ARTICLE
Dhaka Art Summit
A multi-day event held biennially in Dhaka, Bangladesh, the Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is a non-profit festival focused on South Asian art and architecture. DAS was founded in 2012 by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani of the Samdani Art Foundation, and is hosted at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, in partnership with the Bangladesh Ministry of Cultural Affairs. In recent years, the summit has also expanded its scope to Southeast Asia and the broader Global South, while still retaining its core focus on Bangladesh.
The festival is curated by a team led by Diana Campbell Betancourt, artistic director of the Samdani Foundation since 2013. Since 2020, DAS programming has been centred around a theme for each edition. The schedule usually involves exhibitions, tours for students, educational sessions and workshops, talks, symposiums, screenings, and book launches. The curators commission new, often site-specific work from artists whose work speaks to South Asian concerns; past exhibitions have also included works on loan from prominent international institutions such as the Centre Pompidou and the Asia Art Archive. Every year, select Bangladeshi artists showing their work at the summit are nominated for the Samdani Art Award; the winner participates in a residency at the Delfina Foundation in London.
Admission to DAS is free, and the summit has been noted for its lack of exclusivity or special VIP provisions. DAS programming also deviates somewhat from a typical biennial format in focusing on research and criticism alongside creative work.
DAS is a major platform for both emerging and established Bangladeshi artists; work commissioned for the event is often subsequently acquired by other international institutions such as the Sharjah Biennial, the Tate, the Kunsthalle Zurich, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibitions developed at DAS have also travelled to other venues.
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