The Samdani Art Foundation, a Bangladesh-based private arts fund founded by Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani and known for running the Dhaka Art Summit, has announced it will be opening its first permanent public venue in Sylhet, a rural area in Northern Bangladesh, about 150 miles from Dhaka. The Srihatta – Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park, set to open in late 2018, will include a 930sqm artist residency complex, a 465sqm gallery designed by Kashef Mahboob Chowdhury and his firm Urbana, and several artist commissions in its 100-acre sculpture park. Access to Srihatta will be free to the public.
Led by the foundation’s artistic director Diana Campbell Betancourt, Srihatta’s programming will pursue the foundation’s involvement in supporting and presenting art from South Asia, and aim to connect ‘the rural and the urban, and the local and the international’. The foundation also announced plans to host future writing and curatorial residencies as part of a wider initiative of training a new generation of arts professionals in Bangladesh.
16 May 2017
