Winter is the month of celebration in this country of scorching summers. And the Dhaka urbanites do get spoilt for choice when harangued by fetes of literature , music and art taking place successively hot on heels of each other. Dhaka switches into the role, across a span of three or so months, of a placeholder for resplendent names in all of these distinct fields and consequently earn a lot of kudos for reeling in a cache of international art cognoscenti who apparently exchange views , experience, knowledge with their far-flung peers through dialogues that appear even to the uncritical minds to be lopsided. The local gets subsumed under the flattened, gleaming surface of the global. Dhaka Art Summit, chiefly a private initiative that collaborated with important government (cultural) agencies to stage their fourth edition at Shilpakala Academy, has progressively and increasing been expanding its scope and scale to be an inclusive platform that chose as its locus of enquiry South and Southeast Asia, a fecund ground for chaos , conflict, resilience and hope. Looped around representatives of MOMA and Tate and many more big-wigs , that forms the global circuit, DAS paid a reckoning to traces of ‘other’ stories wrought, expectedly, from within their own context. In an age of dizzying connectivity that compresses space and time and blurs all notions of distance and difference in its speedy transmission of information, this summit acts as a performative vehicle for telescoping the present onto the past , and weaving parallel narratives of convergence and divergence as it chronicles the cyclical course of history of peoples and the process of identity de/formation.
A grandiose scheme of exhibitions spread across four floors, accompanied by workshops, symposiums, panel discussions, film screenings , not to mention performances, it seemed veritably impossible to keep track of the goings-on. There has been a steady traffic of visitors throughout its nine-day programme with the second weekend seeing a heavy flow of enthusiasts who seemed genuinely interested in exploring the art works that stood or rather were seen sweeping across the walls and the floors in their sumptuous presence. As art and architecture shared a common space, so did old and new, and it was a common thread of shared cultural genealogy that seemed to tie the works together instead of geopolitical hierarchies or boundaries that define art as belonging to given territorially significant markers. Volunteering art mediators regularly patrolled the grounds intercepting spectators to offer a glimpse into the background of the artwork on view. One must say this helped create a warm atmosphere of interaction, forging a space of intimacy between art and viewer , releasing art from an air of intimidation that seem to create a distance from less-trained eyes. However, this seemingly growing taste in art can also be attributed to the steady stream of regular exhibitions around the city, and of course larger events like biennales being staged at close intervals to which Samdani Art Foundation has made a praise-worthy contribution since 2012, by dedicating their efforts and resources to introduce the local crowd to some of the best artworks from around the world. This has without a shadow of doubt invigorated the local artists’ appetite for new possibilities that could be explored with newer, heretofore untested tools and techniques, and has woken the viewers to changing realities in the world of art which has the ultimate power to change the world, more so than technology with its sheer prophetic insight into man and his relation to the world that sustains him.
The entrance to the Summit could not have been more appropriate than what stood as somewhat an ambient gateway made of bamboo (painted in red) after the vernacular South Asian technique by Rasheed Araeen. Nearby was another structure more in the shape of a canopy bearing familiar patterns of baskets by Yona Friedman ushering the audience into the hallway to be accosted with yet another curious piece of scaffoldings and bulwarks named the Utopian Stage, a project by Archaeology of the Final Decade, and as the name suggests it was raised to showcase the failures and promises of the last decade symbolically through a slew of film screenings, dance, music and performance, the latter featuring two of Dhaka’s celebrated artists Reetu Sattar and Yasmin Jahan Nupur with choreographed performances that respectively included musicians and dancers in a melee of tradition and performativity coming together to seek accord amidst discord, something essential that silently glues together the fractured realities of a world gone berserk. But the problem was the profundity of the projects thinned away in the face of thoroughfaring visitors who looked clueless and only struck for a moment to contemplate before they decided to move on. Similar was the case with the piece by Runa Islam, whose multifaceted performance complete with an ensemble , mindboggling though it was had to be wrapped up every time there was a talk session at the auditorium. A lot of the video installations , quite edgy as they were in addressing contemporary issues of grave concern through alternately stark and poetic rendition were presented in curtained enclaves, and seemed to draw in a lot of curious audience bringing them to tears not only by the soulful unfolding of human tragedy but also by stinging their eyes with freshly applied paints. Apart from these glitches , and despite its sprawl this edition was arranged in, if one may, in a jigsaw fashion, following a sinuous trail carrying the crowd along the schema of five segments each having its own thematic anchor which at the same time is rendered interchangeable so far as the theme of artificial, forced divide and dislocation and finding one’s place in the cartography of a world driven by neo-liberal policies and post-human technologies that daily challenges the ecology of the human mind and body and its environments is concerned. Artists from variegated locales seem to consensually bring the grief and distress of a disjuncture of the individual from his community to bear, each through a unique treatment of their own of the form and content of their works.
Out of such a vast plethora of conceptually dazzling and technically intricate works it is really painstaking and moreover unfair to single out a handful that stood out, yet it is still worth a try! As one pulls the curtain to enter Rakib Shaw’s parallel universe of breath-taking splendour and flamboyance, it does not evade the gaze once one is drawn to examine the self-portraits up-close, that beneath the glitter and the embellishment lies one’s yearning to reembrace the past that was riddled with myths and fables and was a syncretic confluence of different streams of religiosity interweaving together wherein question of identity became a redundant fallacy. Rendered in a similar vein Nilima Sheikh’s enthralling scroll depicting the 14th century Kashmiri mystic draped in an idyllic landscape by a curatorial oversight lay by the wayside in a cluster of lesser works. Erosion of the plurality of indigeneity under the bulldozers of homogenizing globalization was poignantly manifest in both Munem Wasif and Joydeb Royaja’s works. Both address colonization’s (both of the past and the present) atrocity that slowly and insidiously wipes away traditions and locales to fuel the engines of capital driven economy.
Human civilization flourished as more and more trails and passages were etched crisscrossing the globe that centuries of travel by land, water and air made possible. Which was not however free of the bane of vicious struggle for power and domination. When to tame and exploit to one’s advantage associated with an insatiable hunger to also possess becomes the driving impetus for civilization it is not surprising that artists, who are the conscience of a community would try and sensitize people to the grievous outcomes of such vested human mobilities or migrations. The dire plight of these migrants crossing borders (imaginary) of depleting communities were captured with much contextual sensitivity in many a works. Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s eye-catching video installation, suspended diagonally across a room with a fascinating chiaroscuric effect projected on the floor presents Bangladeshi Dilbar working in the UAE, whose half-bemused expression mocks at the sub-standard working environment he has been trapped into. Pratchaya Phinthong had an art guide wear a pair of jeans which far removed from its place of origin and owner traces the treacherous chasm between producers and the mode of production. Curator Cosmin Costinas examined works based on textiles from different regions as metaphors for stories of resistance that were woven into them and by doing so acquainted the audience with a unique experience.
This year the Samdani Art Award went to Mizanur Rahman Chowdhury, who mainly forages the vibrant field of new media, and in this DAS edition of 2018 presented the audience with a tongue-in-cheek multi-media that lambasted the follies of human endeavours. Seen is a raised pedestal made of plastic chairs nestling a monitor showing how gravity pulls down a levitating man in an endless loop, the same motion is again mirrored in the vain effort of trying to keep afloat a handful of floppy tinsels. These self-defeating acts are reflected implicitly through the channels of makeshift art extravaganza that proffer itself as decolonizing platforms which in reality happens only to contest a fluid landscape of virtuality in a quest for both that is vanishing and that which is potentially lurking on the horizon. And DAS is no exception!
Dhaka Art Summit ran its course from February 2 to 10 at Shilpakala Academy, produced by the Samdani Art Foundation led by its artistic director Diana Campbell Betancourt.