লীন

OF RIVER AND LOST LANDS
[2011 – ONGOING]


‘Of River and Lost lands’ is a series of photographs that surveys River Padma (Ganges) and the waterborne land of Bangladesh. Made over a period of 12 years and continuing, the series describes a complex relationship of intimacy and ruthlessness between nature and humans on the margins.


It is a story of loss which begins with a hostile river resulting in vast erosion and frequent floods. With these occurrences, the landscape disappears and along with it, its many ways of life. The residents witness the river making abrupt changes in its course, drowning their village, therefore being forced to migrate to other parts of the banks which too can erode without warning. Overnight, a stretch of land, and with it houses, farmlands, and livestock, will collapse and flow off in different directions. As uncontrolled sand mining proliferates, erosion increases at a fast pace. Now the River is not only a potential source of hostility, but also of casualty. Masses of land vanish and the river’s ecosystem changes in ways that cannot be undone.


Shallow mud banks (chars) will emerge along with the influx of new sediments. The shore forms new land with the possibility to restart and build new communities for environmental and ecological refugees.


The extensive series is marked by an overcast atmosphere and by isolated figures emerging, coming to terms with what has passed or awaiting the next deluge. Through steady and intent observation, the places often feel sacred and still, the horizon dissolves as the skies blend with the stream of river, creating a grey, melancholic backdrop for these characters. The photographs use the grandeur of landscape, while alluding to a consistent hint of intimacy.


Most places seen in these photographs have ceased to exist. As a result, the photographs survive as visual documents of these vanished and vanishing lands.

Protick's works are built on long-term surveys rooted in Bangladesh. To make decaying memory tangible, to define the disappearance of a place without confining it, Protick’s often minimal, suspended, and atmospheric photography, video, and sound, explore how form and materiality often morph into the physicality of time. Accompanying its raptures and our inability to grasp or hold time, the process of image-making is a way to expand time, to make space for more subdued moments, or hint at the possibility of an embodied life.


In progress.







COPYRIGHT© 2024 SARKER PROTICK