Dhaka's art scene runs from Zainul Abedin's famine sketches to rooftop galleries in Dhanmondi. Between hand-painted rickshaw panels, Baul music nights and Louis Kahn's concrete parliament, this is three days inside Bengal's working creative culture.
Louis Kahn's 1982 masterwork — raw concrete cylinders and marble strips around an artificial lake, widely ranked among the 20th century's finest buildings. Exterior viewing free from Manik Mia Avenue; interior tours need advance written permission from the Sangsad secretariat.
Muzharul Islam's 1955 brick-and-louvre campus for Charukala, with a pond courtyard where students paint outdoors daily. The attached gallery shows work by Zainul Abedin, founder of Bengali modernism, best known for his 1943 Bengal Famine ink sketches.
Bangladesh's leading private contemporary space, running rotating solo and group shows of painters, printmakers and photographers since 2000. White-cube rooms over two floors in a Dhanmondi residential block, with a bookshop of Bengali art monographs.
The lane where rickshaw painters hand-letter tin backplates with film stars, tigers and Taj Mahals — a craft UNESCO inscribed on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2023. Painters work outdoors from mid-afternoon; small panels are sold direct.
Four floors and 40-plus galleries covering Bengal from Mauryan-era stone sculpture and Paharpur terracotta plaques to the 1971 Liberation War. The Hindu-Buddhist black basalt sculpture rooms on floor two hold the country's strongest pre-Islamic collection.
The state body for the Bengali language, housed in a 1900s colonial bungalow in Ramna. It publishes the standard Bengali dictionary, runs the Ekushey Book Fair each February, and keeps a reading room and small museum on the language movement.
The national academy for the arts, with three theatres, a National Art Gallery of Bangladeshi painting, and daily rehearsals of Manipuri and Kathak dance. Evening drama in Bengali runs most nights in the Experimental Theatre Hall.
The cultural institution that kept Rabindrasangeet alive through the Pakistan-era ban and stages the Pahela Baishakh dawn concert at Ramna Batamul. Its Dhanmondi hall hosts Tagore and Nazrul recitals plus student showcases through the week.
An early-19th-century mosque refaced in the 1930s with chinitikri — mosaic made from broken Japanese and English china, including a Mount Fuji panel. Blue stars cover every surface of the facade and interior domes.
Built in 1781 by Dhaka's Armenian merchant community, with a walled graveyard of some 350 marble headstones in Armenian script. A single caretaker family has maintained the church and its clock tower site for decades.
A purpose-built 2017 museum on the 1971 war, using recovered personal effects, radio broadcasts and testimony rather than triumphal display. Galleries move from Bengali nationalism through the genocide to independence; a memorial column anchors the plaza.
A drab 1980s shopping block that became the hub of Dhaka's independent publishing and design scene — small presses, poetry imprints, screen-printed panjabis and the cafes where writers and filmmakers meet after work.