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Diana Campbell
Betancourt
Diana Campbell Betancourt is the artistic director
of the Samdani Art Foundation in Dhaka and the
chief curator of the Dhaka Art Summit for its 2014
and 2016 editions, and is based in Mumbai. She
caught up with Tank at Frieze London to discuss
the 2016 Summit.
Interview: Thomas Roueché
Portrait: Shumon Ahmed
Thomas Roueché How long
have you been working in
Bangladesh?
Diana Campbell Betancourt
I have been coming to
Bangladesh for three years, and I
have lived in India for five going
on six. I went to Princeton and
did the LA-New York thing from
the time I was 13, as part of my
intense classical ballet training.
I moved to India in 2010 because
my boyfriend in college, later my
fiancé, was Indian. It had absolutely nothing to do with art! I
was curating independently in
New York and thought I could go
to India and do the same thing.
I arrived there and realised, this
is not going to work. I didn’t
move to Delhi or Bombay; I
moved to Hyderabad, which
is in south-central India. It’s
extremely conservative and there
is zero contemporary-art scene
there. But through my ex-fiancé’s
family I met a man who was very
passionate about sculpture parks,
and he wanted to start his own
sculpture park in Hyderabad. He
funded me to travel all over India
and do studio visits with 250 or
so sculptors across the country,
and also to visit sculpture parks
all over the world to figure out
what sort of model we should be
using. My ex-fiancé and I broke
up, but I decided the art I was
seeing in India was so interesting, there was something
worth staying in the country for.
As there are no sculpture
parks in India I came up with
the idea that we should be
commissioning Indian artists
in international parks to give
them exposure and experience
working outdoors. In the process,
I worked with the Yorkshire
Sculpture Park, Wanås Konst [in
Sweden] and a lot of international
parks to create new opportunities
for Indian sculptors. One of the
artists I was exchanging a lot
of ideas with was Jitish Kallat,
a very famous Indian artist
who also curated the last Kochi
Muziris Biennale. The Samdani
family of Bangladesh had just
acquired some work of his and
when they came to Bombay,
he organised a dinner for us
to meet. It was a great match,
because soon after they invited
me to get involved with the
Dhaka Art Summit. It was
strange because at the time
Bangladesh was having intense
protests; Nadia and Rajeeb
Samdani kept inviting me to
come to Dhaka, but the trip
kept getting cancelled because
of the strikes.
Ahead of their very generous
invitation, I had never thought
about going to Bangladesh; I
knew nothing about Bangladeshi
art, but I was really surprised and
impressed with what I saw there,
which rivals the art scene in
India. Bangladesh is right next
to India, but the context is
completely different. They
have far fewer resources, but in
a way they are able to do things
in Bangladesh that would be
impossible in India. I think
maybe because the country is
very new – it was founded in 1971
– the government is very excited
about building things. Working
in Bangladesh I’m able to take
loans from the Pakistani government; I’m able to take loans
from the Bangladesh National
Museum; I’m able to take loans
from the Bangladesh national
collection; and then put together
exhibitions of works that haven’t
been seen in the public for over
30 years. So for a while I was
developing this park in
Hyderabad and also working
for the Samdanis, but it got to
a point where the amount of
work for the Samdanis was
so large and so exciting that
I shifted all attention to
Bangladesh. I took over the fulltime role of artistic director of
the entire Summit and Samdani
Art Foundation and collection
in October 2013.
TR So tell me about the Dhaka
Art Summit.
DCB Rajeeb and Nadia Samdani
started the Summit from a place
of passion. They’re very young;
she’s 33, he’s 41, and I’m 31, so
we’re all roughly the same generation with similar energy levels,
and it’s a great team.
The Samdanis decided to
start their foundation because
when they would travel, people
in the arts would talk about
South Asia – it’s become a
buzzword – but South Asia
seemed to mean India and
Pakistan. People know about art
from India, and maybe Pakistan,
but much less Bangladesh, and
what about Myanmar, what about
Nepal, what about Bhutan, what
about Sri Lanka? These places
don’t have a platform on the
international art scene. So the
Samdanis decided to create
something that would inspire
people to go to Bangladesh
and do their own research to
change the narrative of discussions about the region.
