Far Reach

Samdani Art Foundation is pleased to announce a new partnership with Kunsthalle Basel to co-organize the Samdani Art Award 2026 within Regionale 27, supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.

Eight Samdani Art Award finalists from Bangladesh will exhibit alongside sixteen artists from the Regionale at Kunsthalle Basel, opening November 28, 2026, bringing together artists from Bangladesh and the wider Basel region without geographical division. The exhibition, entitled Far Reach, is curated by Diana Campbell, Founding Artistic Director of Samdani Art Foundation, and Mohamed Almusibli, Director and Chief Curator of Kunsthalle Basel, with Yana Kadykova, Curatorial Assistant, Kunsthalle Basel; Ruxmini Reckvana Q Choudhury, Curator, Samdani Art Foundation; and Swilin Haque, Curatorial Assistant, Samdani Art Foundation.

The Bangladeshi artists are: Akib Akram, Dinar Sultana, Jinnatun Jannat, Mery Chakma, Pulak K. Sarkar, Riturupa Talukder, Ruposhree Hajong, Sadia Sharmin

The Tri-national artists are: Tim Bartel, Azadbek Bekchanov, Samuel Bron, Alan Croissant, Brenda Dell'Anna, Fanny Adriana Dunning, Nicole Hassler, Valentin Jäcksch, Tina Janiashvili, Laure Mojo, Rabea Pie, Stas Shärifulla, Sherif Sherif, Ajmal Shifaz, Kelly Weiss, Cansu Yıldıran

The Tri-national artists all live and work in the same tri-national region, while their artistic practices draw on cultural contexts spanning Egypt, Eastern Siberia, France, Georgia, Germany, India, Switzerland, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and Spain, so that it is precisely this divergence between shared place and disparate origins that makes tangible the international character defining this year’s Regionale exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel.

Established in 2012, the Samdani Art Award was created to build an internationally recognized platform for emerging Bangladeshi artists, offering opportunities for international visibility, professional exchange, and long-term artistic development. Presented by the Samdani Art Foundation, the award has supported artists through exhibitions, residencies, and collaborations with leading international curators and institutions, and many of its previously shortlisted artists have gone on to participate in major exhibitions, residencies, and institutional programs around the world. 

Both the Samdani Art Award and Regionale exist as open calls, built on the conviction that talent is distributed far more widely than opportunity—and that Samdani Art Foundation and Kunsthalle Basel see it as an institutional responsibility to close that gap. For this edition, Almusibli and Campbell jointly selected artists from two parallel open calls: one in the tri-national region around Basel (Regio, Alsace, and South Baden), which received approximately 800 applications, and one in Bangladesh, which received approximately 200. Together, these calls form the basis for an exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel as part of Regionale 27—itself organized through an open call for the past 27 years. This collaboration, initiated by Kunsthalle Basel together with Pro Helvetia Swiss Arts Council (New Delhi) and Samdani Art Foundation (Dhaka and Sylhet), brings a new curatorial focus to Kunsthalle Basel's contribution to the 27th edition of this tri-national exhibition project, which unfolds across institutions in Switzerland, France, and Germany from November 28, 2026, to January 3, 2027. It brings artists in closer contact with curatorial perspectives that bring new readings to their work and networks to widen their professional opportunities in the world.  This partnership will deepen after the exhibition with residency exchanges for the winning artists. 

Regionale takes place in the Dreiländereck, where Switzerland, France, and Germany converge—a region shaped as much by its borders as by the crossings they invite. At Kunsthalle Basel, work by regional artists selected from the tri-national open call will be shown alongside work by the Bangladeshi artists selected through the Samdani Art Award in an exhibition that considers the concept of a region as a space connected by thoughts and relationships rather than simple geographic proximity. 

More About the collaboration
"We are so proud to see the reach that Bangladeshi artists are having in the international art world. When Rajeeb and I established Samdani Art Foundation 15 years ago, we never imagined our Samdani Art Award would grow to this level of international significance for emerging artists in our country. Our first collaboration with Kunsthalle Basel happened in 2014 with the solo exhibition of Naeem Mohaiemen, one of the most internationally established artists from Bangladesh. Twelve years later, we are delighted to create a new partnership highlighting talented Bangladeshi artists who have never had a major international exhibition before. The fact that 6 of the 8 artists are women, and 2 are indigenous, speaks to how much more open the Bangladeshi art scene has become since we began this journey.” —Nadia Samdani, Co-Founder, Samdani Art Foundation

“What I value most about this collaboration is the exchange it creates on both sides. Having Diana bring her curatorial perspective to artists from the tri-national Basel region offers them a rare opportunity to have their practices seen within a much wider international context. At the same time, working closely with artists from Bangladesh has opened up an entirely different artistic context for me. This reciprocity, bringing different practices, perspectives, and geographies into dialogue and ultimately into a shared space, is what makes the collaboration particularly meaningful.” —Mohamed Almusibli, Director Kunsthalle Basel

"The Regionale and the Samdani Art Award are two international platforms that give curators the opportunity to work with emerging artists through an open call process. It's exciting as a curator to meet artists outside one's existing network, and to open up a cross-cultural reading between artworks from the Bangladesh open call and those from Switzerland, France, and Germany. Together, Mohamed, the Swiss and Bangladeshi teams, and I are finding nuanced ways of thinking about 2026 as a region of thought and feeling, rather than one of national borders. Nearly all of the artists we selected are new to the Regionale and new to Samdani Art Award, speaking to the impact that an open call can have in bringing institutions closer to their ecosystems of emerging artists." —Diana Campbell, Artistic Director Samdani Art Foundation