Works by Lynda Benglis and Tino Sehgal will be shown alongside emerging South Asian artists such as Munem Wasif and Nge Lay at the third edition of the Dhaka Art Summit—the high-profile, privately backed platform for South Asian art—early next year (5-8 February).
The summit, a meeting point for more than 300 art professionals, will be held in the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. The event is, according to the organisers, “the world’s largest non-commercial platform for South Asian art”. The summit “is not a biennial, and not a symposium, nor a festival, but rather somewhere in between and removed from the pressures of the art market”, they say.
More than 90% of the funding for the Dhaka Art Summit comes from the Samdani Art Foundation, with the remainder coming from private and governmental sources. The summit only last four days because it “costs nearly $2m to produce and the marginal costs of each extra day are not feasible for the Samdani Art Foundation to support in the face of 120% import bonds that must be paid on all temporarily imported works”, says a statement.
Nadia Samdani and her husband Rajeeb launched the Samdani Art Foundation in 2011; the first edition of the summit opened the following year. Nadia Samdani is a member of the Tate’s South Asia acquisitions committee while Rajeeb Samdani is the co-chair.
The Mumbai-based curator Diana Campbell Betancourt is the summit’s artistic director and the chief curator of the 2016 edition. She is overseeing a solo projects section that includes 13 commissioned pieces by artists such as Benglis, Simryn Gill and Sandeep Mukherjee.
Campbell Betancourt will also co-organise an exhibition of historic, post-war works by South Asian artists called Rewind. Artists featured include the late Bangladeshi practitioner Rashid Choudhury, Indian-born Monika Correa, and Karachi-born Nalini Malani. The Indian art collector Amrita Jhaveri is sponsoring the show.
Guest curators include Nada Raza, an assistant curator at Tate Modern, and Daniel Baumann, the director of the Kunsthalle Zurich. Raza is organising an exhibition entitled The Story of the Missing One, the centerpiece of which is a Modernist watercolour by the early 20th-century Indian painter Gaganendranath Tagore. Artists such as US-born Neha Choksi and Firoz Mahmud of Dhaka will respond to the work. The artists Nikhil Chopra, Madhavi Gore and Jana Prepeluh will oversee a performance art section.
Postscript (10 October)—A spokesman for the Dhaka Art Summit tells us: "One of the reasons the summit lasts four days, apart from the production costs, is that it is ticketless and free for all, which means there is no ticket fee, or income. The event benefits local audiences; the last summit drew more than 70,000 visitors."
