New partnerships and residencies 2026

In 2026, the Samdani Art Foundation continues to bring together Bangladeshi and international artists and architects around the art and culture of Bangladesh, with projects rooted in Bangladesh and reaching institutions worldwide.

Ashmolean Samdani Visiting Artist Programme at the University of Oxford
The Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, and the Samdani Art Foundation have established a programme supporting contemporary art from Bangladesh, centred on an annual two-week research residency for a Bangladeshi artist. The Visiting Artist works with the museum's South Asian collections and curatorial staff and connects with Oxford's academic and creative communities. The programme also builds a collection of contemporary Bangladeshi art at the Ashmolean, which has acquired a work by Ashfika Rahman with support from the Foundation. Artist, curator, and educator Munem Wasif, based in Dhaka, is the inaugural Visiting Artist and is currently in residence.

The Foundation supported Climate, Culture, Care, a solo exhibition by Samdani Art Award 2020 winner Soma Surovi Jannat at the Ashmolean. It is the first solo exhibition by a Bangladesh-based artist in a UK museum. The show is on view until 1 November 2026.

Miet Warlop at the Belgian Pavilion, 61st Venice Biennale
Miet Warlop is representing Belgium at the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia with IT NEVER SSST. The project builds on Warlop's Chant for Hope (2023), commissioned by the Samdani Art Foundation in partnership with KANAL-Centre Pompidou and first presented at the Dhaka Art Summit.

Bringing together performance, language, music, and collective ritual, IT NEVER SSST continues Warlop's exploration of the relationship between sound, movement, and collective experience. The project also carries forward her ongoing exchange with Dhaka, with Bangla incorporated into the presentation at the Giardini. In Venice, Bangla joins Italian, French, English, and Flemish as linguistic building blocks of a moving sculptural poem. Following its presentation in Venice, IT NEVER SSST will be presented at KANAL-Centre Pompidou in Brussels from 3–21 March 2027.

Bangladeshi Art in British Institutions 
Tate Modern is presenting works by Bangladeshi artists and collectives with longstanding ties to the Foundation. These include work from the Go Back to Roots (2020) series gifted to Tate by the Foundation by Joydeb Roaja, whose practice draws on his Indigenous Tripura heritage; Munem Wasif's Land of Undefined Territory (2014–15), 21 archival pigment prints on the impact of border disputes in northern Bangladesh, first shown at the Dhaka Art Summit 2016; and Britto Arts Trust's RASAD, an installation drawing on Bangladeshi street-market architecture, first shown at documenta fifteen. Britto Arts Trust also activated its social kitchen, Pakghor, in Like Spores, We Spread, organised by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational with the Laboratoire d'art et de recherche décoloniaux (LabARD), Université du Québec à Montréal, and supported by the Canada Research Chair in Decolonial Artistic Practices, the Samdani Art Foundation, and Fluxus Art Projects.

The Foundation also supports Mrinalini Mukherjee: Unbound Forms – Women Sculptors of India and Bangladesh at The Hepworth Wakefield (23 May to 1 November 2026), which includes Novera Ahmed's Untitled (1960), lent from the Foundation's collection. Artpro's Nakshi Kantha, commissioned by the Foundation for Dhaka Art Summit 2020, is on display at the Whitworth, Manchester, where it is now part of the collection.

Samdani Art Award 2026 at Kunsthalle Basel
Established in 2012, the Samdani Art Award supports emerging artists based in Bangladesh and creates opportunities for their practices to engage with international audiences and institutions. The 2026 edition is presented with Kunsthalle Basel as part of Regionale 27, from 28 November 2026 to 3 January 2027, with support from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. Eight Bangladeshi artists are shortlisted: Akib Akram, Dinar Sultana, Jinnatun Jannat, Mery Chakma, Pulak K. Sarkar, Riturupa Talukder, Ruposhree Hajong, and Sadia Sharmin. The jury, comprised of past Dhaka Art Summit contributors Chus Martinez, Daniel Baumann, and Filipa Ramos, will select one winner, who receives a fully funded residency in Switzerland. An artist from Regionale 27 will be selected for a residency at Srihatta in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

In Sleep Comes a Lonely Forest and Its Silent Songs: Reetu Sattar's Tondra Commission at Loop Barcelona

Reetu Sattar's latest film is being developed through Tondra, a Samdani Art Foundation project bringing ten Bangladeshi artists together with international curators and mentors. Mentored by Tondra curator Hiuwai Chu, Sattar is making the film in collaboration with the Halda River Dolphin Research Lab; Daniel Gonzalez-Socoloske, ecologist and conservation biologist at Andrews University; and Dr Nachiket Kelkar, wildlife marine ecologist and Head of Riverine Ecosystems and Livelihoods at the Wildlife Conservation Trust, India. Drawing on their research, Sattar traces how embankments, first built under British colonial rule, have let salt accumulate in soil and water, eroding the livelihoods and culture of the Munda, an Indigenous community living around a mangrove forest in Bangladesh's southwestern coastal region. The same salinity harms the endangered Ganges river dolphin, whose sonar meets silence or bounces off the dikes, a failed echolocation Sattar treats as a metaphor for the community's loss. The film treats the climate crisis not as an abstraction but as salt, mud, and sound, and will be presented in Barcelona in November as part of Loop Festival 2026.

Photosynthesis Artist Residency Programme: Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser at Srihatta: Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park
As part of the Photosynthesis residency programme, Himali Singh Soin and David Soin Tappeser will be at Srihatta in December 2026 and January 2027, continuing their research into light, including its material and sonic dimensions and its relationship to ecological and cosmic phenomena. Their work considers a world saturated with artificial light and images, even as darkness, natural illumination, and bioluminescence become harder to experience.

During the residency, they will develop a new moving-image work centred on a lighthouse keeper tending a flame in a world that has become too bright. It draws together light pollution, war, disappearing fireflies, eclipses, sacred fires, and moon worship, alongside experiments with natural pigments made from flowers, leaves, and rocks. The residency is part of a longer, multi-site project across five continents.

Photosynthesis is a long-term residency initiative focused on research in non-urban contexts, developed by the Samdani Art Foundation, Pivô, Denniston Hill, LUMA Arles, Tate St Ives, and The Mothership. It is supported by the Getty Foundation's Global Art and Sustainability Fellows initiative, of which Soin is an inaugural fellow. She and Tappeser are currently in residence at Denniston Hill, following residencies at LUMA Arles and The Mothership in Tangier.

Rizvi Hassan's Confluence: Pavilion for Shared Belonging and Artisans' Atelier at Srihatta: Samdani Art Centre and Sculpture Park
Bangladeshi architect Rizvi Hassan, recipient of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (2022) and a collaborator of the Dhaka Art Summit 2023, has been developing a collaborative woven pavilion at Srihatta, which already hosts workshops, performances, music sessions, and other community programmes in Sylhet. Underway since 2024 through exchange between Sylheti artisans and architecture students from Leading University, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, and Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, the pavilion foregrounds collaboration and material knowledge as a shared process of learning, making, and inhabiting space grounded in local practices.

Among the artisans are a number of women who took on the physical construction directly. As one of them put it, their husbands had doubted women could build something this large, until they saw the finished scale of the work and came to take pride in it. The exchange continues as an open-ended process: in the coming years, visiting architects and artists will work with Sylhet-based students and artisans to develop the structure further, with maintenance and reinvention understood as integral to its life rather than as signs of a fixed, finished work. As a social agent, the pavilion builds trust and collective effort, extending creativity beyond its walls and into society.