TBA21–Academy at Dhaka Art Summit
February 2 – February 4, 2018
Shilpakala Academy, Bangladesh

Ayesha Sultana, Threshold (2012-13). Image courtesy the artist and Experimenter, Kolkata.
Past
TBA21–Academy
Programming

TBA21–Academy is proud to collaborate with the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) 2018. DAS is an international, non-commercial research, and exhibition platform for art and architecture connected to South Asia. With a core focus on Bangladesh, DAS re-examines how we think about these forms of art in both a regional and an international context. Founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation, DAS is held every two years in a public-private partnership with the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, with the support of the Ministry of Cultural Affairs and Ministry of Information of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, the National Tourism Board, Bangladesh Investment Development Authority (BIDA), and in association with the Bangladesh National Museum.

Nabil Ahmed, one of the Fellows of TBA21–Academy The Current, will present the first stage of his two-year research commission INTERPRT (Inter-Pacific Ring Tribunal), an interdisciplinary project on environmental justice in the Pacific region at the intersection of spatial practice, international law, and artistic research. In the project’s conception, the Pacific ring – a contingent, geological force field rising from the depths of the Pacific ocean floor – inspired a fluid, geological imaginary of the Pacific region as a global commons, with the indigenous people of Oceania as its guardians.

The four geographically distributed sites for the project are in West Papua, French Polynesia, Vanuatu, and the Marshall Islands, where the project will investigate possible crimes against nature and propose alternative legal forums working with international lawyers and Pacific-centered groups. Towards these aims, a wide range of activities are proposed including performative public legal forums, exhibitions, drafting of laws, publications, symposiums, and interactive reports setting a new trajectory of artistic research on which to support key Pacific stakeholders. 
 
LOCATION
Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy
14/3 Segunbagicha
Segun Bagicha Rd
Dhaka, Bangladesch 

General enquiries: info@dhakaartsummit.org
T: (+88) 0288 78784
 
FREE ADMISSION
The Dhaka Art Summit is free to the public, ticketless, and requires no registration to attend. 
 
PROGRAM
3:30–5:30 pm, Friday, February 2, 2018  |  Auditorium

Rising Oceans and Conflict: From Bangladesh to Planetary Scale

Organised by TBA21–Academy and INTERPRT, this panel brings together artists, architects and curators, to locate Bangladesh and the rising waters of the world’s oceans at the frontier of global Climate Change. The panel will explore the agency of cross-disciplinary research on oceans and investigative tools of Forensic Architecture for gathering and presenting evidence on environmental destruction. A closed-door workshop will follow this panel in the Education Pavilion on February 3 and a discussion with Sugata Bose, Cosmin Costinas and Nabil Ahmed on February 4 (within the exhibition space of A Beast, A God, and A Line


Saturday February 3

Environmental Investigation (closed workshop)

This workshop explores spatial and media practice as tools for visualizing and bringing to the foreground specific environment related conflicts, inequalities and disputes. Participants will make tactical use of concepts such as scale, territory, forensics, before and after, landscape and diagram. We will ground practice and theory with the methodology afforded by environmental history at the intersection of nature, capital and social relations. Participants will collectively work on contemporary situations and cases that are specific to and resonates with the ecology and climate of Bangladesh and the wider Bengal delta, to explore the process of gathering, examining and presenting environmental investigations.


12:30–1:30pm , Sunday February 4  |  within the exhibition space of A Beast, A God, and A Line

Unfolding the Pacific Ring with Nabil Ahmed, Sugata Bose and Cosmin Costinas

A contingent history of Oceania is marked by intensive human-nature entanglements, nuclear colonialism, resource extraction, and climate change and their itinerant evidence. What parallels might be drawn between oceanic histories reimagined through geology and climate, rather than national boundaries, towards practices of political and ecological self-determination in the Asia-Pacific. This discussion is realised with the support of TBA21–Academy, Samdani Art Foundation, and Harvard University’s South Asia Institute.