Nadia and Rajeeb planned
the first Summit on their own –
there were galleries, there were
commissioned projects, but it was
a home-grown affair, nothing
international; it was really only
focused on Bangladesh with a few
illustrious guests such as Jessica
Morgan, Ravinder Reddy and
Deepak Ananth, among others.
After the success of the first
summit, the Samdanis wanted
to increase the Summit’s ambition, so that’s when they offered
me an invitation to commission
and produce the 2014 Solo
Projects, which led to an invitation to take on the role of artistic
director and head of the foundation’s collection.
When I came on board, we
began changing the model of the
summit to divorce it from the
misconception that it is an art
fair. There were some misconceptions because the India Art
Fair used to be called the India
Art Summit. Our event is
entirely noncommercial.
Everything is free; we don’t earn
a cent of income from sales of
artworks; no one even needs a
ticket. There is another foundation in Bangladesh that is a
commercial entity with gallery
spaces – we wanted to have our
own model that allows us to
exhibit artworks without any
constraints that looking at the
art market might bring. Local
people in Bangladesh have really
warmed to what we are doing.
We had 70,000 local visitors in
the 2014 edition and we expect
130,000 next time. Adam
Szymczyk, who’s curating the
next Documenta, came last time,
loved it and gave a Bangladeshi
artist a solo show at the
Kunsthalle Basel, which we
helped to support, and he’s
coming back for the 2016 Dhaka
Art Summit as well, along with
several members of his curatorial
team. My challenge is to be able
to equally address the leading
intellectuals and institutional
directors in the art world as well
as people who have never experienced contemporary art before,
such as the local tea sellers,
because they both have absolutely equal access to the
Summit. It’s great because there
are a few art critics in Bangladesh
but not many, so the reviews are
written by firemen, lawyers, local
people, and they’re excited and
proud that they can have a worldclass exhibition in Bangladesh.
Our international visitors were
very surprised to see the kind
of works that we were showing.
Imagine a 60-foot-long, threechannel HD video with surround
sound, where each of the projectors cost €150,000! Through
goodwill and ingenuity and
tenacity, we were able to
secure loans of projectors from
Eidotech, as well as the patience
of the artist, Shahzia Sikander, to
be able to show this work locally.
I am asked about this work each
time I visit Bangladesh, so it had
a deep local impact.
We have over 40 collaborators, from Harvard University
to the Centre Pompidou. While
I’m the artistic director and chief
curator, I have about seven curators working with me who will
have very different takes on
the South Asian scene, so we’re
trying to explode the dominant
ideas about the region. Often
when you see regional shows or
South Asian shows, it’s the same
10 names you see everywhere.
We really want to expand the
narrative beyond the “chosen
few”. The other thing is, and
maybe this ties into my biography a bit, but I think it’s very
difficult nowadays to categorise
someone by their nationality.
Especially in South Asia, where
Partition happened. Bangladesh
used to be part of Pakistan.
There’s a deep history of
Bangladeshi artists in Pakistan,
but when you only focus on this
Bangladeshi-Pakistani thing you
miss out all the different points
in between. We’re not going to
be labelling any of the artists by
country and we’re also looking
at Western artists who have deep
engagement with South Asia.
Lynda Benglis, for example, lived
in India for 30 years, her life
partner was Indian, and she still
has a studio in India. She’s unbelievable. She’s Greek, but Benglis
kind of sounds like Bengal, so
she has a theory that maybe her
ancestors were shipbuilders from,
or with a connection to, Bengal!
It’s obviously an unconfirmed
theory, but Benglis-Bengal is a
fun sound and we are honoured
to be showing her work in
Bangladesh for the first time.
She invited me to visit her studio
in Santa Fe, which was amazing,
and we drove around in her
truck, and she was playing Indian
ragas from Gujarat! There are
many sorts of these characters
who fall in between traditional
ideas of nationality.
We also have the first historical section of the summit in this
upcoming edition. One of the
fathers of Bangladeshi modern
art, SM Sultan, was a bohemian
who travelled all over the world
before retreating into peasant
life in Bangladesh toward the end
of his life. He was in New York
in the 1950s and sold a work to
Hilton Hotels in order to pay the
bills. He sold it for nothing, but
Rajeeb found it in an auction and
brought it back to Bangladesh.
We’re really interested in these
transnational connections, and
along with a colleague from the
Guggenheim Museum, we are
beginning some intense research
on these sorts of exhibition histories tied to the region – SM
Sultan even exhibited with
Picasso and Paul Klee in London
in the 1950s. But it takes a lot of
research because these transnational connections are often
forgotten outliers. There’s something important about being
exceptional, so we want to make
space for the exception as well.
TR Am I right in thinking you’re
doing something with the Centre
Pompidou?
DCB Yes, we have a curator
from the Centre Pompidou
curating a show of Bangladeshi
architecture, which is incredible.
He thought he would include
maybe 10 architects, and now
it’s 17. Of course, Louis Kahn’s
Parliament building is in
Bangladesh and it’s one of
the most important works of
20th-century modern architecture. It’s in Dhaka, so we’ll get a
lot of architecture buffs coming
as well. Normally you can’t go
inside the building, but during
the Summit we’ve been able to
get permission to take people
inside. The contemporary
architects are incredible and
responding to Kahn’s legacy as
well as the intense environmental
needs of the country, building
flood and cyclone centres alongside beautiful residences,
mosques and office buildings.
TR How did the Summit evolve?
DCB The Summit evolved
through our research on what the
needs of the region are, and the
potential reach we can achieve
through addressing audiences
in Bangladesh. There is a very
established model of the biennial
– but the Summit isn’t a biennial
– Bangladesh already has a
long-established biennial, which
has existed for 16 editions, called
the Asian Art Biennale. The
difficulty with these biennial
models is that the same artworks
just travel around everywhere.
Also, most biennials now don’t
pay for production, so they put
the artists really out of pocket.
Bangladesh is a very poor
country; so is India; so is
Myanmar. At least in India there
are commercial galleries that are
stepping up to the plate and
helping support their artists with
non-commercial projects. But
imagine a place like Myanmar,
where there are very few
commercial galleries – there is
no way there is going to be this
sort of production support. We
produce many artworks because
we saw a need to produce works
outside of the market. These
works belong to the artists
after the Summit – they don’t
belong to us; it’s not a collection-building strategy. We also
have a collection, but that’s
another story! We keep the two
very separate because we see
the Summit as a philanthropic
gesture. Collecting is philanthropic also, but you get some
sort of tangible benefit. The
Summit really is a pure gift to
the people.
TR I feel like a lot of biennials
get bogged down with overthinking the relationship of the
work to the place – precisely that
problem of stuff being brought
in from wherever…
DCB A lot of biennials also seem
to be curating artist lists, and I
respect recent decisions of curators not to publish artist lists so
that people can focus on the
works themselves and not the
star power of the names of the
artists in the show. Many of
the artists we will show in the
summit have names that are
unfamiliar to international audiences, and it is exciting to be able
to present something outside of
preconceived ideas that come
along with “curated artist lists”.
In Myanmar, for example, when
I went a year ago, there was
barely any internet connection,
and it’s only in the last couple
of months that Telenor has built
a cell network. So now the 3G
network is faster than anywhere
I’ve experienced in the region.
But still, you can’t really do
research online – you have to go
and see the works and artists in
person, which is challenging but
well worth the effort. In addition
to producing works we also
support the travel of the artists
whose work we produce, so the
international curators and
museum professionals can meet
them. Bangladesh is a great
meeting point because Indians
can’t easily get visas to Pakistan,
and Pakistanis can’t easily get
visas to India, but they can get
visas to Bangladesh, so where
before people would have had
to go to London or Japan or
Australia to meet, now they can
all meet in the region, in Dhaka,
during the Summit. §
Dhaka Art Summit, February 5-8,
2016. dhakaartsummit.org