What sort of space is the gallery under contemporary conditions of political authoritarianism and “too late” capitalism? In this paper, I use the profusion of engaged and politically committed art practices on display in galleries across Bangladesh to think critically about what happens to progressive and socially engaged aesthetic forms, their communities of practice, and sites of display, when the infrastructural, financial, and technological transformations of the 21st century realign the relationship between politics and aesthetics so that they leave behind their familiar 20th century articulations. By tracing the working conditions, formal qualities and digital extensions that mark contemporary aesthetic practice in Bangladesh, I suggest that the reconvening of forms and communities associated with the left in the expanded gallery is a consequence of our contemporary media and infrastructural conditions. These transitions are not unique to Bangladesh but part of 21st century reconfigurations of the relationship between politics and aesthetics.

Lotte Hoek is Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. She is a media anthropologist whose ethnographic explorations of the moving image are situated at the intersection of anthropology and film studies and are grounded in theoretical debates emerging from South Asian contexts. She is the author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2014) and co-editor of Forms of the Left in Postcolonial South Asia: Aesthetics, Networks and Connected Histories (Bloomsbury, 2021). She is one of the editors of the journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies.