Man roasts, nature toasts: Ishara exhibition explores memory in land, water and the cosmos

At Ishara Art Foundation, the earth is not treated as a silent witness to history. The exhibition The sky held it, the earth remembered presents land, water and the cosmos as living archives that retain the marks of ecological change.

Running from Sept. 11 to Dec. 15 in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation, the show features major works by Shahana Rajani, Rohini Devasher and Sarker Protick. It challenges a human-centred view of the world and presents people and non-human forces as inseparably connected.

Rajani’s three-channel film Lines That World a River follows displaced communities from the Indus delta as they reconstruct submerged ancestral villages through murals and paintings. The images include houses, creeks, boats and dargahs, or shrines dedicated to Islamic saints. The works serve as acts of remembrance and resistance in a landscape shaped by dams, barrages, flooding and displacement.

A structure evoking a dargah stands at the centre of the film’s three screens. Such shrines may be among the few structures left standing after settlements are inundated, even though displaced residents can no longer reach them. The exhibition temporarily recreates that absent connection.

Devasher’s Latent Fields consists of three monumental habotai silk panels, each measuring 3 by 5.5 metres. Inspired by sunspots and other solar phenomena, the images move from microscopic to atmospheric scales. Devasher draws on research conducted during residencies at scientific institutions including CERN. The exhibition also presents selections from Protick’s Dhaka 1217, a recent series of 135 black-and-white photographs.