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We arrived in a polluted Dhaka where the air was thick and almost soup like. Our hosts and heroes of the trip were Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani. Here is Nadia and Tate Director Maria Balshaw greeting us to the Dhaka Art Summit with the ‘A Utopian Stage: Festival of Arts’
Then a tour of the wonderful shows within the art summit, where the quality of work was outstanding. We saw Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw’s first major presentation in South Asia co-curated by Maria Balshaw
At Simon Castets’ shortlist for the Samdani Art Award we very much loved Ahmed Rasel’s photographs. Originally trained in Bengali Literature he turned to photography to capture the great human story of Dhaka
The interesting group show ‘Planetary Planning’ curated by Devika Singh featured my favourite work ‘Provenance’, 2013 by Amie Siegel
Also part of the show was ‘The One Year Drawing Project’ which was an initiative started by four artists
Up next was Yasmin Jahan Nupur who is inspired by multicultural connections and created the work ‘The Long Way Home’ which are embroidered fabric maps
In the VIP lounge Tate Modern Director Frances Morris was in conversation with Dayanita Singh discussing her portable ‘museums’
In ‘A beast, a god and a line’, curated by Cosmin Costinas, I loved the work of Ming Wong from Singapore. ‘Bloody Mary’s Song of the South Seas’ uses fragments of popular culture and cinema along with the theme tune ‘Bali Hai’ from the 1958 film ‘South Pacific’
There was also a group of five Buddhist clerical garments. The different colours belong to two sects within Cambodia’s Theravada Buddhist system. The work is called ‘Srie Bun’, 2016 by Than Sok
At last it was great to see new work by Paul Pfeiffer called the ‘Incarnator’, 2018. Then it was off to the glamorous home of Nadia and Rajeeb for a sumptuous and exciting art evening
