The Dhaka Art Summit (DAS) is an international non-commercial research and exhibition platform for art and architecture related to South Asia. The British Council being the strategic partner; supported the Samdani Art Foundation through showcasing contemporary British artists to the Bangladeshi audiences and engaged broader audiences throughout Bangladesh, including people in education, young professionals and existing and emerging art leaders under the arts for social change theme.
Four British artists- Trish Scott, Tina Rowe, Fraser Muggeridge and Eleanor Vonne Brown. joined the summit and conducted a three-part collaborative and practice-based workshop in the Education Pavilion of Dhaka Art Summit, and the British Council supported these sessions. DAS 2018's new Education Pavilion has been transformed into a free art school for the creative community of Bangladesh, complementing the exhibitions programs and re-imagining the traditional tool boxes used when considering art-making and artistic practices.
Furthermore, the collaboration was extended on further and the British Council organised two workshops in a different district with the international artists so that people from there can also learn arts.
Trish Scott and Tina Rowe run a workshop focused on processes of translation between visual, verbal and performative stimuli at Chittagong Arts Complex on 11 February 2018. The workshop explored how individuals can work together to develop different languages of communication, both analogue and digital, through the processing and re-processing of material. One of the participants said “I learned from this workshop that we can convert a visual art to sounds. We recorded several of sounds to express our thoughts about an artwork”.
Another workshop contained an introduction to Alternative Art & Design Education projects and workshops by Fraser Muggeridge from Typography Summer School and Eleanor Vonne Brown from X Marks the Bökship, visualising how to create the ingredients for an engaging educational workshop brief at the Institute of Fine Arts, Chittagong University on 12 February 2018.
The Dhaka Art Summit brought together 100 local and 200 foreign artists from 35 countries and 120 speakers and welcomed record attendance of 317,000 visitors over nine days.