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International
Visual Artists' News Sheet | May – June 2020
Héctor Zamora, Movimientos Emisores de Existencia (Existence-emitting Movements), 2019-2020; performative action with women and terracotta vessels; courtesy of the artist and Labor; all photographs by Randhir Singh
Seismic Movements LÍVIA PÁLDI REPORTS ON THE DHAKA ART SUMMIT 2020 WHICH TOOK PLACE IN BANGLADESH IN FEBRUARY.
IN LIGHT OF the growing pandemic crisis, social distancing and the rush towards digital space, the week I spent at the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) now feels like both a mirage and a rare privilege. The large-scale art event was organised in one of the world’s fastest growing megacities with a population of over 20 million, of which slum-dwellers make up 40% – largely those escaping climate-induced disasters in rural and coastal areas. DAS was founded by the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF), a private arts trust established in 2011 by collectors Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani to support the work of contemporary Bangladeshi artists and architects.1 SAF serves as the principal funding body for DAS and is led by Artistic Director and Curator, Diana Campbell Betancourt, who has also been the Chief Curator of the Summit since 2013.2 Since its inception in 2012, DAS has expanded and branded as a transnational art event, an internationally well-connected regional catalyst that boosts artistic and curatorial production and exchange in the wider regions of South East Asia, Oceania, Africa and the Middle East. DAS has a powerful network of advisors including institutional partners (Asia Art Archive and Para Site, Hong Kong), museums (Tate, Pompidou, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw), private galleries (White Cube), and biennales (Kochi, Liverpool, Sharjah). Interrogating the space that art history occupies in societal and political reflection, central to DAS is the aim to build an ecosystem supported by various strands, including the MAHASSA (Connecting Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, South and South-East Asia). This collaborative research project – involving intensive seminars, distance learning sessions and public lectures with international faculty and emerging scholars – fosters research and critical platforms on modernist histories and intersectional approaches.3 Connected to this, the collective research project, ‘Seismography of Struggles: Towards a Global History of Critical and Cultural Journals’, headed by French art historian, writer and cultural critic, Dr Zahia Rahmani, was presented as an hourlong multi-channel video and sound installation within the Independence Movement section. Betancourt refers to DAS more as “a holistic project” than a biennale; as a “cumulative exercise of sharing and building knowledge and commu-
