অন্তর্বর্তী
[INTERIM]
On the occasion of celebrating 24 Years of Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, we cordially invite you to the opening of exhibition - ‘Interim’ curated by Pathshala Faculty Sarker Protick & Project Inertia at DrikPath Bhobon on 28 January 2023. Renowned artist Dhali Al-Mamoon and founder of Pathshala South Asian Media Institute Dr Shahidul Alam will inaugurate the exhibition.
আর্টিস্ট: হাবিবা নওরোজ, তসলিমা আখতার, মুশফিক মাহাবুব তূর্য্য, সালমা আবেদিন পৃথ্বী, শুভ্র কান্তি দাশ, শৌণক দাশ, দেবাশিষ চক্রবর্তী, মোঃ ফজলে রাব্বি ফটিক, সাব্বির আহাম্মদ, তানজিম ওয়াহাব, বাবা বেতার / আরফান আহমেদ, সামসুল আলম হেলাল ।
প্রজেক্ট ইনারশিয়ার সাথে প্রদর্শনীটি কিউরেট করেছেন সরকার প্রতীক ।
আর্টিস্ট: হাবিবা নওরোজ, তসলিমা আখতার, মুশফিক মাহাবুব তূর্য্য, সালমা আবেদিন পৃথ্বী, শুভ্র কান্তি দাশ, শৌণক দাশ, দেবাশিষ চক্রবর্তী, মোঃ ফজলে রাব্বি ফটিক, সাব্বির আহাম্মদ, তানজিম ওয়াহাব, বাবা বেতার / আরফান আহমেদ, সামসুল আলম হেলাল ।
প্রজেক্ট ইনারশিয়ার সাথে প্রদর্শনীটি কিউরেট করেছেন সরকার প্রতীক ।
Solo exhibition by Sarker Protick looks at the unyielding passage of time.
Through his mediated exploration of light and time, the photographer looks at the traces of time and how a photograph can capture it while telling stories of migration and loss. - by Sukanya Deb
Invested in the formations of light and time that denote the creation of a photograph, Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick’s most recent solo exhibition Nirobodhi / Till Time Stands Still at Shrine Empire, New Delhi, considers a complex formation of memory, materiality and medium.
Protick presents two new series of photographic works that span across a decade of research, exploration and contemplation, adjoined with a film or rather, a moving image work. Throughout his artistic career, the intangibility of light and time has been a point of interest for Protick, as he tells STIR. The invisibility and immateriality of the two mediums being depicted through what can be conceived of as the harsh, often collapsed lens of photography, Protick’s works seek to delineate a stillness that is perhaps a split second, or the movement of a decade. His photographic works themselves have a tendency to develop over a period of time, often taking years to settle and reach a point of articulation. Protick added, “In general, when I started [practising photography] I was interested in this tangibility of time––about how time can be tangible in our surroundings, consciousness or history.”
Jirno / Ruins series, 2016-ongoing, Image Courtesy of the artist and Shrine Empire.
Nirobodhi starts with the premise of the fracturing, traumatic dissection of Bengal as a region, that began with its sectioning into West Bengal and East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) on the basis of religious division. The political and religious division of the subcontinent into Pakistan and India resulted in decades of strife and lack of resolution as can be seen in the eventual formation of Bangladesh as an assertion of identity through its Liberation War in 1971, decades after independence from British rule. To this day, a complex web of relations and political grievances affects geopolitical and cultural relations between the three nations, despite their shared history. Through his series of works presented in conversation with one another, Protick addresses the theme of migration in particular, through the personal as well as the archaeological.
Installation view: Jirno / Ruins at Nirobodhi at Shrine Empire. Image Courtesy of the artist and Shrine Empire
Protick talks about his initial foray into finding archaeological sites that were intermittent and hidden from the all-seeing eye of nation-building, yet crucial to the formation of towns in Bangladesh. Through the state-run Department of Archeology, it was often difficult for him to find information that was reliable and continued to be historically accurate. His field research for the series that came to be Jirno / Ruins looked at abandoned feudal or landowner estates from pre-Colonial India.
The artist tells STIR, “When I was looking at these spaces I realised that these are also images of migration, but we are not seeing the movement. We are only seeing what happens over time when a large number of people migrate from one nation to another, and what happens to another, structurally and architecturally, or through the landscape. [...] I was interested in looking at Partition, but I was also aware that these places are little documented, not just photographically or visually, but even in written form.”
From the series, Mr and Mrs Das, 2012-16, Image: Courtesy of the artist and Shrine Empire
Protick’s photographic series which documents his grandparents’ life and home, eventually came to include archival material in relation to their own migrations. The photographic series titled Mr and Mrs Das, in reference to Protick’s now-deceased grandparents, documents their home and domestic life in their old age. The passage of time becomes a part of the subject matter as we see a combination of livelier, younger archival photographs that document a collective familial life being set up, and more recent starker photographs depicting their old age through a sense of decay and loss.
