Bangladesh's art market: collectors, buildings, and trade shows

Bangladesh's art market expanded during the last 20 years, deepening from culture salons and informal patronage into an ecosystem with more stature, with galleries and collectors. While it remains small compared to regional art market centres, its identity is clearly defined: an art economy with an expanding range of practising contemporary artists and an established public/private collector base that buys art as a cultural and financial asset and appreciates the strong welding of local craft tradition with painting.

Galleries in Dhaka and Chattogram serve as the market's backbone. They privately curate and exhibit works from emerging artists alongside historical masters. With the aid of catalogues, outreach, and lectures, galleries aid in the translation of art into a marketable practice and add value to works acquired and sold. Many artists achieve their first art sales and critical feedback through galleries, which offer a sustained relationship to the artist. Artist-run spaces and pop-up galleries serve as complementary spaces where collectors find hidden, underpriced, new artists to invest in.

Collectors from Bangladesh come from all walks of life. Supports of figurative paintings and crafts, just as any family of traditional collectors, proclaim that they come from families that have provided and served the community for generations. Public collections, as well as university museums, complete the collection by stabilising the collection and reputation of the artist through loans and purchasing the collection. Younger collectors, primarily working in the creative, design, and tech industries, have recently begun purchasing all types of art, including video and installation pieces from contemporary artists. Unlike the previous buyers, these collectors are more speculative, buying the pieces primarily for their own personal enjoyment rather than resale. A small, but growing form of corporate collecting is also emerging, in which corporations associate art purchasing and placing within corporate offices and hospitality spaces with branding and employee engagement initiatives.

Local art fairs and the Bangladesh Art Week add to the growing importance of regional events for networking and press activity. Collectors, curators, and critics come together to a series of fairs to form a “collective market,” which encourages publicity and press for secondary sales of the collection. For many artists, participation in international and Bangladeshi festivals provides a more precise position in the foreign market, which in turn helps to attract curators and buyers beyond restricted borders. Even though Bangladesh is still behind its neighbouring countries in the number of large-scale fairs, the market continues to grow.

The surrounds that are offered by these fairs allow for new movements to form, set price benchmarks, and validate changes in the market. There are strengths, and there are also real market challenges. Scarcity of infrastructure, and there is also art-transit infrastructure and conservation services, paired with a lack of provenance documentation, inhibits pricing clarity and further diminishes the confidence of collectors. For many working in the field, juggling stalled payments rendered privileged artist income back to prepandemic levels. As a result of limited resale liquidity, speculative buying, and large-scale investment are also tempered.

There are also equally tangible opportunities. During global disruptions associated with the pandemic, there were new demand channels to which online sales served. There is also the ability to contact buyers directly due to digital platforms and social media. There are also partnerships with galleries that have begun to fund residencies and exhibitions to reach global artists with cultural NGOs and international institutions. Importantly, cross-disciplinary projects with Bangladesh's rich cultural traditions in textiles, metalworks and contemporaneous ceramics and ceramics as well as folk arts, are also available, appealing to collectors honouring culturally modern artistic work.

That support offers artists the excitement of tracking their career in addition to cautious gallery patronage. Artistic and commercial risk is ‘curatorial stewardship’, as for fairs and public institutions, the challenge is to forge local practices with world audiences, traditional craft with modern experimental art.

The Bangladeshi art market is still taking shape, which creates a perfect environment for curators, collectors, and artists to engage without guesswork. Participants have the opportunity to engage in more than just the sheer trade of objects, as they can also design pathways to diverse careers. With the improvement in infrastructure as well as the increase in market connections, the growth of the market, along with the rest of the artefacts, is highly likely. This growth in the market is a continuation of the development of other innovative art markets, and while the growth is usually slow and lopsided, it is still a promise to a highly inventive future.