https://sarkerprotick.com Sarker Protick Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:48:17 +0000 https://sarkerprotick.com en https://sarkerprotick.com/FOTOHOF-Shadows-In-The-Sky-II Tue, 16 Sep 2025 05:48:17 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/FOTOHOF-Shadows-In-The-Sky-II FOTOHOF presents SHADOWS IN THE SKY II <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8c4e0bdc1ff71324cb78e29eead4a6ac8624ef87ac63af05393b06517709037a/_MGL5583.JPG" data-mid="238268787" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8c4e0bdc1ff71324cb78e29eead4a6ac8624ef87ac63af05393b06517709037a/_MGL5583.JPG" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1f39b770cedf590a86c5eda5aa0bd81880cf0960afdf4548ea4b31387e5fc5b2/_DSF5712.JPG" data-mid="238268778" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1f39b770cedf590a86c5eda5aa0bd81880cf0960afdf4548ea4b31387e5fc5b2/_DSF5712.JPG" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e79d72b127b442f435ec67c0ba351e3c57a3b67b9dae788fe2e24cd256f0c993/_MGL5534.JPG" data-mid="238268784" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e79d72b127b442f435ec67c0ba351e3c57a3b67b9dae788fe2e24cd256f0c993/_MGL5534.JPG" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/788de69f5679076e30acd170d9fb370d325fd911400d57e07aa86993ec11289e/_MGL5571.JPG" data-mid="238268786" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/788de69f5679076e30acd170d9fb370d325fd911400d57e07aa86993ec11289e/_MGL5571.JPG" /> With Sarker Protick, FOTOHOF is presenting a contemporary artist from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose long-term investigations combine the media of photography, video and sound in order to create an ongoing meditation on a single moment‘s transience as well as on larger historical and political formations. In seemingly melancholic images, he makes his way through Dhaka, through his mother’s house, and through the neighborhood where he grew up and still lives today. Looking at the people, animals and plants, which are all to be found in front of a monumental setting of giant construction sites, the aesthetic sentiment fades and reveals itself as a means of interweaving multiple layers of time. As such, the unfinished pieces of concrete and steel seem like frozen relics of an era when mega-cities of the global South were rushing towards a future whose deafening sound still seems to resonate through the images. It is against this backdrop that Sarker Protick creates a personal narrative, an epic vision dedicated to life between the disruptions of capitalist and post-colonialist processes. <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6470083e57915282c0d316e434d2170712c22a65686bf77f0825324f45f907b8/_MGL5537.JPG" data-mid="238268785" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6470083e57915282c0d316e434d2170712c22a65686bf77f0825324f45f907b8/_MGL5537.JPG" /> In “Stitched” (2023), a film shot in the slow, matter-of-fact style of a home movie, Sarker Protick looks at the life of his mother Bina through the details of her everyday life. Her different identities as a woman, mother, and worker are woven together with fragments of her past. A glance in the mirror, looking at herself, is the first thing we see of Bina. She appears to us in the monsoon, after we have heard the sound of a plane landing in the distance and seen a crow perch on the windowsill. These omens of time, its familiarity and strangeness, its continuity and fragmentation, are the material of which life is made here. »Stitched« unfolds as a voyage through something that is intuitively comprehensible, perhaps – in it’s existential elements – also part of a universal experience. Loosely connected scenes show a house in which every act has been tried and tested before, in which every object is filled with history and memory. Sarker Protick‘s images create their own sense of time and space. They offer a close-up view of their protagonist, who at the same time seems to disappear into the diffuse haze of the megacity. For the private space, the daily work, the reading, the plants, and the birds are closely intertwined with Dhaka, a city that seethes, roars, and fights for its survival. <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a85d9935388e4a8a0db73b6ef89a0c592426dd1564493e1cca0e7b9ff4d94fb2/_MGL5505.JPG" data-mid="238268780" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a85d9935388e4a8a0db73b6ef89a0c592426dd1564493e1cca0e7b9ff4d94fb2/_MGL5505.JPG" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ba751c02f0243dd5086784aafde8a7ede413fb697a2705088cea8cd5841407c7/_DSF5654.JPG" data-mid="238268777" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ba751c02f0243dd5086784aafde8a7ede413fb697a2705088cea8cd5841407c7/_DSF5654.JPG" /> With “Dhaka 1217” (2013–25), Sarker Protick presents an almost archaeological assessment of a world in transition. Here, in the neighborhood where he grew up, he finds images that—each in its own right—are dedicated to the fleetingness of the