জীর্ণ 

Spaces of Separation

[2016 - Ongoing]
Installation view, Delhi 2022

Jirno, speaks about the changing relationship between the time and land of pre-partition Bengal, observing the specific detail of abandoned jamindar houses, but in its speaking, it reminds the subtleties of transformation beyond its archaeological spasms; lights leaning into and casting out from colonial architectural ruins in a terrible, relentless brightness, with a stillness without relief, often fleeting and ending before change is completed. Digging personal memories becomes a reciprocal process while it engages and liberates the viewers of his images, who live with inescapable memories of the colonial past, personal and collective loss or belongingness, as well as with their imagined and imaginable escapes from it.



ELEGY

Essay by Sam Ishan


From 2016 onward, Sarker has been exploring and photographing abandoned feudal estates and decaying buildings previously owned by Hindu jamindars or landlords. The changing relationship between the land, its rulers and subjects as reflected in these regions is also a story of Bengal’s history: from the 1500s onward, the Mughal Empire established a system of apportioning tracts of land for the purposes of revenue collection, with the Muslim authorities receiving tax tributaries from conquered Hindu rajas. When British colonizers took over Bengal in the late 1700s, they entrenched this feudal structure with the Permanent Settlement, a system intended to extract large shares of revenue for the East India Company, while creating a small class of landed local aristocrats loyal to the British. It resulted, however, in the disenfranchisement of rural tenants, rifts between Muslim villagers and Hindu minority landlords, as well as unintended land speculation.


RUINS, 2016

Following the 1947 partition of India, Bengal was split, with predominantly Hindu West Bengal going to India, and predominantly Muslim East Bengal going to Pakistan. Renamed East Pakistan, East Bengal was to become the independent nation of Bangladesh following the Liberation War of 1971. Amidst the chaos of decolonisation and new nationhood, huge migrations were taking place: Hindus were leaving East Bengal for India, and in the same way, Muslims departed West Bengal. Those who were wealthiest and most well-connected—including landlords and large business owners—were the first to leave upon the loss of their political and social power. At the same time, a series of controversial laws dating from 1948, culminating in the Vested Property Act of 1974, allowed the confiscation of property from any groups declared “enemies of the state”. This led to the appropriation of many feudal properties and agricultural land that had belonged in the same family for generations, further spurring the departure of the jamindars. Sarker’s series JIRNO focuses on what remains of these abandoned landscapes and little-documented buildings, many of which have been taken over by nature and gradually enveloped into the daily life of the surrounding villages.


While contextualised by the events of the region, the work reflects broader philosophical ideas about the scale, directionality and universality of time. Buildings and structures, broken apart by the elements and enshrouded by tropical foliage. Despite the incompleteness of their forms, the architecture’s classical symmetry invites the eye to naturally trace lines where arches, columns and walls were once whole. Hybrid in their design and setting, they visualise specific ways that colonial and independence histories have marked the country, reflecting how the rise and fall of dominions can be read in the transformation of physical structures. With fields of view that move between wide vistas of land and sky, to intimate close-ups of minute detail and texture.

Sarker’s approach to making the work was a combination of the long exposures he is known for, and a methodical revisiting and photographing at very specific times of the day and in the year. This introduces another kind of time experience different from historical time, one that belongs instead to the cycles of the natural world, and includes the diurnal movement of day to night, and the rotation of seasons as they relate to agriculture. Such notions of cyclical time are shared and mythologised by many cultures, and suggests both the inexorable loss of time passing but also the possibilities presented by a kind of time that begins to end and ends to begin.

MR. & MRS. DAS 
[জন ও প্রভার গল্প]

2012 – 2016

Protick’s series of photographs and family archives, Mr. and Mrs. Das, captures the presence of his grandparent couples in a confined space or home setting, intimately weaves how partner sees one another, or share a specific moment in a human relationship, and then by doing so, to open us into timelessness, endlessness, an eternal continuity- a redemption of time. Keeping a profoundly intimate gaze is a perilous act, because it gets so far under the skin, into the skin, often mute and plaintive in its calling out. 
- Tanzim Wahab 


Installation view, Delhi 2022

This is the story of Reverend John Swapn Das and Konok Prova Das, my grandparents. After many years of working for the Baptist Mission in post partition East Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh, they settled down and moved to Dhaka where they started living in an old appartment called ‘Haque Mansion’ in Eskaton, Mogbazer. Within few years John suffered from a cancer and Prove had several strokes. They were not able to go out anymore. For them, everything was confined into a single room.


