So, another edition of the Dhaka Art Summit comes to a close, and we are once again overwhelmed by the visual treasures that were on display over the three days. I can’t begin to explain, on behalf of everybody, how grateful we are for the efforts of Diana Campbell’s team, led by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, which successfully carried out this massive operation with such precision, and all for no reason other than to give us a feeling of the trends which permeate today’s international art scene.
Just as our cricket Test team can never improve unless it continues to play Test cricket with the leading teams, our artists also need to be in constant, challenging interplay with all the modern currents in the realm of arts plastiques, as the French put it, so as to learn from, and in turn enrich, global artistic output.
And it seems this cross-fertilisation process is already at work. As I was told by Deepak Ananth (who curated with great sensitivity the Exhibition of Emerging Bangladeshi and Contemporary Art), there is a difference of “night and day” in the works of Bangladeshi artists since the first edition of the Art Summit two years ago. However the object of an art extravaganza is to engage with the works on show, and it is in this spirit that I would like to set out some of my personal likes and dislikes.
The most striking thing about the show was the vastly increased number of artworks which went beyond the boundaries of the classic canvas-in-a-frame. It seems that artists of the whole South Asian region have taken on, with a will, the possibilities granted to them to let their imaginations roam out of the box.
From video or dynamic performance, to sculptured objects or multi-modal assaults, we were spared of nothing. The trouble though, is that this level of unlimited degrees of freedom comes with an in-built trade-off, namely that any mediocrity in the artist’s imagination is all the more severely punished.
Thus, blurred photographs of people walking in the streets of a city is a theme (amazingly, encountered on no less than four separate occasions in the show) which represents so weak an artistic conception that these photographs get summarily brushed off the eyes of the onlooker.
As a counter-example, let us take almost the very first piece on Level 1, by Mithu Sen. It is an unusual book, almost five times thicker in terms of pages than normal, with a sensuous red cover, and golden edges which shine under dramatic lighting. Then one looks at the title of the piece: “Poems Declined.” The gentle humour shines like the golden edges. I like this kind of unity of the thought and its execution.
A still greater unification of thought and execution was the work which Tayeba Begum Lipi showed at the 2012 Dhaka Art Summit, the bed made of gleaming stainless steel blades with the chilling title “Love Bed,” which subsequently made its way to international fame. I hope it is not too harsh of me to point out that her offerings at this Summit, using the very same stainless steel blades but this time to make objects such as a paan-daan and a glamorous handbag, veered off a bit into gimmickry and did not do justice to her talent.
There were other successful installation pieces in which all the elements worked together. The giant grenade adorned with white roses presented by Promotesh Das Pulak. The large hanging banner with writing in black, which writing turns out on second look to be made up of our good old Bangladeshi crows. The baskets of Rana Begum, best viewed with sunlight streaming through the crevices, which together form a really cosy warm space within, exactly as intended by the artist.
Then there was of course the work of Shazia Sikander. I, along with a roomful of people, sat entranced through the showing of this vast multi-screen projection. The complexity and beauty of the forms, the naturalness with which the spectacle unfolds despite its elements being clearly arbitrary, the odd juxtapositions which somehow make sense, all these combined to make this a major work.
Another startling video work was “Birth of Brainfly” by Nandita Kumar in which the soundtrack played an even more important role. There is always a danger in such works of crossing that exquisite line which separates design from art, but I think that in both these cases that line was finally not crossed and we remained in the domain of art.
I was among the probably 99% of people whose first thought was that Rashid Rana’s large empty room was pretentious nonsense, and the verbiage about the work in the catalogue only reinforced such an impression. Rashid Rana’s empty room resembles nothing so much as a dull corporate office of some kind. Could this mean then that the artist’s work is like a lament for the way in which the modern world has managed to desacralise everything, even that which is most not deserving of such desacralisation? As far as I am concerned, this is the story, or at least a story, of Rashid Rana’s “Large Empty Room” whether the artist intended it exactly that way or not, and that is its real merit, that it permits alternative answers.
Finally, I would like to pay tribute to the works of the upcoming younger generation of Bangladeshi artists: Ayesha Sultana, Naeem Mohaiemen, Biswajit Goswami, Ronni Ahmed, Shumon Ahmed, and a number of others. They seem to have truly embraced the wide-open experimental spirit which is the defining feature of 21st century art, and their early works to date give real promise that they could become founts of world originality in time.
Just one word of caution to them not to be totally swept away by the winds emanating from the metropolitan regions of the world, some of which, like notions of minimalist pointlessness, may need to be resisted with ideas nurtured in our own Bangladeshi environment, ideas which, I am convinced, retain at base a nurturing and sustaining force.
Above all, may they remember that an artist is judged on the depth of his or her work, and the irresistible energy emanating from it.
Sal Imam has an art gallery at Radius Centre, which is currently housing an exceptional exhibition based around works originally presented at the Dhaka Art Summit by Saidul Hague Juise, Uttam Kumar Roy and Biswajit Goswami.