The Dhaka Art Summit Defines The Democratization Art, And What The Art World Can Learn From It

“Impact,” this was one very meaningful word uttered by Edouard Detaille, Director at The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, in conversation on the ground in Dhaka, Bangladesh at the 6th edition of the biannual Dhaka Art Summit. It was a word that laced the 11-day event and became more pronounced and, even, palpable as the summit was witnessed alongside nearly six hundred thousand attendees who visited the free and open-to-the-public exhibitions.

“While art–or more widely, culture–remains too elitist in many countries even if some progress has been made, it’s an everyday fight for us who present art to enable anyone to access the work we present,” Detaille further explains in an interview.

“When I experienced the Dhaka Art Summit–this superb human event in free access, without VIP treatment, with an armada of volunteers trained for the occasion in cultural mediation which they did so well, and with a smile–all I could think of is the impact this summit has and how, we, as the international art community, could work to towards achieving greater impact in our own work through this type of model.”

Founded by Bangladeshis Rajeeb Samdani and Nadia Samdani MBE, the husband and wife are two of the world’s top art collectors and the Dhaka Art Summit is put on by their Samdani Art Foundation. The Summit not only showcased the best of contemporary art of the region, but also of the world. Sir Antony Gormley, the renowned British artist, created a site specific piece for the show and was also in attendance in Dhaka. Gormley was joined by Directors and Curators of major institutions such as the Guggenheim and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a gaggle of international press who hailed from Asia, Europe, and the US. As all gathered last month in Dhaka to absorb the vision and mission of the Summit, it was obvious to the professionals in attendance that beyond the displays of works, what was also being witnessed was the democratization of art itself.

“The Dhaka Art Summit is an endeavor that innovates and challenges how we think about the art ecosystem, from art production to curation to critical theory as well as the commercial art market,” says Manjari Sihare Sutin, Vice President, Sotheby’s, who was present in Dhaka.

“With free admission, no VIP lounge, no early entry times and well-organized transportation, people from all walks of life–students, curators, collectors, art enthusiasts and dealers–are invited to participate in a shared experience. This was a truly democratizing approach to oftentimes inaccessible events.”

Conceptually, the existence of museums could be considered as evidence of art democratization. When the first museums appeared in 18th century Europe as vehicles to bring art out of the homes of wealthy collectors and to the public, they were theoretically created for the masses, but in practice those masses ended up being a very specific segment of society.

Art Historian Carole Paul explains invisible fences existed in these infancy stages of art institutions and continue to exist today. Paul is the Director of Museum Studies, History of Art and Architecture at the University of California Santa Barbara and has recently published a collection of scholarly essays on the appearance of museums in the modern era titled, The First Modern Museums of Art: The Birth of An Institution in 18th and Early 19th Century Europe.

While the book makes the case these early museums forever set the standard for viewing art, in an email interview with Paul she was asked whether these first institutions were a move towards art democratization. She answered, “One of the motivations for the founding of public art museums beginning in the eighteenth century was to provide the educational opportunities afforded by broad access to artworks. The museum going public of the period would have consisted largely of the elite and the learned as well as artists, partly because the audience for museums was—and still is—self-selecting.”

Self-selecting. This is where the Dhaka Art Summit breaks away from the norm–a self-selecting audience is hardly the aim in Dhaka. The summit’s doors are wide open and its approach to hosting a free and public, world-class art fair in a country of over 160 million people living within the square mileage roughly the size of the state of Georgia is an ambitious feat; and yet, the Dhaka Art Summit succeeds at its mission. So, it becomes a living, breathing classroom for the art ecosystem on how to democratize art, why to democratize art, what it actually looks like in practice, and most importantly the outcomes and outputs of such inclusivity.

Even through the exclusivity of art or the experience of art as self-selecting, it has always been a medium for conversation and controversy. If it continues to exist within an echo chamber–accessible only to the collectors, curators, historians, press, and the self-selected–has the art world handicapped itself from the impact artworks may have on society at-large? The Dhaka Art Summit is a petri dish to answer such questions.

