Bangladeshi artist Firoz Mahmud, and ACC alumni, has been exhibiting at Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, Yeonmi Sun Nature Art Park, Chungcheongnam-do, South Korea. About artist: Firoz Mahmud is a Bangladeshi conceptual artist for his large scale and long running art projects which deal with changing global conditions, environment/climate politics, lost histories, the dream and hope of refugees, immigrants and displaced people and their resiliency, wretched fiction as a heritage of his descendants, untold woes in the last decades and centuries of his region and dismal histories of colonial Bengal, debacle of South Asian Muslim-majority single state for 24 years after British Raj, legacies, sociopolitical exegesis of his country and controversy in popular culture. His recent art project is on Bengali’s history of migration to the US, how they initially migrated as ‘Ship Jumpers’ from cargo ships since the 1930s and in recent decades, they crossed borders arduously through international migration routes and many migrate with other visas and thus Bangladeshi immigrant population has now become the fourth fastest growing in New York. The art project reveals a lost history of Bengalis sojourning and life-making in the US, these men built clandestine networks that stretched working as factory workers, imam at mosques, traffic police men, taxi drivers, kiosk workers, halal restaurant owners, street halal zyro vendors and others created lives as remarkable as they are unknown. At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengalis quietly became part of some of America’s most iconic neighborhoods of color. Firoz was the first Bangladeshi fellow artist at Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, did his PhD on Fine Arts and thesis from Tokyo University of the Arts, MFA and BFA from Dhaka University‘s Fine Art Institute. Firoz has exhibited at Bangkok Art Biennale, Lahore Biennial, Dhaka Art Summit, Aichi Triennial, Sharjah Biennale, Office of Contemporary Art, Oslo, MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Arts Rome, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan Contemporary Art at Asia House London, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, University Art Museum, Fuchu Art Museum, Mori Art Museum Tokyo; Metropolitan Mostings Hus Copenhagen, Sovereign Art Foundation, Ota Fine Arts, Exhibit320 in Delhi, National Museum and Bengal Gallery in Dhaka. Recently, he has exhibited at Asia Art Initiative, Twelve Gates Arts Philadelphia and Hunter College East Harlem Gallery in New York. In 2011, he was a recipient of Asian Cultural Council (ACC) Fellowship in New York and in 2009, he received the Art project Ideas prize from Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art Japan.