DAS 2023 considers the ways in which we inherit and form vocabularies to understand the world around us, and the mistranslation that can ensue when we try to apply these vocabularies to unfamiliar contexts; the same word can migrate from positive to negative connotations and back depending on how and where it travels. Weather and water as shapers of history and culture as well as being metaphors for life in general are viewed in an embodied way through the lens of those who live in Bangladesh, next to the sea and rivers, underneath the storm systems, feeling the wind and rain. This is further explored through a consideration of how Bengali children encounter these phenomena, palpably but also via the stories passed down through generations. The aim is to see past the limits of translation which can be incapable of conveying the different ways we negotiate the world, and open up new channels for transcultural empathy. How do you tell the story of a crisis, while facilitating hope?
The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international, non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related 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.
Exhibitions & Programmes
বন্যা (Bonna)
DAS 2023
Curated by Diana Campbell
Samdani Art Award Exhibition
DAS 2023
Curated by Anne Barlow
Very Small Feelings
DAS 2023
Co-curated by Diana Campbell and Akansha Rastogi with Ruxmini Choudhury
To Enter The Sky
DAS 2023
Curated by Sean Anderson
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দ্বৈধ (A Duality)
DAS 2023
Curated by Bishwajit Goswami with research support from Muhammad Nafisur Rahman, in collaboration with Brihatta Art Foundation
Art Mediation Programme
DAS 2023
Dhaka Art Summit
Purposeful Goods
DAS 2023
Curated by Teresa Albor
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Talks Programme
DAS 2023
Dhaka Art Summit 2023
Bonna is the fifth chapter under the Artistic Direction of Chief Curator Diana Campbell and is complemented by a series of intersecting exhibitions including the Samdani Art Award curated by Anne Barlow (Director, Tate St. Ives), To Enter the Sky curated by Sean Anderson (Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture), দ্বৈধ(a duality) curated by Bishwajit Goswami (Assistant Professor, Department of Drawing and Painting, University of Dhaka) with research support from Muhammad Nafisur Rahman (Assistant Professor of Communication Design at the School of Design, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati) in collaboration with Brihatta Art Foundation, and Very Small Feelings, co-curated by Campbell and Akansha Rastogi (Senior Curator, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art) with Ruxmini Choudhury (Assistant Curator Samdani Art Foundation), and a transnational folklore research team with contributions from Kanak Chanpa Chakma and other indigenous thought leaders connecting traditions across Bangladesh and Northeast India.
DAS is a continually unfolding story imagined by hundreds of contributors, and this edition will include over 120 artists, architects, and writers, over 60% Bangladeshi, and over 50% producing new work for the show.
Rather, the DAS concept of Bonna challenges binaries - between necessity and excess, between regeneration and disaster, between adult and child, between male and female. DAS 2023 invokes and interprets Bonna as a complex symbol system, which is Indigenous, personal, and at once universal, an embodied non-human reversal of how storms, cyclones, tsunamis, stars, and all environment crises, and discoveries are named, allowing Bonna, the young girl, to speak from Bangladesh to the world; she asks why the words for weather are gendered, what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be.
During Bengali New Year, Bangladeshi people sing a song written by Rabindranath Tagore, Esho he Boishakh, which calls upon the first month of summer to bring storms to wash away any residue of ugliness from the previous year: “'Bring forth and sound your conch of storm, Let the foggy mesh of ugly illusion be gone.” Ebb and flow, drought and abundance are phenomena that have shaped the culture and history of Bangladesh (and South Asia) just as a river cuts an ever-changing path as it seeks lower ground. When considering this, and the traditional ways of coping and celebrating polar forces, we must acknowledge that climate change is accelerating and causing even more dramatic events, often beyond the capacity of even the most resilient people’s ability to survive. During the planning stages of DAS 2023, the north-western part of the country was overwhelmed with severe flooding and we are releasing the thematics of Dhaka Art Summit at a time when devastating floods and the many lives lost and made precarious in South Asia demand our urgent attention. This is a sobering instruction to consider the implications during DAS 2023 for a country that has always managed to co-exist with extremes.
The word for flood, ‘Bonna,’ is also given as a common name for girls in Bangladesh. A flood in Bangladesh does not simply translate into the dominant idea of the word flood carrying a singular connotation of “disaster.”
Storms have eyes and eyes have storms. We can be flooded with emotions, yet reduced to singular drops of tears. We give storms human names; we describe human emotions using terms that are also applied to weather. A tropical cyclone in the Bay of Bengal was captured in the iconic “Blue Marble'' image of the Earth in 1972, the first full image of the Earth taken from space and one of the most circulated images of all time. The Bangladeshi artist and climate justice activist Nabil Ahmed points out that the cyclone in this image derives “from the same tropical storm system that produced Bhola, which devastated the coast of East Pakistan in November 1970. In its aftermath followed a genocide and war of national liberation for present-day Bangladesh. After Bhola, looking at a cyclone will never be the same; the potential for political violence and an ever-circling wind are united as one.” Extreme weather and the absence of state management was the tipping point for Bangladeshis to declare independence in 1971 and fight for the right to express themselves in their own language. As the Ghanaian-Scottish designer, thinker, and educator Lesley Lokko insightfully points out, “When you are in the eye of the storm, this is often the right point to push for maximum change.”
DAS 2023 aimed to listen to the lands and waters of Bangladesh and its people to tell stories and imagine futures where people regard what the planet and non-human bits of intelligence have to say, as opposed to the clock or the calendar. DAS 2023 was about the power of water and the double paradox of how floods and their impact may be (mis)understood. Bonna is also concerned with the power of translation– how do Bangladeshi understandings of life challenge those who might have only understood the flood and its manifestations as a mistranslation and those now experiencing similar climatic challenges? By extension, the Bangladeshi artist and researcher Shawon Akand expands upon mud as a metaphor for the adaptive power of Bengalis; mud can be hard as stone when baked under the summer sun, a fertile bed for crops during the harvest season, and liquid during the monsoon, all without losing its essence.