The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford has joined forces with the Samdani Art Foundation on a new initiative to bring contemporary Bangladeshi art into the heart of one of Britain's oldest public museums. The partnership combines an annual visiting artist residency with a dedicated collecting programme, giving artists from Bangladesh a recurring presence in Oxford and a permanent place in the museum's holdings. Each year, one Bangladeshi artist will spend two weeks in Oxford as the Ashmolean Samdani Visiting Artist, with access to the museum's collections, archives and curatorial staff. The first to take up the role is Munem Wasif, a Dhaka-based artist, curator and educator whose practice moves between photography, moving image and archival material. His work returns repeatedly to themes of impermanence, insecurity and the colonial history of Bengal, and he plans to use his time at the museum to research its collections while building connections with the wider cultural community around the university. Alongside the residency, the two organisations will assemble a dedicated collection of contemporary Bangladeshi art, with new works entering the Ashmolean each year. The museum has already acquired pieces by Ashfika Rahman with the foundation's support, and further purchases are planned as part of a broader push to strengthen its holdings of contemporary South Asian art. The move is designed to connect the Ashmolean's historic Eastern Art collections with present-day practice, allowing contemporary artists to offer fresh readings of older holdings. The announcement marks fifteen years of the Samdani Art Foundation's work supporting Bangladeshi artists through exhibitions, awards, residencies and international collaborations. Its president and co-founder Nadia Samdani MBE framed the Oxford partnership as a natural extension of the foundation's long-standing aim to build lasting cultural bridges between Bangladesh and the rest of the world. The foundation has been deepening its European footprint: it recently backed a solo exhibition at the Ashmolean billed as the first by a Bangladesh-based artist in a UK museum, and it has partnered with Kunsthalle Basel to host the Samdani Art Award this November.