Britto Arts
Trust

Britto Arts Trust is an artist-run non-profit collective founded in 2002. As part of the Triangle Network, an international network of artists and visual arts organizations, it has a global reach.

Britto Arts Trust 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.

At documenta fifteen, Britto creates a vivid interconnected landscape devoted to food politics, displacement, and culture. The first is an organic palan—a Bengali kitchen garden—which feeds the pak ghor, the family kitchen-cum-living room. In Kassel, Britto’s pak gor serves food and gathers people from its immigrant population, who prepare meals, share their histories, memories, and host events, presenting the food cultures of 100 nationalities in 100 days.

In the large-scale installation rasad (2022), Britto has recreated a small-town bazaar stocked with food items in crochet, ceramic, metal, or embroidery, produced collaboratively through workshops in Dhaka in 2021.

A team of artists have spent a year combing through old Bengali movies for scenes of food, famine, and war, renditions of which form a large on-site mural Chayachhobi (2022). Britto has organized Re-Visit (2021–2022), which travels across remote Bangladeshi villages revisiting communities they have worked with in the past, and documented for display in Kassel. Here, Britto scrutinizes the geopolitical issues facing rural and border locations in Bangladesh and their loss of land rights, environment, and culture.

Over the past few years, Britto has concentrated on large-scale, long-term projects focusing on socio-political issues and engaging communities and participants from various spheres. One example is ZERO WASTE-FoodArt, which was established during the coronavirus pandemic. Since March 2020, this initiative has worked with a number of artists and art collectives to create socially responsible projects at various locations in Bangladesh and abroad. Starting from its connection to local roots, histories, and communities, Britto engages with international events, such as the organization of the first Bangladesh Pavilion at the 54^th Biennale di Venezia in 2011.