Artist Reetu Sattar says critics missed the point in backlash over her exhibition at Dhaka’s National Theatre of Bangladesh

A critic’s description of an exhibition as “meaningless” has prompted a public response from the Bangladeshi artist Reetu Sattar, who said the judgment missed the purpose of the work, according to a report published by The Guardian on August 6, 2026. Sattar described the experience of encountering and creating art as something physical and immediate, saying she did not recognize the point of an artwork by its distance from mainstream gallery culture but by what it enabled people to feel, including those who might consider themselves outside the art world.

The Guardian’s account frames Sattar’s comments in the context of large public-facing art projects in London and Bangladesh that aim to reach audiences who feel excluded by traditional gallery settings. The article compares the intent behind Sattar’s approach with projects such as London’s Backyard Biennial East, describing them as collective endeavours rather than single-author statements meant for an insider audience.

Sattar’s personal story in the report begins in 2018, when she encountered a work by seeing musicians positioned on construction scaffolding on an outside wall surrounding the entrance of the National Theatre of Bangladesh. In the Guardian account, the musicians were dressed in white and played a single note on a harmonium, and Sattar described this as the moment she first felt art “in my nose,” using the sensory language to argue that the work’s meaning could not be captured by standard critic frameworks focused on interpretive distance or formal criteria.

In the later episode that drew public attention, Sattar said a critic treated the exhibition’s aims as empty rather than communicative, The Guardian reported. She argued that projects placed in public spaces or structured as shared experiences are designed to extend art beyond rooms that already report who is welcome, shifting the focus from whether the work satisfies conventional art-world standards to whether it creates access and shared recognition.

The Guardian report also situates the discussion within ongoing debates over what counts as art and who gets to interpret it, especially when exhibitions borrow the language of collectivity and public encounter. It emphasizes that Sattar’s approach reflects an effort to bring art to people in ordinary environments, including infrastructure-adjacent spaces such as scaffolding and building entrances, rather than limiting it to curated interiors.

For audiences, the controversy raises questions about the role of criticism when the underlying project design is explicitly audience-reaching. Sattar’s response, as described by The Guardian, suggests that commentary can fail when it evaluates a work as though it were primarily meant for gallery-goers, rather than as an invitation for broader participation.

The Guardian report does not specify the critic’s identity in the portion summarized, and it does not provide details on whether any institutional response was issued by venues, organizers, or galleries. As of publication, the central development reported is Sattar’s explanation of her intent and the claim that the critique overlooked the exhibition’s accessibility purpose, shifting the dispute from interpretation to the expectations placed on public art.

The next steps for readers and institutions would likely involve how future exhibitions document their public-facing goals, including explanatory materials and programming decisions that clarify the intended relationship between the work and its audience. In this case, the report’s emphasis is on Sattar’s insistence that “meaning” should be measured by how the project functions for people who encounter it where they live, work, and gather, not only by how it reads to established art critics.