While growing up, I found much warmth and care from them as I was their only grandchild for many years. They were young, strong and full of life. As time passed, body started to decay and relationships went distant. Grandma’s hair turned gray, the walls started peeling off. Objects, letters, old photographs were all that remains of a past that was lived. The process of being photographed was a new expereince for them and they found it exciting. It allowed us to spend more time together. After almost 50 years of marriage Prova passed away in the winter of 2012. I visited John more so he could talk and spend time. He told me stories of their early life, and how they met, my mother and aunt and uncles. and so on. Life was silent, suspended. Everything seems to be is on a wait.

In one morning of spring in 2018, John passed away the night returned back to  his hometown, in his sleep.


Sarker Protick
Dhaka, 2018

রশ্মি/RAŚMI/RAY

[2017 - 2020]


The fragility of light, space and time in Protick’s works hurtle into overwhelming rapidity of contemporary urban experiences in Raśmi as time collapses into a dizzying continuum. Constituted from images captured by Protick daily of his surroundings and encounters from his travels—defying geo-political anchors—for a period of three years, the moving-image work marks the existential anxieties, sensorial excess and continued accelerationism as we drown in the dregs of civilizational ambition. The cacophonous ticking of the visual and sonic cues in this work instils in us the sense of glowing embers just moments before they recede into absolute stillness, darkness and silence. Just as ashes speak of the annihilatory glory and fury they were once capable of, we are left with after-images that carry the imprints of mortality and transience.


— Anushka Rajendran, 2022

Video
Multi Channel, 16:9, Color
09:09 mins
Sound: 2 channels
2020


Rasmi, lands us in his personal truth, or sought to reconcile the competing influences of a natural world full of ambiguities, and indeterminacies, an uncertain and paradoxical inner voice, and an embodied transformation shaped by conflicting reflections. The work extends with sonic responses and sound cues, opening a new way of seeing through another way of hearing, and revealing a personal cosmology that illuminates what might come next.

FOAM TALENT: ESSAY BY BINDI VORA





Constantly delving between the two extremes—the hyperreal-digital and the organic-natural world—Raśmi becomes a depiction, a commentary on duality of lives, contradictory and often overlapping. The images are created out of the everyday, non-extraordinary consequences and the luminous queries about the ‘cosmic’.

Raśmi (a ray of light in Bangla) is an arrangement of images and soundscapes, materialising as a video projection. Ingrained in an experience of loss and grief, the work explores the ideas of personal truth and fiction, with its pretext being non-geographical, a non-place and yet universal in its stimulation. Intertwined with the images, the immersive soundscape works almost as a narration of the sequence.

This light which is almost omnipotent throughout Sarker’s depiction of the objects – as those of the cosmos – creates situations as lucid as it can get in its meaning. Anchoring it further in its universality, is the recurring presence of the circular form photographed from varying vantage points, empty or hollow and at times illuminated at a distance. In between this intricately carved pattern of imagery and sound, one could find oneself hoping for a hope, to breathe – inhale-exhale and to let go.

Installation view from ‘Dancing with the Dead’ at New Castle.















STITCHED [2023 - X]



“The sky fills me up with light and I will fill the sky my song” (Rabindranath Tagore)

Light and sound travel through ether. ‘Stitched’ builds its way from Dhaka city to the artist’s neighbourhood since childhood. The installation weaves its way through multiple series of images from Protick’s ongoing work to connect with a film whose sound becomes the narrative for the space. The interspecies bonds that develop with time are observed through the story of a retired woman, a single widowed mother, the artist’s mother. A lifelong passion and relationship, the musical instrument she played on since her childhood was the harmonium. Life in the city leads to this chapter of retirement and longing that turns back outside to the relationships that shift from humans to crows, to animals and plants that take over abandoned spaces, to the streets and into ether, into flight ...




[ঢাকা-১২১৭]


︎ WORK IN PROGRESS








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