A young country born in 1971, Bangladeshi society is one which is developing and growing, both economically and socially, at a sprinting pace–the IMF predicts Bangladesh’s GDP to grow by 6% in 2023, on par with India. Yet with growth comes growing pains. Construction in Dhaka is omnipresent, traffic is amongst the most frustrating in the world, and air quality suffers as a result of both.

Also with growth comes opportunities and innovation, and in the case of the Dhaka Art Summit the opportunity is to progress the philosophical and cultural development of Bangladesh. In a country that has not a single museum dedicated to contemporary art, the Samdani Art Foundation fills that void every two years (or three, in this case due to the pandemic) with this event and presents Bangladeshis with a world-class exhibition. In turn, The Dhaka Art Summit stands as a medium for cultural conversation and societal shifts in the country.

Attendees were presented with work outspoken in its commentaries at every turn such as LGBQT recognition, the story of the stateless, indigenous Chakma people in Bangladesh, the plight of the Rohingya refugees, and the status of women in the culture. But unless you are Bangladeshi, it would have been easy to miss how strongly the Dhaka Art Summit spoke to these cultural issues of the region.

Yet, in some ways, that was the point.

“This show and platform is speaking to multiple audiences in different ways, but ultimately it’s meant for the Bangladeshi people,” says Diana Campbell, the Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation and Chief Curator of the Dhaka Art Summit since 2013. “So this summit was coded all over the place and radical at times, but you may have only recognized it if you are Bangladeshi.”

Indeed, Dhaka Art Summit’s social perspectives were in-your-face from the onset. The opening gallery was a meditation on the tribulations of the indigenous Chakma tribe of Chittagong Hill Tract area of Bangladesh.

A collection of works of ink and paper on board, the artist Joydeb Roaja—a Chakma himself—created an immersive and experiential piece titled Submerged dream 8 which tells the story of the displacement of over 100,000 Chakma people who, under Pakistani rule supported by technical and monetary support from the American Government, had 54,000 acres of their homeland submerged because of the erection of the Kaptai Dam.

It was a purposeful flooding to force the indigenous group to comply with England’s colonial exit in 1947 where the British hacked into the Indian Subcontinent with the creation of arbitrary borders which divided the region by Hindus and Muslims in an act called Partition. Hindus were forced into India and Muslims were forced into Pakistan—a new nation created by Partition—and it was the largest and fastest migration of people in human history with nearly 15 million people forced to leave their homelands and left about 2 million dead in the process.

The geographically sovereign Chakma people, who are Buddhist and possess their own language, distinct culture and ethnicity, resisted Partition and refused to become part of Pakistan as the British had deemed. In response, the dam was built and submerged the region, made refugees of the Chakma families living there, buried their land underwater including the Chakma Palace (which was home to the Chakma Raj, or king) and erased the homes, history and cultural footprint of this indigenous group forcing them to comply with Partition and leading them into an era of oppression.

But Roaja’s work was much more delicate in its conversation around the history of his people. Indeed, the work didn’t speak directly of Chakma oppression at all. Rather, it beautifully shared the history of the flooding and depicted the the Palace being raised out of the water–which the Chakma call the Lake of Tears–in a symbolic, if not hopeful, rising again of its people.

The relevance, space, and voice given to this minority and historically-marginalized group in a massive, experiential installation as the first thing one witnessed when entering the Dhaka Art Summit would have made it impossible for Bangladeshis in attendance to have missed the gravitas of its message while also setting the tone of the entire summit.

It is an immense achievement for the Dhaka Art Summit to present sophisticated and socially-charged works within a nation still emerging into its own. Bangladesh is a country which is rebuilding after British colonialism, still healing from the sharp slice of Partition, and memories of its genocidal war of independence from Pakistan (the country the British forced them to become part as part of 1947’s Partition) are only starting to fade. All of these events didn’t happen over centuries, they took place during a period of less than 25 years. Which is all to say there are sensitivities to consider when curating an event such as this.

