The Sweetmeet Network is an international artistic collaboration platform with LGBTIQ+ artists participating from Bangladesh and Germany. Active during the pandemic years, the Network witnessed artists and activists between the two countries explore collaborative co-making online through workshops and shared projects, as a way of fostering solidarity, intimacy and friendship at a moment of social and emotional distancing. After three years of activity, the Sweetmeet Network presents the Sweetmeet Shindook, a unique collaborative travelling exhibition produced through the connection between the two communities in the two countries.
Shindook is an Urdu-Hindi-Bangla word for a treasure chest, describing decorative heirloom trunks that are quintessential in South Asian households, as personal object archives of a population that has survived historic migration and refugeehood through Partition, wars and socio-political upheavals across highly militarized and hostile national borders. Trunks are often passed on to next generations by womenfolk, and contain prized possessions, personal journals, archives of marginalized identities and their survival. Thinking through this object-archive of the Shindook, the Sweetmeet Network in both the countries have participated in co-creating two travelling shindooks, composite archives of personal artworks, that are sent as gifts to the network in the other country as an exhibition. Each of the two Shindooks carry deeply personal artistic works that reflect the hopes, dreams, struggles and joys of the diverse queer communities that the artists are a part of in both Bangladesh and Germany.
About the Bangladesh Shindook
In April 2024, a queer event organiser was detained from a party venue in Dhaka, Bangladesh, sending shockwaves through the community. The incident reignited conversations of hopelessness, departure, and longing – a question that has lingered in queer spaces through moments of political limbo and unrest: What does it mean to leave? Shindook emerges as a response to this question – a moving archive, an ever-shifting vessel of memory, dialogue, and survival. Anchored in the contributions of artists, organisers, and activists, the Bangladesh Shindook challenges the conventions of queer storytelling. It asks not only what we take when we leave but also how we hold onto ourselves as we move between spaces, countries, and identities. The objects collected carry a deeply personal story. The objects reflect the heterogeneity of a collective that is anything but homogenous – where differences in identity, social class, privilege, and lived experience shape the contours of belonging. The Shindook becomes a prism, refracting the complex realities of queer existence. Every contribution here – a talisman, a memory, a fragment of life – is a portal into the unique reality of its bearer. The Shindook has travelled through numerous cities and localities across Bangladesh over the past five months. Through its journeys, it deconstructs traditional forms of storytelling, creating a space that transcends borders. It captures not only the emotions of departure but also the temporal and spatial realities in which queerness is lived. Dialogues and discussions are central to this process, as participants reimagine and reshape their collective histories while in transit.
The Bangladesh Shindook and its objects and their stories will ultimately be preserved in the archives of the Schwules Museum, not simply as material artefacts, but as living echoes of a time, a place, and the enduring struggle of queer individuals to create, resist, and thrive. Shindook is more than an archive; it is a witness to queer survival and a testament to the resilience of the collective. It embodies the journeys we take, the spaces we leave behind, and the new worlds we build as we move forward. Starting in September 2024, the Bangladesh Shindook began its journey, moving from one place to another, with each artist contributing an object they considered most valuable – something that captures their lived reality, often existing in a liminal space, neither here nor there. Now, the Shindook has arrived in Berlin, where these objects are on display.
Curators: Tanvir Alim, Promona Sengupta
Project in cooperation with Goethe-Institut Bangladesh
Visual: Nahid Hassan (Art & Photo)
