Sweetmeet Network
The Sweetmeet Network is an international artistic collaboration platform with LGBTIQ+ artists participating from Bangladesh and Germany. It is co-curated by Promona Sengupta and Tanvir Alim and supported by Schwules Museum Berlin and Goethe Institut Dhaka.
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.
Sweetmeet Shindook
Shindook is an Urdu-Hindi-Bangla word for a treasure chest, describing decorative heirloom trunks that are quintessential in Southasian 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.
Berlin Shindook
Archival Box of Queer Berlin
The Berlin Shindook, containing seven artistic positions from Germany, travelled to Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the summer of 2025. It contained the works of Promona Sengupta, Jessica Walter, Geigold and Weiss, Jona Wolf and Nippun Bhalla, Orchi Lohani and Samuel Perea-Diaz. It also contained a historic pin from the archives of the Schwules Museum, Berlin.
Photos by Patricia Sevilla Ciordia