“During the ten years of working in Bangladesh, I’ve learned there are certain things you can say and certain things you can’t say, and then it even depends on how you say it,” the Curator explains. “So much of the show was radical, but you had to look for it. You had to spend time with the work, and at the same time we had to be careful because we don’t want to have things shut down in the future.”

Roaja’s piece is one example. Another example is Rotational Rider: Where Do the Ants Go? An immersive digital installation created by Afrah Shafiq with Jeremy Waterfield, the piece was inspired by the video game Minecraft and under its layers lie messages about the Bangladeshi experience.

Set inside a towering sculpture of a pixelated anthill, viewers enter the sculpture and become players in the game where they are asked to make choices for the ants, affecting the trajectory of the colony. The Queen Ant gives verbal responses in Bangla to the players’ inputted computations, responses which are phrases acquired from everyday Bangladeshi people during a data collection exercise by the creators.

“This was a piece which was disguised under the trope of fun and kids,” describes Campbell. “Although when you listened to what the ants were saying, their words were recordings of the words of everyday Bangladeshi youth and you hear them say things which express fear in Bangla, like, ‘they’re scared that their mom will disappear.’”

Similarly, Rasal Rana’s works are an exploration of life as a queer male in Bangladesh, a theme which Rana keeps well-coded within his work.

“I paint in a secret, which means I use symbolism in my paintings and there are so many mysteries so that everybody cannot understand the concept easily. That protects my life from being threatened from my neighbors and relatives, and that’s how I can continue my art practice,” says the artist in an interview.

“My family did not support my art practice, ever. They love me but they do not support the LGBTQIA. My family is also a middle class Bengali Muslim family, so they do not have interest about art and culture and they do not understand about my queer life. If my family relatives or neighbors get to know about my activism it could make my art practice more difficult and I might have to leave my home or family.”

The presentation of themes such as those which appear in Roaja’s and Rana’s work invite viewers, particularly Bangladeshis, to consider the world around them from a different point of view, and it has resulted in the Dhaka Art Summit being able to claim measurable change, both qualitative and quantitative, from their democratized approach.

“In the beginning, we struggled to have a single female applicant or artist, and when we did have a female artist, she stopped because she got married,” Campbell explains. “That’s no longer the case. We see more women, we see artist’s being able to support themselves with their art. Many artists have studios instead of working out of home and there are more institutions now than when we first started.”

“And there’s a very collective energy,” Campbell continues. “Which is very different than India where artists tend to work individually, in individual studios. In Bangladesh many artists have both individual and collective practices that support and reinforce each other. In Dhaka, there’s a lot of support for one another.”

The Dhaka Art Summit has also brought varying levels of economic impact to the country from the micro lens of an artist being able to earn a living from their work, to the macro perspective of the creation of a market for contemporary Bangladeshi art which was nonexistent prior to the existence of the Summit.

The Summit’s exhibitions have been on display all over the globe and works from past summits have been acquired by Centre Pompidou, the Tate, the Guggenheim and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Currently, Roaja’s Submerged dream 8 is on view at Art Basel Hong Kong where it resides in a solo booth. Having appeared in every Dhaka Art Summit since its inception, he’s become a known entity in his own right which has turned him into a flag-bearer of sorts for contemporary Bangladeshi art. The success of such artists simultaneously grows the market for contemporary Bangladeshi art while also being a voice for the plight of indigenous people worldwide.

If the Dhaka Art Summit is the experiment for the democratization of art, what has been proven so far with its mission is that art—when available to all—has the potential to shift all levels of society from social to economic and can change lives, perspectives, and cultural molds. Isn’t this, after all, the essence of an artist’s vision—to create work to inspire and influence the conversations of the day?

“Yes. This is certainly my vision, and very much the vision of my peers in Bangladesh,” answers Rana to this question.

“Having open access to art and helping an artist to become well-known, as the Dhaka Art Summit does, makes it much easier to deliver messages to many people in much less time,” he continues.

“I’m honored to be a part of the Summit and if it helps me to reach more people, then it can help me to spread my message of activism to the society, and this is the most important thing for both my life and my work.” Impact, indeed.