Sharing the Future

The Dhaka Art Summit revisits colonial pasts and devises collective strategies for the present, points out Abhijan Toto.

- Abhijan Toto

As I write this, my phone is filled with updates of the violence in Delhi, where mobs tore through neighbourhoods, killing, burning and maiming indiscriminately late in February. I’m just back from a rally at Mendiola in Manila on the anniversary of the People Power Revolution which had toppled the dictatorship of the Marcoses, where talk of the current President Duterte’s own descent into dictatorial moves is the subject of discussion. In my home city of Bangkok, students are beginning to take to the streets to protest the disbanding of the main opposition party.

By all accounts, our worlds are burning – how we face and continue to work in this burning world appeared to be one of the central questions that the 2020 Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) was moved by.

Titled Seismic Movements (rather poetically translated as Shancharon in Bangla), the fifth edition of the Summit from the 7th to the 15th of February, was helmed once again by Diana Campbell Betancourt, who serves as the Artistic Director of the Samdani Art Foundation. Unlike previous editions, which dove into tackling the political issues of the day head-on, this year the focus seemed more heavily on creating a space for historical introspections and unpackings of nationalisms, both regionally and globally. In doing so, it presented an interesting answer to the question of what different exhibition formats can continue to offer in our trying times.

Unlike many other biennales, which attempt to enfold entire cities, the Summit packs its entire exhibition and program into the Bangladesh Silpakala Academy, thus producing unexpected collisions, juxtapositions and points of meeting between disparate sections.