Moment of truth

The Samdani-led Dhaka Art Summit poses questions about artists, collectors and the market for art in Bangladesh

Rajeeb Samdani is enjoying his celebritydom. “You see,” he says of the hype that followed when he snapped his fingers and wrote a cheque for an undisclosed amount for a digital collage by Rashid Rana that had been grabbing eyeballs at New Delhi’s India Art Fair earlier this year, “Kiran Nadar spending $2 million is no longer news — that is expected — but Rajdeep Samdani spending that money on buying art makes it news.”

For a first-generation Bangladeshi entrepreneur who has carved himself a sizeable empire in commodities and agro-industries broking, info-tech and logistics, and as director in City Bank (in which American Express has an interest), it is his art collecting that has launched him and his wife, Nadia Samdani, in the cult space. In Dhaka, their new home into which they still have to move, but which was the venue for the opening party for the first-ever Dhaka Art Summit, was the cynosure of everyone’s attention. It’s been designed in a manner that draws notice to the art that the Samdanis have been collecting somewhat eclectically for a few years, but which they hung especially with all the guile of a collecting eye to represent their Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani interests.

Like London-based collector and promoter Charles Saatchi, and to an extent Anupam Poddar or Kiran Nadar in India, the Samdanis now find themselves at a curious crossroads when it comes to buying art in Bangladesh. “The moment word gets out that Rajeeb and Nadia have bought a work by some artist…” Samdani shrugs, leaving you to draw a conclusion about what it does to an artist’s collectability and price. That may be one reason the Samdanis are increasingly seen bidding at auctions in New York and London, where they enjoy being wooed by Christie’s and Sotheby’s. There is, of course, the excitement of belonging to a select group of global citizens who bid at auctions, and who make news back home with their bids. It’s a powerful aphrodisiac.

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In Dhaka, the opening of the art summit — a Samdani event, despite the presence of friends such as diplomat Farooq Sobhan, collector Enayetollah Khan, and even finance minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith — was pure testosterone, a jingoistic celebration that marked the arrival of the city on the global art map. That the infrastructure was basic, the curation uneven, the representation inadequate, and the facilities non-existent, appeared not to matter so much. Speeches were made, international visitors commented on the lack of a vernissage (or the hope, even, of a decent cup of coffee) as they walked across grounds strewn with rubble and bricks to a venue where building material was as evident as the art, to installations such as Farah Naz Moon’s on which the morning downpour had taken its toll, and used filthy loos, but neither the lack of appropriate signage nor the on-off electricity could dampen the sense of enthusiasm. Unlike in India, there was no attempt to pass the buck, just one nervous question: Did the art live up to one’s expectations?

The format of the summit made that difficult to answer. For a start, it had concentrated only on young, emerging and contemporary artists who were being offered a platform to show their work; the visitors, though, were keener to view the masters and other, more celebrated Bangladeshi artists. Then, only Bangladeshi artists were allowed to participate, restricting the international participation to the stature of observers. Finally, artists brought and hung their own submissions, the curatorial lack turning it into a visual mela of images. The small space allowed to the participating galleries reinforced the visual cliché. It was a jalfrezi of art without any focus.

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Artist Shahabuddin Ahmed was the star of the summit, followed everywhere by a retinue, his presence leading to delighted bystanders whipping out their mobile phones to take his pictures. Wild-haired, and wearing the same orange shirt for the duration of the summit, Shahabuddin stole the limelight with his presence. The Paris-based artist, who is proud of his “freedom fighter” tag, is to Bangladesh what M F Husain was to India, minus the controversy. “L’ magnifique,” he said every time we met, blowing kisses and sharing hugs generously. He was on the cover of the lifestyle magazine MW, on the podium at the opening, and being asked constantly if he had works for sale.

Shahabuddin has a sizeable following in India too, but relations had recently soured when he approached the Bangladeshi foreign office to file a police report in India regarding the theft of his paintings from a Kolkata gallery. The paintings, allegedly stolen by an employee of the Kolkata gallery, had been traced to a New Delhi gallery which had acquired them on good faith. Two of the paintings had been sold by the New Delhi gallery, the rest had been seized by the police, but now the gallery owners were in an unsavoury squabble over payments, commissions, even the return of the sold paintings.

