Announcing the Launch of the DBF-KMB Award – Press Release
Hayward Gallery is delighted to announce the launch of The Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi-Muziris Biennale Award (DBF-KMB Award) and Lecture Series
The Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi-Muziris Biennale (DBF-KMB) Award is a new multi-year exhibition and lecture programme that brings together the Hayward Gallery, the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation and the Kochi Biennale Foundation.
The Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi-Muziris Biennale (DBF-KMB) Award will give a South Asian artist and participant in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale the opportunity to present their first institutional solo show in the United Kingdom at Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space. The first recipient of this award will be chosen from the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which will open in Kerala, India on 12 December 2022.
The recipient of the DBF-KMB Award will be selected based on the merit of their work presented at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale. This Award has been created with the aim of supporting the artist at a timely moment in their career: contributing to the Awardees personal and professional development by giving them an opportunity to exhibit a solo show at Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space. Since opening in 2007, the Project Space at Hayward Gallery has presented exhibitions from a wide-ranging group of innovative international artists, including many UK premieres. Over the past 15 years, the Project Space has featured artists from 40 different countries. All exhibitions in the HENI Project Space are free to the public.
Ralph Rugoff, Director at the Hayward Gallery, says: “We are thrilled to be partnering with the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation and the Kochi Biennale Foundation on this Award and Lecture Series. This new initiative is another step in realising our ambition to make Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space one of London’s most vital portals for showing innovative and relevant art from across the globe.”
The DBF-KMB Award selection committee will include members of Hayward Gallery’s curatorial team and its Director, Ralph Rugoff, as well as representatives from the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation and the Kochi Biennale Foundation. Artists shortlisted for the DBF-KMB Award will originate from a South Asian country (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and will not have had any prior solo exhibitions in UK public institutions.
Bose Krishnamachari, President of Kochi-Muziris Biennale, says: “The Kochi-Muziris Biennale was founded keeping the artist at its core with the aim to build new audiences and develop meaningful platforms for emerging practices. We wanted to move beyond regions and think globally; a peer to peer network that foregrounded our shared yet distinct realities. We believe a lot of this intention will come to fruition with the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation and the Hayward Gallery partnership. Together, we hope to support and learn from the spirited ideas and work of artists from the South Asian region”
Shubigi Rao, Artist, Writer and Curator of the fifth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, says: “As an artist who participated in the 2018 edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, and now as Curator of the 2022 edition, I firmly believe in the potential of this artist led initiative and how it platforms artists and histories from the region. In that light the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation – Kochi Muziris Biennale- Hayward gallery partnership is significant in representing practices from South Asia in the larger global context beyond limited readings of nations and regions. I truly believe this award will change the way we look at emerging practices from South Asia by foregrounding nascent ideas and courageous, urgent work.”
Running in alternate years to the exhibition of the DBF-KMB Award recipient, Hayward Gallery will also host a public programme entitled ‘The Durjoy Bangladesh Lecture Series’. Co-curated with the Kochi Biennale Foundation, these public talks will feature leading artists and curators from the South Asian region. Exploring salient curatorial issues in the region, the talks will take place in one of the Southbank Centre’s auditoria. The Lecture Series will serve to further build the Southbank Centre and Hayward Gallery’s critical and research-driven engagement with the South Asian arts landscape.
Durjoy Rahman, founder of Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation, says: “DBF is delighted to be partnering with the Hayward Gallery and the Kochi Muziris Biennale in developing a new programme of art production, exhibition and discourse in support of South Asian practitioners. Through the DBF-KMB Award and Lecture series, we aim to cultivate art innovation and critical thinking, while emphasising the need for connection and collaboration, which is at the core of the foundation’s mandate”
Planned schedule of DBF-KMB Award and Lecture Series events: Winter 2022 – DBF-KMB Award winner selected from Kochi-Muziris Biennale Summer/Autumn 2023 – Exhibition of DBF-KMB Award winner at Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space
Autumn 2024 – Durjoy Bangladesh Lecture at Southbank Centre
Winter 2024 – DBF-KMB Award winner selected from Kochi-Muziris Biennale Summer/Autumn 2025 – Exhibition of DBF-KMB Award winner at Hayward Gallery’s HENI Project Space
2026 – Durjoy Bangladesh Lecture at Southbank Centre
Winter 2026 – DBF-KMB Award winner selected from Kochi-Muziris Biennale Summer/Autumn 2027 – Exhibition of DBF-KMB Award winner at Hayward Gallery’s HENI
Project Space
2028 – Durjoy Bangladesh Lecture at Southbank Centre
The launch of the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation/Kochi-Muziris Biennale Award and Lecture Series will be held at the Palazzo Mocenigo detto “il Nero”, a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice, Italy in April 2022. The palazzo which was once occupied by the English poet Lord Byron (1788–1824) is located between the Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Square. The original Palazzo Mocenigo was built for the Mocenigo family, a notorious family of Doges of Venice.
