BRITTO ARTS TRUST is an artist-run non-profit collective founded in 2002. The collective is based in Dhaka, but works extensively in different locations across the country. Britto attempts to understand Bangladesh’s socio-political upheaval by exploring missing histories, cultures, and communities and collaborating with various partners. Britto seeds and promotes multiple interdisciplinary practitioners, groups, and networks. It provides an international and local forum for the development of professional art practitioners, a place where they can meet, discuss, experiment, and upgrade their abilities on their own terms. In response to the lack of suitable educational institutions in Bangladesh, Britto functions as an alternative learning platform for many artists who have gone on to produce highly experimental work. Britto was participating in documenta fifteen where they created a vivid interconnected landscape devoted to food politics, displacement, and culture.

DIS/ORIENTING is a discursive artistic platform established by the MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar for the winter semester 22/23. It aims to research art as means for social transformation through the coordinates of space, place, environment, axes, routes, links, and the body.

The DIS/ORIENTING Lecture Series wants to explore how art can contribute to societies marked by heterogeneous experiences of displacement and migration and how we as people and artists dis/orient and act in new, challenging situations, spaces and complex thematic worlds. Various international artists and curators will help the programme examine strategies of art and culture under challenging conditions of flight, anxiety, migration and confrontation with the past and present of war and violence, with personal, social and political antagonism. Audre Lorde noted, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". What are the prospects of this intersectional collaboration between artistic practices and curatorial discourses for a future where hegemonies are disassembled? How can the decolonial approach and postcolonial practice help curatorial practices to evolve beyond the given structures of classical exhibitions and collections? How can artistic and curatorial practices be rooted in the methodologies of social and self-care?

A project by the MFA-programme “Public Art and New Artistic Strategies” at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, organized by Associate Prof. Ina Weise, Arijit Bhattacharyya, Lea Maria Wittich and Jirka Reichmann (coordinator). The lecture will be held in English language.