famine of 1943 in its creation.

New Delhi-artist Nilima Sheikh created one of her largest murals to date for DAS 2020, chronicling women’s ongoing struggles in Kashmir, which was the epicentre of the destruction left in the wake of the British Partition of India and the rising Indian nationalism.

Artists from Bangladesh and other countries engaged with Independence Movements. Bangladeshi artists Murtaja Baseer, Quamrul Hassan, Rashid Talukder and Zainul Abedin looked at Bangladeshi history, from the Swadeshi movement from 1905, to the language movement of 1952, to the country’s ultimate independence in 1971. Bangladesh’s history is parallel to similar histories of independence movements in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, as Maryam Jafri’s Independence Day 1934-1975 showed at DAS 2020. The ongoing work started 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.

Artists from around the globe looked at Social Movements and Feminist Futures, like Indian-American artist Chitra Ganesh. Her work expanded upon her exploration of gender and power in a futurist imaginary, taking as a point of departure the 1905 utopian, sci-fi, feminist novella Sultana’s Dream by Bengali author and social reformer Begum Rokeya as a point of departure. Ganesh here considers a world where men stay home, and women innovate new ways of being by harnessing the power of the sun.

In an ongoing collaboration with Artspace Sydney, Taloi Havini collaborated with her community in Bougainville, transforming traditional weaving techniques to create a monumental meeting place that was located at the centre of DAS 2020. The new commission was a space to consider personal and political narratives around themes of place, protection and resilience, at a time when communities across the globe are at the tipping point of environmental and social change.

Spatial Movement was the focus of the group exhibition “On Muzharul Islam: Surfacing Intention”, with mostly commissioned works by 17 artists/collaboratives responding to the built and unbuilt legacy of the ground-breaking Bangladeshi architect Muzharul Islam (1923-2012). Islam forged an architectural movement in what was East Pakistan as part of a broader claim toward decolonial consciousness in the 1950s, and influenced multiple generations of Bangladeshi architects working today, as well as international figures such as Louis I. Kahn, Richard Neutra and Stanley Tigerman, who contributed to ideas of modernist architecture in South Asia.

In Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 there also were moving image works curated by The Otolith Group in “Rituals for Temporal Deprogramming”, and the launch of the project Connecting Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and Southeast Asia (MAHASSA) in collaboration with the Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) at Cornell University, and the Asia Art Archive. There was also “Geographies of Imagination”, an ongoing research and exhibition project curated by SAVVY Contemporary, and Srijan-Abartan (Srijan in Bangla means to create, creation), funded by Pro Helvetia – Swiss Arts Council. The latter is an international, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary research project aimed at developing new tools and methodologies for creating culturally rooted, ecologically sustainable, and socially responsible exhibition displays. Focusing in on Bangladesh’s reality, Dhaka-based artist and educator Bishwajit Goswami’s exhibition “Roots” examined the transfer of knowledge by art educators who have been critical in the building of the country’s art history.

A recurrent, highly awaited element of the Dhaka Art Summit is the Samdani Art Award, which supports the artistic development of the country’s emerging artists. Curated by Philippe Pirotte, Rector and Professor Art History at the Städelschule Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt, Germany, the Award gives artists the opportunity to create new work for DAS, and to be supported in a residency at Srihatta. For the fifth edition, supported by the Goethe Institut Dhaka, the shortlisted artists who showed their new works at Dhaka Art Summit 2020 were Ariful Kabir, Ashfika Rahman, Faiham Ebna Sharif, Habiba Nowrose, Najmun Nahar Keya, Palash Bhattacharjee, Promoti Hossain, Sounak Das, Sumana Akter, Tahia Farhin Haque, Zihan Karim and the Award Winner Soma Surovi Jannat, who received a six-week paid residency at Delfina Foundation, London.

Jannat’s award winning work, Into the Yarn, Out in the One, (2019-2020), raises the question, “How do we perceive human existence and history living in the disjoint landscape?”  Talking to the Daily Star, Jannat said of her work:

The space that I have created into my work is inspired from the two-way spiral, signifying the golden section. The sacred cut is found in nature, ranging from the milky way of the galaxy to the DNA of our body cell. Different layers and shapes of the display confer to ‘Seismic Movements’, the theme of the DAS 2020. The audience will find a kind of primitiveness in my work – one that is pure and tells stories of our own society. The smell of soil, various organic forms and simplicity are noticeable aspects of my work.

Talking to Ocula, Betancourt said DAS 2020 was “inspired by the 1414 gift of a giraffe by the Sultan of Bengal to Emperor Yongle of China”, and would “widen its view to look at historical layers of connectivity across Asia and Africa and the Indian Ocean and catalyse further exchange across these regions without Western intermediaries.” Betancourt hoped for the Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 to become

a platform where former colonial subjects can come together without a western intermediary to imagine new futures from Dhaka inspired by similar utopian movements of the past. The work “summit” calls to mind the physical signs of plate tectonics, and ideas of Pangea and existences far beyond the span of a human lifetime or even the cumulative history of mankind. How can we as artists, curators, writers, and art’s many supporters and publics come together to make a constellation of seismic shifts toward a better world outside of the myopic individual interest that is threatening our existence on this planet?

Seismic Movements: Dhaka Art Summit 2020 ran from 7 to 15 February 2020 at the Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh.