DUBAI.- Ishara Art Foundation presents ‘The sky held it, the earth remembered’ in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation, an exhibition that showcases major works by Shahana Rajani, the recipient of the inaugural South Asian Video Art Production Grant, Rohini Devasher, and Sarker Protick.
The exhibition examines how land, water, and the cosmos serve as living archives of memory and history. Through photography, moving image, and installation, the exhibition proposes that the environment bears the material traces of ecological change, preserving them across deep time.
‘The sky held it, the earth remembered’ engages with contemporary critiques of the Anthropocene, rejecting a human-centred vision of the world in favour of the view that people and non-human forces are irrevocably intertwined. Rather than a passive witness to history, the earth embodies the effects of environmental destruction and infrastructural violence.
These traces are inscribed on the environment as residues and stratified layers that often elude human perception. Dense urban infrastructure belies the vegetation that preceded it, and which now fills only liminal spaces; the banks of the Indus River, erased by flooding, turn into brushstrokes on a mural painted from memory; and celestial phenomena become repositories of information invisible to the naked eye.
In Shahana Rajani’s ‘Lines That World a River’, the Indus emerges as a site of extraction, erasure and contested memory. The three-channel film traces the experiences of displaced communities of the delta who create murals and paintings to reconstruct and memorialise their ancestral villages, submerged underwater due to the building of hydraulic dams and barrages. Depicting clusters of houses, winding creeks, boats and ‘dargahs’ or shrines dedicated to Islamic saints, these artworks become acts of resistance against both ecological destruction and state neglect.
An enclosure evoking a ‘dargah’ – often the only structures that remain standing amid inundated settlements – sits in the centre of the three screens. Creating an intimate space from which to engage with the work as a multisensory experience, the installation evokes both presence and absence. While shrines endure in the delta landscape, they cannot be accessed by those who have been displaced; within the exhibition, however, this void is momentarily filled.
Rohini Devasher’s ‘Latent Fields’ consists of three monumental habotai silk panels suspended from the ceiling, each measuring 3 x 5.5 metres. The works are emblazoned with images inspired by sun spots and other solar phenomena, shifting in scale from the microscopic to the atmospheric, as though taking the viewer through the body of a star. First rendered on paper-thin copper sheets using techniques such as drawing, acid washing, embossing and fumage, these images are then photographed, scanned and digitally printed onto the fabric.
In her practice, Devasher plays the role of artist-as-astronomer, harnessing her research during past residencies at scientific institutes such as CERN. To create the images in ‘Latent Fields’, she draws on specialised technologies used to observe distant stars and subatomic particles. Layered with these luminous forms and delicate tracings, the installation represents the atmosphere as a palimpsest of cosmic time.
A selection from Sarker Protick’s ‘Dhaka 1217’, a recent series of 135 black-and-white photographs, is displayed at Ishara. The complete body of work forms the basis of a forthcoming book of the same title (co-published by Nokta Books and Sarker Protick, November 2026). Captured between 2011 and 2026, the works document the transformation of a one-square-mile radius around the neighbourhood where the artist was born and continues to live. Here, it is what is missing from the image that carries residues of history. The built environment slowly encroaches on parks, lakes and vegetation: A railway line under development almost obscures rolling hills in the distance; palm trees stand buffeted by rain behind construction hoardings.
Ecological ruin intermingles with personal loss in these works. Fallen hair gathers on the floor, a woman gazes from an old photograph in a stained envelope, and a stack of books collects dust. Demonstrators of the 2024 Monsoon Revolution come together, protesting lost livelihoods. These scenes position the city of Dhaka as a contested terrain in which social, ecological and individual histories converge.
Bringing together perspectives from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, ‘The sky held it, the earth remembered’ foregrounds shared experiences of ecological decline, revealing how rivers, landscapes, and skies testify to changes that transcend national borders. Rather than offering a definitive historical account, the exhibition invites sustained and close attentiveness to subtle traces that narrate stories of both dispossession and resilience, for those who are willing to hear them.
Artworks for ‘The sky held it, the earth remembered’ have been loaned from Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco and Shrine Empire, New Delhi.
