Dhaka Art Summit 2023: Bonna, February 3 – 11, 2023

Children of the puppet theatre group of the Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts. Produced by the Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts. Commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation and Kiran Nadar Museum for Dhaka Art Summit 2023 and World Weather Network. Photograph: Giidree Bawlee

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. Founded in 2012 by the Samdani Art Foundation—which continues to produce the festival—in collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, People’s Republic of Bangladesh, DAS is hosted every two years at the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Following the fifth edition subtitled Seismic Movements which welcomed nearly 500,000 visitors in nine days in February 2020, its sixth edition is the first edition with a Bangla subtitle; Bonna. 

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. 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. How do you tell the story of a crisis, while facilitating hope?

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.” Rather, the DAS concept of Bonna challenges binaries—between necessity and excess, 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 environmental 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, and what the relationship between gender, the built environment, and climate change might be. 

DAS 2023 proposes 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 intelligences have to say, as opposed to the clock or the calendar. DAS 2023 is about the power of water and the double paradox of how floods and their impact may be (mis)understood. Bonna also concerns 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 for those now experiencing similar climatic challenges around the world. 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. 

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. 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 in partnership with Delfina Foundation and 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. 

Very Small Feelings is co-produced by Samdani Art Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.  More than an exhibition, this institutional exchange experiments with modalities of transgenerational artistic engagement and will travel to KNMA in July 2023 as part of the institution’s Young Artists of our Times initiative.  It is for the first time that two major contemporary art institutions from South Asia are collaborating on this scale and committing to develop this exhibition into a platform to highlight the works of younger artists' voices, under-represented art historical narratives from both Bangladesh and India, and create dialogues with works of select international artists and voices. Such extensive facilitation and exchange between contemporary artists through exhibition-making, book-making, co-commissioning and loaning of artworks between Bangladesh and India is unprecedented, with an intent to continue and multiply this exchange beyond 2023. Very Small Feelings, as well as the wider Summit, seeks to encounter our “inner child” and bind us strongly to it as we learn how to walk in a new world that emerged after DAS 2020. The Gidree Bawlee Foundation for the Arts wrote this play and produced this video for DAS 2023 as part of its collaboration with KNMA and the World Weather Network, both an artwork in itself, but also a trailer to introduce Bonna to audiences connected to the internet all over the world.