“How did you know about it?” Shahabuddin laughed, enjoying his notoriety. But beyond saying “It isn’t resolved still”, he refused to shed any more light on the unseemliness. Did he feel wronged? “Will you have a glass of wine?” he changed the subject on the first evening. On the second, he said, “Let us not talk about it, let me get you a beer instead.”

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We met a number of artists other than Shahabuddin. Some, like Kalidas Karmakar, were at least as senior and equally respected. Others were younger. At Britto Space, a gallery newly opened in the middle of a busy market, a number of them had gathered to showcase their cutting-edge artworks, led by the curator and rising avant-garde artist Mahbubur Rahman, whose own offering was an eerie video installation. At the summit, the following day, he would do something more radical as part of his performance art — cut off his long hair. “I was so moved when I thought of my parents,” he said later of his obviously orchestrated performance, “that I couldn’t stop from cutting my hair.”

Mahbubur’s wife Tayeba Begum Lipi is at another forefront in installation art. At Britto and at the Samdani house, her bras fashioned from moulded steel blades address issues of gender and identity. At the summit, she unloaded, just in time for the opening, a bed fashioned from similar, moulded steel blades, with real blades used to fashion its springs. Blades and pins are to be found in her works as often as bindis in Bharti Kher’s.

Installations and conceptual art seem to be the current trend in Dhaka. Nazia Andaleen Preema had a short video of herself dancing; at Britto, which is an artists’ collective, several works dealt with video installations, including one by Kabir Ahmed Masum Chisty that consisted of an animated storyboard. Visitors couldn’t stop snapping pictures of Alfa Man that used a cow’s head, and which had been entered by Zahid Hossain for the Samdani young artist’s award. Unfortunately, few visitors visited the section where what seemed like large chicken coops were backed with a background score of chirruping birds (hens?), perhaps ignoring it for something they thought as natural to the summit space.

Photography seems to be enjoying its moment too, though it appeared largely derivative — capturing the dilemmas of identity (the gay gaze), development (the choking of the Buri Ganga around Dhaka), and class (housewives and housemaids in an interesting parallel). “There is a lot of interest in photography,” confirmed Mahmudul Haque, who is a professor in the fine art faculty at the University of Dhaka, evident in the manner visitors lingered over them longer than they did over conventional paintings.

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Another highlight was a show of the masters at the Bangladesh National Museum. Poorly framed, badly hung, nonetheless it created almost as much excitement as the summit itself. Here were the artists of Bangladesh and undivided India that were familiar from, mostly posters and books — and a tour immediately after through the gallery of modern art, and chiefly the works of Zainul Abedin, reiterated the claim that Bangladesh has much to offer art-lovers. A number of parallel events dispersed visitors through the city’s traffic-choked points to venues where events had been planned — openings, launches, shows — to receptions at city hotels and dinners at the homes of the collectorati. It wasn’t so much Dhaka’s inadequacy as much as its warmth that was on display. Unfortunately, it was not sufficient to keep back the questions the key players were interested in: What next? Is it worth it? Is there money?

Discussions assumed an urgency about the size of Dhaka’s art market, which is minuscule, and its potential, which can only be exponential. When Amin Jafer promised, at a Christie’s reception, to promote more Bangladeshi artists in its South Asian auctions, it highlighted the current conundrum: is Bangladesh looking at an overseas market for its artists? Or wanting a platform of its own within the country? Or hoping to provide an opportunity for international (chiefly Indian and Pakistani) artists to show — and sell — in Bangladesh?

In the next edition of the summit in January 2014, the Samdani purse-strings and the development of infrastructure will hold the key to some of those questions. But for now, with the Samdanis rejoicing in pulling off the summit, despite odds, in four months, and the art fraternity hoping it will pave the way to growing integration with the global art economy, it is Bangladesh’s artists who’re basking in the glory of creation. Having made the world’s largest alpana on its poorly-lit roads in the dead of the night leading up to the Bengali new year, they’re hoping for better times to come.