The masked women - made of black cloth, wood and paper - are dead and look like 'ghosts in a funeral'. The bride in black is offset by the bloody black cow being butchered.

'Women in Bangladesh are usually uncertain about their fate after marriage. They are fattened and beautified like slaughter house cows to be sacrificed at the altar,' Rahman said.

Rahman, the founder of Bangladesh's biggest contemporary arts initiative, Britto Arts Trust, is one of the few artists in the country who lives on art alone.

'The rest all have jobs to support themselves because market has not yet made inroads into Bangladeshi art,' he said.

Bangalore-based artist L.N. Tallur, known for his new age installations, speaks of 'social chains and repression of human freedom across Asia' in his interactive project, 'The Souvenir Maker' in which viewers are invited to operate a barbed wire making machine to create souvenirs of golden barbed wires stored in glass milk cans- marked 'Designed in America, conceptualised in India, Made in China and Sponsored by Korea'.

Contemporary Sri Lankan artists Muhammed Cader, Chandragupta Thenuwara, Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan and Jagat Weeasinghe document the civil war, people's unrest, social disintegration in Sri Lanka in a relay drawing project featuring 100 sketches, 'The One-Year Drawing Project', between 2005-2007.

'The One Year Drawing Project is one of the most significant art projects to have emerged from Sri Lanka in the recent past. The project seemed to find a way of surmounting the turmoil and civil unrest in the country through its process - that of artists mailing works to each other and allowing each artist to articulate their visual vocabulary over a period of time,' co-owner of the gallery Anupam Poddar, one of the country's top collectors of contemporary art, told IANS.

'Given the foundation's engagement with the subcontinent, we were extremely keen on bringing this project to Indian audiences,' Poddar said.

The projects are an extension of the India Art Summit.