The mood was festive in the capital of Bangladesh Despite the protests and blockades that left Dhaka air heavy with uncertainty, here people were singing and dancing to a brass-band playing traditional folk songs for the opening rally of Chobi Mela IV, the international festival of photography. The celebrations, in fact, continued till midnight with…

Forty-seven exhibitions, eight venues, more than 1000 photographs and 23 participating countries easily made Chobi Mela IV the largest photography festival in Asia. It all started in 2000 when the first festival of its kind in Asia was organized under the title ‘The War we Forgot’. That show featured the most significant press photographs taken…

This essay was originally published as the curatorial introduction to System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, curated by Lorenzo Fusi and Naeem Mohaiemen, at Palazzo Papesse, Siena, Italy. Featuring the artwork of more than 40 artists from different countries, the show explores the response of artists to the current period of…

The sixth solo exhibition of Rafiqun Nabi’s paintings (Bengal Gallery, Dhaka, 20 November-3 December 2006), was aptly titled Down Memory Lane—as all but a couple of the 76 works done in watercolour, acrylic, oil, mixed media, pastel, pen and ink and lithography are reminiscences of a time spent in the midst of nature, in a…

For two weeks in December 2006 the Bengal Gallery of Fine Arts in Dhaka hosted a fine exhibition of Henry Moore’s Graphics. The exhibition, which was beautifully installed in the gallery, was organised in a close collaboration between the Bengal Foundation and the British Council. The show attracted much interest, and I was fortunate to…

Let me begin with a personal conviction, put bluntly: the non-Western artist in Denmark (and Europe in general), like the average non-Western person in Denmark, lives in a state of ‘visible invisibility’ This ‘visible invisibility’ can be highlighted in different ways. I have known of non-Western artists—and, for that matter, non-Western writers (including a serious…

A survey of contemporary art scene in Switzerland Among the artists invited by the last Biennial at Sao Paulo, 49-year-old Thomas Hirschhorn was featured. There, in characteristic fashion, Hirschhorn erected a monumental display which was called ‘Restore Now’ – a thought-provoking box in the guise of a hardware store full of tools and books made…

In the last decade of the 18th Century, the cultural interaction between local artists and their British and European patrons transformed indigenous Indian painting and led to a unique style that came to be known as the Company School This genre of art surfaced in a number of regions in India and Bengal was one…

Modern sculpture was introduced to Korea in 1923 by a young artist named Kim Pok Chin(1901-1940). He entered the Tokyo School of Fine Art in 1919, and won the entrance prize in a competition which was held by the Japanese government in 1923. He returned home to become the first Korean ever to be trained…

Tony Twigg’s decade-long engagement with the Philippines has led him on a journey from figuration to abstraction. Turning to the found object and bamboo, Twigg has defined a personal style that sits beyond geographic borders. His timber constructions take us on a discovery of ‘art’ in the accidental and everyday Tony Twigg (b.1953) first visited…