moment, but thoroughly elude any further attempt to get a grip on time. Looking at the big city, Sarker Protick weaves the individual, micro-biographical threads of its inhabitants into a rhythmic fabric, which stands in stark contrast to everything that is undergoing sudden transformation by capitalism. Here, Sarker Protick turn to the 169 day movement of the “Bangladesh Tree Protection&nbsp;Movement” (BTPM), whose ongoing effort is dedicated to the protection and preservation of Pantho Kunjo Park and Hatirjheel Reservoir. Against the backdrop of destructive urban development projects, these activists, all people, animals and plants appear like miniatures. And yet, Sarker Protick‘s images unmistakably show them as the truly enduring elements in a metropolis threatened with drowning into endless rain and global economic tides. <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c31fccb2d27753de23f2b56dd13697c2378f0bf77f724ee9935f5336af4a4a05/_DSF5733.JPG" data-mid="238268779" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c31fccb2d27753de23f2b56dd13697c2378f0bf77f724ee9935f5336af4a4a05/_DSF5733.JPG" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8df9cb5a87f82b961f04d28e2b8af230d1a28fb40accd8f838e7d8c9bcd63969/_MGL5586.JPG" data-mid="238268788" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8df9cb5a87f82b961f04d28e2b8af230d1a28fb40accd8f838e7d8c9bcd63969/_MGL5586.JPG" /> In contrast to the calm, observant gaze that sets the elements of time, space, and the individual in motion and connects them with one another in “Akash Kalo Megh” (Dhaka 1217) Sarker Protick seems to shift the perspective effectively in his work “Matter” (2024/25). Now it is his own position that becomes apparent. His eye, which can only capture fragments of the gigantic elements that surround him. In the end, it seems that of a person looking into the guts of an already fallen colossus and at the traces and damage that it has left behind. <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d15f48dc888414d4f5e03eb0edb787883a03755d9f17cb374078f0bb23ec933a/_DSF5725.JPG" data-mid="238272072" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d15f48dc888414d4f5e03eb0edb787883a03755d9f17cb374078f0bb23ec933a/_DSF5725.JPG" /> <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b7d11769f472f2cc1c29ca974233c2c0fe700a8404e33825664a3b21e0b783dc/_DSF5628.JPG" data-mid="238272070" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b7d11769f472f2cc1c29ca974233c2c0fe700a8404e33825664a3b21e0b783dc/_DSF5628.JPG" /> In “Murder” (2020/21), Sarker Protick returns to his mother‘s house, where he watches a flock of crows through the window. Their slanted and enigmatic silhouettes emerge from a smooth sky, against which they take their timeless stance on the steel struts of the unfinished city. These birds aren‘t just companions to humans. They are confidants who share these windows and parapets, those places where the inside and outside meet. The intermingling that takes place here affects spaces, but also people and animals. It therefore encompasses the conscious and the unconscious, the private and the public, the natural and the artificial. These elementary combinations could be seen as the essence of Sarker Protick‘s artistic investigations. <img width="1500" height="1000" width_o="1500" height_o="1000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5d7f0cc5ed4766f86eb669a4997020f0898b780d8a2b445812ee82d6c875b96/_MGL5522.JPG" data-mid="238268782" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c5d7f0cc5ed4766f86eb669a4997020f0898b780d8a2b445812ee82d6c875b96/_MGL5522.JPG" /> These elementary combinations could be seen as the essence of Sarker Protick‘s artistic investigations. For they give rise to specific yet boundless narratives which, seemingly detached from the usual flow of time, cast an equally private and analytical, historical and contemporary gaze on a world that has always been out of joint. https://sarkerprotick.com/SHADOWS-IN-THE-SKY-Arushi-Vats Mon, 10 Feb 2025 18:57:01 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/SHADOWS-IN-THE-SKY-Arushi-Vats SHADOWS IN THE SKY[ESSAY]By Arushi Vats <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f4a501d9c8723abbeebfc2c0bf03a22d2e151de1c9f44eb8a8ff6e0912f538e5/Sarker-Protick_001.JPG" data-mid="226352581" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f4a501d9c8723abbeebfc2c0bf03a22d2e151de1c9f44eb8a8ff6e0912f538e5/Sarker-Protick_001.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b4f93713d3d3714f09f09f325aa454edf318973f9a29b3b42d99dc9898bb655b/Sarker-Protick_011.JPG" data-mid="226352592" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b4f93713d3d3714f09f09f325aa454edf318973f9a29b3b42d99dc9898bb655b/Sarker-Protick_011.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d92854fe64432880bfaba277a520ecd422c41c8e70ed046e5333379a22c6868f/Sarker-Protick_010.JPG" data-mid="226352590" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d92854fe64432880bfaba277a520ecd422c41c8e70ed046e5333379a22c6868f/Sarker-Protick_010.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d866ad2af965b14debbfe9e48c269fc6e90787bc68c8dd6a5139f763a66b944/Sarker-Protick_006.JPG" data-mid="226352586" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8d866ad2af965b14debbfe9e48c269fc6e90787bc68c8dd6a5139f763a66b944/Sarker-Protick_006.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e1b9f90742ad9b10a4566834839bcda3ff2d2ce910d6a690a51ef672bfc96def/Sarker-Protick_007.JPG" data-mid="226352587" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e1b9f90742ad9b10a4566834839bcda3ff2d2ce910d6a690a51ef672bfc96def/Sarker-Protick_007.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/944d68f23812c4f3488b8671c436269afc7b73feb1e129d99bb3a8304671fc38/Sarker-Protick_004.JPG" data-mid="226352584" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/944d68f23812c4f3488b8671c436269afc7b73feb1e129d99bb3a8304671fc38/Sarker-Protick_004.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ecd9f597852925ed50fce3e9ca3c97bc28387cd847c18e39880713f681691b2e/Sarker-Protick_005.JPG" data-mid="226352585" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ecd9f597852925ed50fce3e9ca3c97bc28387cd847c18e39880713f681691b2e/Sarker-Protick_005.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5c4018349b5c1737fb46fed3f2e1ee80e93f1c0b48e3ea4fa51e450cb382389a/Sarker-Protick_002.JPG" data-mid="226352582" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5c4018349b5c1737fb46fed3f2e1ee80e93f1c0b48e3ea4fa51e450cb382389a/Sarker-Protick_002.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ace5b3d6e4d6316dc84b146dc928e2a9ce08580c910eb8d59985b64bb75169da/Sarker-Protick_012.JPG" data-mid="226352593" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ace5b3d6e4d6316dc84b146dc928e2a9ce08580c910eb8d59985b64bb75169da/Sarker-Protick_012.JPG" /> I. Darkness dissolves as ink in the sky, pomegranate seeds erupt in a mother’s hand, and pillars of concrete stand unmoving, caught in the stupor of progress. The rain remains as a scent, an exuberant disorder, a lingering drop in the frame. In May 1866, Emily Dickinson writes to her friend Elizabeth Holland. Letter 318. She tucks a poetic gesture among the proceedings of her life at home. Between— “Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel.” and '"House" is being "cleaned." I prefer pestilence.’ appears, without hesitation or ceremony, “I would eat evanescence slowly.” The poet knows that even the taste of all that is fleeting, lingers briefly, then dissipates. One must hold the moment upon one’s tongue as slowly as one can, delay its departure. In that minutiae of distended time, a world is made and unmade. In Akash Kalo Megh (Shadows in the Sky), Protick Sarkar excavates the circadian image, steeped in the minor durations that comprise the weft of biographical time—all the works on display germinate in his hometown of Dhaka, in the radius of the neighbourhood he has always lived in. Under the Dhaka sky, familiar images ripple against all that is altering at the speed of capital, scenes unfurl in lento in his mother’s home where time is not bent to history and tenderness and resilience abide, and in the prescient gaze of crows that move seamlessly from domestic architraves to the vast sky. Drawing from the reservoir of lived time, Akash Kalo Megh dwells between the observed and that which escapes being known, the image and its ineluctable unconscious, the drenched sky and the light which arrives after the rain. II.&nbsp; <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/917655e7631cd67a3a531487393e8bcf5a8fac96ad91f2a59acbff01acfabb0f/_O2A4672.JPG" data-mid="227208018" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/917655e7631cd67a3a531487393e8bcf5a8fac96ad91f2a59acbff01acfabb0f/_O2A4672.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/06f17ed3e369385ab5a576348f773ba42e7051be767d17965585191602b7b38b/1B6A7641.JPG" data-mid="227209489" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/06f17ed3e369385ab5a576348f773ba42e7051be767d17965585191602b7b38b/1B6A7641.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f52d048b549c2cd573bcf6ea855072da7427afce769b35400690ac8cf99e3a8d/_O2A4658.JPG" data-mid="227208015" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f52d048b549c2cd573bcf6ea855072da7427afce769b35400690ac8cf99e3a8d/_O2A4658.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11110c0232c6ce0b8526966dc93c63da76ef81ad83d1145befb5b6c67309b08a/1B6A7447.JPG" data-mid="227209497" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/11110c0232c6ce0b8526966dc93c63da76ef81ad83d1145befb5b6c67309b08a/1B6A7447.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a0207e938ed7ec7e5470538f3fe71ee04fd20aa3922e2543c7e9e51999cb13e8/_O2A4664.JPG" data-mid="227208913" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a0207e938ed7ec7e5470538f3fe71ee04fd20aa3922e2543c7e9e51999cb13e8/_O2A4664.