Last night, Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, founders of the Samdani Art Foundation, hosted a gala dinner at the St Regis San Clemente Palace in Venice in honor of Naeem Mohaiemen and Raqs Media collective, who are participating in Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale “All the World’s Futures” (see Venice Biennale Curator Okwui Enwezor On “All the World’s Futures,” Karl Marx, and The Havana Biennial Boycott).
At the event, the program of the foundation’s Dhaka Art Summit 2016 was announced to a slew of VIP guests, including Iwona Blazwick, Marian Goodman, Anish Kapoor, Nicoletta Fiorucci, Caroline Bourgeois, Chris Dercon (see Chris Dercon Leaves Tate Modern To Direct Berlin’s Volksbühne Theater), Jean de Loisy, Beatrix Ruf, Alan Faena, and Dee Poon.
Dhaka Art Summit, the largest non-commercial platform for South Asian art, returns for its third edition from February 5-8, 2016 to be held at the Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka, Bangladesh.
The biennial event will feature new major works by artists such as Lynda Benglis, Simryn Gill, Haroon Mirza, Dayanita Singh, and John Giorno, who in the 70s, traveled through what is now Bangladesh with fellow poet Allen Ginsberg.
The program also includes emerging names from the region such as Ayesha Sultana, Waqas Khan, and Munem Wasif, and previously overlooked South Asian artists active in the 20th century.
For its third iteration, the summit’s curatorial team, helmed by the foundation’s artistic director, Diana Campbell Betancourt, will include representatives from Tate Modern, Centre Pompidou, Kunsthalle Zurich, and South Asian partners. The program will also expand to include the fields of architecture and experimental writing.
“Building on Dhaka’s rich festival tradition, DAS 2016 will be a space that celebrates cosmopolitan histories and looks at very wide definitions of what a South Asia focused art festival means,” Campbell Betancourt said in a statement. “Artists and filmmakers from the 2016 program such as Merchant Ivory, Lynda Benglis, Gaganendranath Tagore, Lida Abdul, Krishna Reddy, Rashid Choudhury, and Lionel Wendt exemplify the longstanding dialogue between South Asia and the rest of the world,” she added.