Installation image of ‘Mr and Mrs Das’ at Nirobodhi at Shrine Empire. Image: Courtesy of the artist and Shrine EmpireGiven their Christian background in a Muslim-majority country, the representation of their lives through the personal becomes a window into the plural identities that continue to exist in a world that considers identity in a regimented fashion. While identity is one of the most politicised issues in the contemporary political landscape, this project explores the complexities of assigned and cultural identities through lived experience. As we sense a parallel building of life that is occurring against the backdrop of a new nation, initially as East Pakistan, and two decades later as Bangladesh, there are pieces of movement that one can retrieve through the photographs, while the moments themselves seek and yet refuse to be held.
In reference to the act of meaning-making in photography, Protick says, “As a reader or an author, how do you create space where the reader can also construct their own world in their head? The visual medium has that challenge - that it can limit your possibility.” With this seemingly contradictory diktat of the photograph to grasp at what it yearns to hold, Protick extends his enquiry to the hybridity of medium that is attuned to the generative, sensory overload that our smartphone-dominated world. The visual artist presents a film or moving image work titled Raśmi / Ray that is constructed out of triptychs of photographs layered with a subtle, abstracted yet effective soundscape, scored by Protick himself. Sources of light seem adversarial as atmospheric views are collapsed into everyday spaces. At points it appears hopeful when it is paired with single-sentence texts, but at other points, there remains an undulating current that emerges from the movement of the impressions of photographs.
Still from Raśmi / Ray, 2017-20, Film. Image: Courtesy of – the artist and Shrine EmpireORIGINAL ARTICLE
︎ https://tinyurl.com/3saacmemলোহিত/LOHIT
Growing Like A Tree: Sent A Letter14 December 2022 - 15 May 2023 ︎READ MORE
INSTALLATION VIEW: Sunaparanta’ Goa 2022. Photo Courtesey: Sohrab Hura.
TO ENTER THE SKY
Curated by Sean Anderson
(Associate Professor and Undergraduate Program Director at Cornell University’s Department of Architecture)
Of River and Lost Lands at Dhaka Art Summit 2023
Weather, when visualised, relies on the interaction of multiple forces enacting potential acts of benefit as well as destruction. Sometimes predictable, and even mapped, more often, spaces inherit weather in unpredictable patterns that suggest tumult, a conjuring or a question, in defiance of the unknown. For example, airplane pilots depend on degrees of turbulence to achieve lift, to enter the sky. Likewise, for architects and builders, turbulence presents a manifold of acts to confront, including the body and the landscape, with which to bend and flex, and from which one may achieve improbable balance.
With sea level rise and unprecedented weather systems throughout the world, South Asia has witnessed recent devastating floods in Northern Pakistan and Bangladesh, the ongoing strengthening of cyclones in the Bay of Bengal, the future disappearance of Maldivian atolls as well as the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. The invention of new land simultaneously destroys sensitive ecosystems alongside the displacement of long undervalued vulnerable communities. The perpetuation of cataclysmic events tear at the definitions of geography, of fixed temporalities, for an architecture subject to extremes continually redefined.
Recent years have also shown us that the turbulence of a global pandemic can challenge nearly every aspect of humanity and forms of collectivity. Refugees and asylum seekers throughout the world confront the fixity of boundaries while architects attempt to design spaces of healing, comfort and joy. Architecture remains one mode with which to reimagine how and with whom we seek solid ground. While new livelihoods unfold over screens large and small, and those landless and nationless continue to seek safety, the built environment presents itself as a backdrop and agent of change pointing us toward possible futures. We all share one sky.
Children’s drawings situate both the vulnerability and resilience of future selves: who, in a spirited display of potential, of beauty, of spaces and buildings that they can aspire to elevate and share. Just as turbulence requires us to navigate the unknown, architecture, beyond the building, can activate new ways of encountering materiality, collaboration, community, sovereignty, and citizenship.
How do we design and build for the inevitability of turbulence, past and future? How does architecture establish belonging in landscapes of devastation and transit? This exhibition responds to the conditions of sea, land and air that allow architects, artists and designers to engage with the dimensioning of turbulence as a catalyst for addressing the ways in which we encounter each other.
To Enter the Sky brings together examples of architectures of resilience, of trust, while not discounting fear, entropy, and destruction. The exhibition centres Bangladesh as part of a broader reckoning of what it means to be human in and of the built environment today. We know that various turbulences will persist. Architecture need not be resistant. Rather, the exhibition asserts how a spatial medium, with its materialities of hope and chance, can begin to disseminate radical stories of becoming to help us understand our own unique capacities as individuals, communities, nations.
