Dawn Images reported that the exhibition The sky held it, the earth remembered at Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation examines land, water and cosmos as living archives of memory and history through the works of three artists from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. The show, which opened in September 2026 and runs through December 15, was presented by the foundation in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation and curated by Sasha Altaf. Its premise holds that environments preserve material traces of ecological change across deep time, including those altered by infrastructural violence or obscured from human perception. The artists approach the theme from distinct scales, from solar phenomena to a submerged delta and a rapidly transforming urban neighbourhood, prompting viewers to discern the interconnections.
The publication highlighted Shahana Rajani’s three-channel video installation Lines That World a River as a central piece in the exhibition. Rajani, a Karachi-based artist and recipient of the inaugural Han Nefkens Foundation South Asian Video Art Production Grant, expanded her 2025 work Four Acts of Recovery into this 14-minute 46-second looping film with sound. The piece documents communities in Pakistan’s Indus Delta, displaced by dams and barrages, as they create murals and paintings to reconstruct and memorialise their ancestral villages now underwater. These remembered landscapes feature houses, boats, creeks and shrines that can no longer be inhabited in their prior form.
According to Dawn Images, Rohini Devasher, a Delhi-based artist and amateur astronomer, contributed Latent Fields consisting of three monumental silk panels suspended from the ceiling. Each panel measures approximately three by 5.5 metres and incorporates astrophotography of sunspots and solar phenomena to create the sensation of passing through the body of a star. The installation shifts in scale from the microscopic to the atmospheric, aligning with the exhibition’s exploration of cosmic dimensions as archives of memory. Devasher’s work complements the other pieces by extending the theme beyond Earth-bound environments.
Dawn Images noted that Sarker Protick from Bangladesh presents a selection from his series Dhaka 1217, which comprises 135 black-and-white photographs taken between 2011 and 2026 within roughly one square mile of the neighbourhood where he was born and continues to live. The images capture incremental changes to the urban fabric of Dhaka, reflecting transformations that accumulate as historical and ecological memory. A forthcoming book based on the full series is scheduled for publication in November 2026 by Nokta Books and the artist. This body of work grounds the exhibition in intimate, street-level documentation of change over time.
Ishara Art Foundation, established in 2019 as a non-profit dedicated to contemporary South Asian art, has hosted the exhibition in its Al Quoz space in Dubai, the foundation’s website stated. The institution supports research-led exhibitions, education programmes and international collaborations that advance dialogue on global interconnections. This show extends prior initiatives, including the Han Nefkens grant partnership with multiple museums and arts organisations across Asia and Europe. A June 2025 Dawn article on a related London exhibition demonstrated how artists from the same three countries have previously addressed intertwined histories of migration, ecology and resistance through collaborative textile and embroidery works.
The Han Nefkens Foundation’s South Asian Video Art Production Grant, awarded to Rajani in 2023, facilitated community-engaged production that forms the basis of her installation, according to exhibition materials distributed by Ishara Art Foundation. The grant programme partners with entities including Prameya Art Foundation in New Delhi, Nottingham Contemporary and Para Site in Hong Kong. Such support has enabled works that engage directly with displaced populations and environmental records. The current exhibition builds on this framework by integrating video, photography and large-scale installation to probe questions of loss, temporality and what art can preserve.