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Southbank Centre press office, press@southbankcentre.co.uk
NOTES TO EDITORS
About the HENI Project Space
Originally opened in July 2007, the Hayward Project Space has been home to a regularly changing programme of exhibitions featuring both emerging and newly established artists as well as significant expressions of broader visual culture. Focusing on innovative forms of art making, the Project Space has also been a platform for presenting the latest developments in contemporary art from across the globe: in addition to the UK, exhibiting artists have come from Latin America, Africa, Europe, North America and Asia. Presenting 6-8 exhibitions each year, the Hayward Project Space’s programme moves at a faster tempo than the Gallery’s main exhibitions. Free to the public it crucially enables the Hayward to regularly feature the work of emerging artists from diverse backgrounds: over the past 15 years, the Project Space has featured artists from 40 different countries and 5 continents. The Hayward Project Space reopened in January 2018 in a larger space on the ground floor of the building and as the HENI Project Space. The rebuild and renovations were kindly sponsored by HENI publishing. While adjacent to the Hayward’s principal galleries, it offers an enclosed environment that ensures that its exhibitions maintain a distinct identity within the larger Hayward programme.
About the Hayward Gallery
The Hayward Gallery, part of the Southbank Centre, has a long history of presenting work by the world’s most adventurous and innovative artists including major solo shows by both emerging and established artists and dynamic group exhibitions. They include those by Bridget Riley, Bruce Nauman, Anish Kapoor, Lee Bul, Andreas Gurksy, Tracey Emin, Jeremy Deller, Kader Attia and Matthew Barney, as well as influential group exhibitions such as Africa Remix, Light Show, Psycho Buildings and Space Shifters. Opened by Her Majesty, The Queen in July 1968, the gallery is one of the few remaining buildings of its style. The Brutalist building was designed by a group of young architects, including Dennis Crompton, Warren Chalk and Ron Herron and is named after Sir Isaac Hayward, a former leader of the London County Council.
About the Southbank Centre
The Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre occupying a prominent riverside location that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames. We exist to present great cultural experiences that bring people together and we achieve this by providing the space for artists to create and present their best work and by creating a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual and eye-opening work. We want to take people out of the everyday, every day.
The site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. It is also home to four Resident Orchestras (London Philharmonic Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, London Sinfonietta and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment) and four Associate Orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra and National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain).
About the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation
Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation (DBF) is a non-profit organisation established in 2018, with a mission to support and promote art from South Asia and beyond in a critical, international art context. Its projects and programming present rigorous artistic and socially responsible practices through exhibitions, commissions, residencies, community engagement programmes and publications, with the aim of developing new dialogues, narratives and interconnections between home-based and diaspora South Asian artists and the international cultural community. These goals are strengthened by fruitful synergies with cross-platform cultural Partners globally, including educational and governmental institutions, museums, foundations and non-profits, art fairs and art festivals, community platforms and charities.
About The Kochi-Muziris Biennale Foundation
The Kochi Biennale Foundation is a public non-profit charitable trust founded by artists for artists. Amongst its mandates is to support emerging practices, a diversity of voices and building devices and alternate infrastructures to promote art, culture and music. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale, our flagship event is the largest exhibition of contemporary art in South Asia, hosted on the island of Fort Kochi. The Kochi-Muziris Biennale seeks to invoke the latent cosmopolitan spirit of the modern metropolis of Kochi and its mythical past, Muziris, and create a platform that will introduce contemporary international visual art theory and practice to India, showcase and debate new Indian and international aesthetics and art experiences and enable a dialogue among artists, curators, and the public. Besides the biennale, the Foundation is also engaged in the conservation of heritage properties and monuments and the upliftment of traditional forms of art and culture. Other important verticals of the foundation include the Students’ Biennale, the Art By Children (ABC) Programme, and the Art + Medicine programme.
