5^thDhaka Art Summit

The biennial Dhaka Art Summit, which opened its doors for the fifth time at Dhaka’s Shilpakala Academy on February 7, 2020, inscribes itself in a list of comparatively recently launched art events around the globe.

In the four floors of the Dhaka Art Summit’s exhibition, in fact, one came less across big names than fresh and often compelling content.

The Summit, a declaredly non-commercial event, honored its curatorial project of bringing together works that act as seismographs of current transformations and re-alignments. As envisaged by its organisers, it created a platform for often under-represented artwork from the non-Euro American world, and made contemporary art in all its facets—from painting and sculpture to installation, from video to conceptual art, from performance to ethnography—accessible for Bangladeshis of ideally all social strata (entrance was free of costs).

The over-proportionate section dedicated to Sheikh Mujibur, the Father of the Nation, funded and curated by the government of Bangladesh itself, as well as an inexplicable appearance of the army during a discussion with Bangladeshi Adivasi, add to the suspicion that neither the curatorial team nor the artists were fully free in the commissioning and producing of new artworks.