SALZBURG.- With Sarker Protick, FOTOHOF is presenting a contemporary artist from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose long-term investigations combine the media of photography, video and sound in order to create an ongoing meditation on a single moment's transience as well as on larger historical and political formations. In seemingly melancholic images, he makes his way through Dhaka, through his mother’s house, and through the neighborhood where he grew up and still lives today. Looking at the people, animals and plants, which are all to be found in front of a monumental setting of giant construction sites, the aesthetic sentiment fades and reveals itself as a means of interweaving multiple layers of time. As such, the unfinished pieces of concrete and steel seem like frozen relics of an era when mega-cities of the global South were rushing towards a future whose deafening sound still seems to resonate through the images. It is against this backdrop that Sarker Protick creates a personal narrative, an epic vision dedicated to life between the disruptions of capitalist and post-colonialist processes.

In »Stitched« (2023), a film shot in the slow, matter-of-fact style of a home movie, Sarker Protick looks at the life of his mother Bina through the details of her everyday life. Her different identities as a woman, mother, and worker are woven together with fragments of her past. A glance in the mirror, looking at herself, is the first thing we see of Bina. She appears to us in the monsoon, after we have heard the sound of a plane landing in the distance and seen a crow perch on the windowsill. These omens of time, its familiarity and strangeness, its continuity and fragmentation, are the material of which life is made here.

»Stitched« unfolds as a voyage through something that is intuitively comprehensible, perhaps – in it’s existential elements – also part of a universal experience. Loosely connected scenes show a house in which every act has been tried and tested before, in which every object is filled with history and memory. Sarker Protick's images create their own sense of time and space. They offer a close-up view of their protagonist, who at the same time seems to disappear into the diffuse haze of the megacity. For the private space, the daily work, the reading, the plants, and the birds are closely intertwined with Dhaka, a city that seethes, roars, and fights for its survival.

With »Dhaka 1217« (2013–25), Sarker Protick presents an almost archaeological assessment of a world in transition. Here, in the neighborhood where he grew up, he finds images that— each in its own right—are dedicated to the fleetingness of the moment, but thoroughly elude any further attempt to get a grip on time. Looking at the big city, Sarker Protick weaves the individual, micro-biographical threads of its inhabitants into a rhythmic fabric, which stands in stark contrast to everything that is undergoing sudden transformation by capitalism. Here, Sarker Protick turn to the 169 day movement of the »Bangladesh Tree Protection Movement« (BTPM), whose ongoing effort is dedicated to the protection and preservation of Pantho Kunjo Park and Hatirjheel Reservoir. Against the backdrop of destructive urban development projects, these activists, all people, animals and plants appear like miniatures. And yet, Sarker Protick's images unmistakably show them as the truly enduring elements in a metropolis threatened with drowning into endless rain and global economic tides.

In contrast to the calm, observant gaze that sets the elements of time, space, and the individual in motion and connects them with one another in »Akash Kalo Megh« (Dhaka 1217) Sarker Protick seems to shift the perspective effectively in his work »Matter« (2024/25). Now it is his own position that becomes apparent. His eye, which can only capture fragments of the gigantic elements that surround him. In the end, it seems that of a person looking into the guts of an already fallen colossus and at the traces and damage that it has left behind.

In »Murder« (2020/21), Sarker Protick returns to his mother's house, where he watches a flock of crows through the window. Their slanted and enigmatic silhouettes emerge from a smooth sky, against which they take their timeless stance on the steel struts of the unfinished city. These birds aren't just companions to humans. They are confidants who share these windows and parapets, those places where the inside and outside meet. The intermingling that takes place here affects spaces, but also people and animals. It therefore encompasses the conscious and the unconscious, the private and the public, the natural and the artificial.

These elementary combinations could be seen as the essence of Sarker Protick's artistic investigations. These elementary combinations could be seen as the essence of Sarker Protick's artistic investigations. For they give rise to specific yet boundless narratives which, seemingly detached from the usual flow of time, cast an equally private and analytical, historical and contemporary gaze on a world that has always been out of joint.

Sarker Protick (*1986) is an artist, lecturer and curator. He studied at the South Asian Media Institute – Pathshala in Dhaka, where he has now been teaching for 12 years. Sarker Protick is also co-curator of Chobi Mela International Photography Festival, the longest running photography festival in Asia. He has received numerous grants and awards for his work (including the After Nature Prize 2024, awarded by C/O Berlin and Crespo Foundation, Foam Talent Amsterdam 2021, Magnum Foundation Fund 2018). Sarker Protick lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh.