Art, robots and plates oh my!

I've had a busy couple of days

Yesterday, I visited the Dhaka Art Summit with a friend and her family

 The artist was a school-mate of Samantha's husband

These were quite impressive in person, this is an example of a jamdani saree - the words were woven into the cloth, by skilled craftspeople

there was a whole set of bathroom fixtures made of scissors

The inevitable performance piece...he then proceeded to play the violin..badly.

It was such a pleasure to visit the summit.  We have visited galleries before with Bangladeshi artists displayed, but here there was a range of styles and mediums - it felt very European as a place to visit.  I would certainly like to go again next year.


Then we went on to visit the National Robotics Festival

Essentially the robots were projects from university engineering students.  We were pretty impressed given their  financial and material constraints, what the students had managed to achieve.

a flying quad drone

Sam's son moving in front of a sensor, which caused the robot to mimic his movement

 I was too tired to cook, we went to a new BBQ restaurant nearby

mashed potato - "gently squeezed"

opted for the tornado potato instead!

Today Lon and I joined a group to visit Shinepukur a ceramics factory. They make crockery for the export market, with some major names such as Royal Doulton, Denby, Royal Worcester, Portmerion (not all lines of all these brands, but some).  All the minerals and chemicals necessary for making the china are imported, which means that the labour costs must be competitively low to make Bangladesh an attractive place to produce and export these items.

Lon uploaded the photos to facebook, with an explanation of the process we saw in the factory - click on the link!