The Ishara Art Foundation has brought together Shahana Rajani of Pakistan, Rohini Devasher of India and Sarker Protick of Bangladesh in the exhibition The sky held it, the earth remembered, which runs through December 15 and examines environments as repositories of deep-time ecological traces that can remain obscured or beyond human perception. Presented in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation, the show positions land, water and the cosmos as active bearers of history rather than passive backdrops, a premise outlined in the foundation’s curatorial text. Rajani, recipient of the inaugural Han Nefkens South Asian Video Art Production Grant, anchors the display with her three-channel video that expands on her earlier Four Acts of Recovery project.
Dawn reported on October 18 that Rajani’s Lines That World a River follows communities in Pakistan’s Indus Delta displaced by dams and barrages as they reconstruct submerged villages through murals depicting houses, boats, winding creeks and shrines. A villager remarks in the film, “When I see these murals I feel as if we are living inside the paintings. The land is alive again.” The Karachi-based artist’s work underscores how painting revives landscapes no longer habitable in their original form, turning collective recollection into tangible acts of recovery that Ishara described as central to the exhibition’s inquiry into memory.
Rohini Devasher contributes monumental silk installations that shift scales from microscopic solar details to vast atmospheric phenomena, drawing viewers through the body of a star in works that Ishara noted connect cosmic processes to earthly questions of loss and temporality. Her Latent Fields series, featuring images inspired by sunspots, suspends across the gallery to evoke forces that operate beyond immediate human timescales yet leave material imprints on planetary memory. The Indian artist’s practice aligns with the show’s rejection of human-centered views of the Anthropocene in favor of intertwined human and non-human dynamics.
Sarker Protick’s black-and-white photographs selected from his Dhaka 1217 series document block-by-block transformations in Bangladesh’s capital, capturing urban layers that the exhibition frames as urban archives of change comparable to the submerged delta and solar surface. The Bangladeshi artist’s 135-image body of work, slated for a book release later this year, records a city in flux where built environments encode social and ecological histories that might otherwise fade. Ishara’s presentation places these images in dialogue with the other works to highlight how everyday urban shifts accumulate as traces of broader transformation.
The Han Nefkens Foundation, which supported Rajani’s video through its grant program, has positioned the exhibition as an exploration of how artistic practices can reveal what conventional records overlook in regions facing rapid environmental pressures. Founded in 2019, Ishara Art Foundation focuses on South Asian contemporary art to foster critical dialogue on global interconnections, according to its own institutional overview. This collaboration marks an early milestone for the grant, which aims to expand video art production across the region.
Exhibition curator Sasha Altaf has structured the display to invite viewers to discern connections among the disparate scales rather than presenting an overt narrative, a choice that Dawn’s reviewer noted returns repeatedly to the question of what art can accomplish in the face of obscured histories. The works collectively propose that ecological memory persists in material forms even when human narratives diverge, offering a framework for understanding intertwined fates across South Asia’s diverse landscapes. Further programming at the Dubai venue is expected to build on these themes through the exhibition’s close in mid-December.
