Increasingly, the founding artistic director of the Dhaka-based Samdani Art Foundation, established in 2011 by collectors Nadia Samdani and Rajeeb Samdani, is finding reasons to be outside Bangladesh. A regular on the talks and conference circuit (be it in Riyadh, for a panel on building institutions, or talking with Pakistani-US artist Shahzia Sikander in New York and veteran US painter Joan Semmel in Belgium), Campbell this year built on a CV that includes cocurating Desert X in 2023 and taking on the inaugural Bukhara Biennial. The Uzbekistan show won’t open until 2025, but Campbell hasn’t hung around in announcing some of the artists that will be present in the city of mosques: Recipes for Broken Hearts, which focuses on food and the theme of healing, and draws on the city’s history with the Silk Road, will include work by Delcy Morelos, Wael Shawky and Pakui Hardware, as well as by locals Aziza Azim, Gulnoza Irgasheva and Hassan Kurbanbaev. Next year will be busy, with the opening of the seventh edition of the Samdani Art Foundation’s Dhaka Art Summit, which the curator has directed since 2013.

*Last Year 96 (with Nadia Samdani and Rajeeb Samdani)