Samdani Art Foundation Announces Bangladesh’s First Major Contemporary Art Center

Plans for a new permanent contemporary art institution in Bangladesh were announced by the Samdani Art Foundation (SAF) in Venice on Thursday, May 11. The announcement was made at a dinner hosted by the founders of SAF, Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, at the Belmond Hotel Cipriani.

The Srihatta-Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park will be located in the rural tea-growing district of Sylhet in northeastern Bangladesh, with the first phrase scheduled to open in late 2018. “Srihatta” is the ancient Indo-Aryan name for the location of the art space, Sylhet, which is also the Samdani couple’s hometown. Also, as SAF director of operations Emily Dolan put it in an email interview with ArtAsiaPacific, “Dhaka and bigger cities are too dense to allow for a 100 acre property with views unobstructed by urbanization.” Visitors will be able to enter the art center and sculpture park for free, in the hope to “make art widely accessible to diverse audiences.” The first completed gallery space will present new media works from the SAF’s collection, with an emphasis on sound art. Moving beyond that, Dolan said the first wave of shows will “look at the last ten years of new media art in Bangladesh, contextualized with new media international collection highlights from the Samdani collection that were acquired specifically for Srihatta.” Artists with commissions to be completed by Srihatta’s late-2018 opening include Rana Begum, Raqs Media Collective, LN Tallur, Mithu Sen, Ayesha Sultana and Rupam Roy.

In a public statement, Nadia Samdani said, “We hope that with this unique endeavor, the people of South Asia as well as international visitors will find a haven amongst the remarkable works of art and profound landscape.”

The Srihatta-Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park will dedicate over 900 square meters toward artist residency activities and another 900 square meters toward public squares. Additionally, it will host a gallery with a footprint of over 460 square meters, designed by award-winning Bangladeshi architect Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury.

SAF was founded in 2011, and hosts various initiatives in order to “expand the audiences engaging with contemporary art across Bangladesh and increase international exposure for the country’s artists and architects.” These initiatives include the biannual Dhaka Art Summit, Samdani Seminars and Samdani Artist-Led Initiatives Forum.

“This is the Foundation’s first truly international endeavor, tying together the Samdani collection, the educational aspects of the Samdani Seminars and Curatorial Research Fellowships, and the production and commissioning activities of the Foundation to create a dynamic and independent complex for art.” said Diana Campbell Betancourt, the foundation’s artistic director.

Crystal Wu is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.

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