Dhaka Art Summit 2018 Explores Decolonization and Regional Histories Through Exhibitions and Performances

The 2018 Dhaka Art Summit, held at the Shilpakala Academy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, featured a hybrid program of exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and conferences focusing on South and Southeast Asian contemporary art. Curated by Diana Campbell Betancourt, the event included a documentary exhibition by Vali Mahlouji's Archaeology of the Final Decade, reviving the banned archives of Iran's Festival of Arts, Shiraz–Persepolis from 1967 to 1977. Reetu Sattar's installation Harano Sur (Lost Tune) (2016) filled the atrium with harmoniums, referencing lost Bangladeshi sounds and set to travel to the Liverpool Biennial. Exhibitions like The Asian Art Biennale in Context showcased abstract works from the biennale founded in 1981 by Syed Jahangir, while the Otolith Group's performance lecture invoked Rabindranath Tagore's Santiniketan academy. Themes of migration and repression were addressed in Jakkai Siributr's The Outlaw's Flag (2017), using debris from Rohingya migration points, and in Sharmini Pereira's One Hundred Thousand Small Tales on Sri Lanka's civil war. Cosmin Costinas's A Beast, A God, A Line traced colonial histories in the Asia Pacific. Founded by Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani, the summit ran for nine days, attracting international art professionals and highlighting decolonized internationalism.