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0bcae293450f60034d8bd477ac507b92691908164e8d0ff202dc8befd4e36d2/Sarker-Protick_003.JPG" data-mid="226352583" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0bcae293450f60034d8bd477ac507b92691908164e8d0ff202dc8befd4e36d2/Sarker-Protick_003.JPG" /> In Stitched (2023), shot with the languor and quiet assurance of a home video, Sarkar beholds his mother’s life in the minutiae of the everyday, the threads of her many selves—a woman, a worker, a mother—are interlaced with remnants of her past; it is a portrait punctuated by both song and silence. We first encounter Sarkar’s mother, Bina, as a reflected image; she is introduced through her own gaze, beholding herself. She appears to us in the monsoon, following the sound of a flight landing in the distance and the arrival of a crow on the window’s ledge. These portents of time, its familiarity and strangeness, its continuity in seasons and routines, and splintering in separations and reunions, are the substance of living. Nâzim Hikmet once made an inventory of desires, confiding in us all the things he didn’t know he loved— “I didn’t know I liked rainwhether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop” Stitched unfolds as a discovery of something innately known; understood now in the alphabet of grain and filament. The vignettes present scenes of a home that is talismanic—where each object, surface, act is bestowed with an inner world, a narratological impulse—with a gentleness that extends to the images themselves an interiority. Each frame holds its own history, forges its own relations, and marks its own time, tells us and withholds from us the many parts of Bina. Woven into scenes of Bina’s home and her daily work of tending and nurturing—her selfhood and art, plants, family, and avian visitors— are brief interludes of Dhaka, a city churning and clamouring to survive. When Bina hums and plays the harmonium, it is along and against the metronome of Dhaka as the frequencies of azaan, sounds of children playing, and distant traffic melt into her breath. In close-ups soaked with affection, we see Bina embrace the rain, her eyes tracing in the raindrops the atlas of a life we are not called to grasp or speculate, but implored to simply be with its inward image. On the terrace, humming among shadows at twilight, standing in the technicolour rain that forms pools in her eyes—Bina eats evanescence slowly. III.&nbsp; <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2a91c8ed7b09e64653085f1d77083588a066d924ecbb073aa240d79f73a72d2b/Sarker-Protick_009.JPG" data-mid="227209249" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2a91c8ed7b09e64653085f1d77083588a066d924ecbb073aa240d79f73a72d2b/Sarker-Protick_009.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/febebf922cfb1e23b03c0a65817a934612cd12707c7efc25509013b26e1ed46c/1B6A7480.JPG" data-mid="227209487" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/febebf922cfb1e23b03c0a65817a934612cd12707c7efc25509013b26e1ed46c/1B6A7480.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0d8b89063177df834d5256a233d870269795e0d11bad494f3a804a346d6b0098/_O2A4691.JPG" data-mid="227209239" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0d8b89063177df834d5256a233d870269795e0d11bad494f3a804a346d6b0098/_O2A4691.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/836155f2e31f0ba4d1b63ef4b711cf78808ac3457584dc5d2aa18ad053ff45ed/_O2A4633.JPG" data-mid="227209238" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/836155f2e31f0ba4d1b63ef4b711cf78808ac3457584dc5d2aa18ad053ff45ed/_O2A4633.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ea088d532f5ca4b19adebd05b42a89e62a72922aa76c2220ecee63162c144875/_O2A4879.JPG" data-mid="227209241" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ea088d532f5ca4b19adebd05b42a89e62a72922aa76c2220ecee63162c144875/_O2A4879.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/077d60015d29e52ae45c5c0f54e4e3fbe9968bbc217f82b5e79db7c25e0ee2c5/_O2A4777.JPG" data-mid="227209240" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/077d60015d29e52ae45c5c0f54e4e3fbe9968bbc217f82b5e79db7c25e0ee2c5/_O2A4777.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2d3dca45fc037c4056e9cbcf1a5ed01840036b51154da023ab39e32228d509ad/_O2A4907.JPG" data-mid="227209245" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2d3dca45fc037c4056e9cbcf1a5ed01840036b51154da023ab39e32228d509ad/_O2A4907.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/31af3a992b277b1a13285f781173fd183af072e35de88f04e6ce63876dd2b8ff/1B6A7738.JPG" data-mid="227209491" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/31af3a992b277b1a13285f781173fd183af072e35de88f04e6ce63876dd2b8ff/1B6A7738.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11c333420d9fba235f68222ea048bc0620a6d8e83b91938bdcd10ead652ba746/_O2A4713.JPG" data-mid="227209244" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/11c333420d9fba235f68222ea048bc0620a6d8e83b91938bdcd10ead652ba746/_O2A4713.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b38454324d7da2fed1e9c0c76a444e99ff24dccd5e9109406eefa7cc2e740fde/_O2A4780.JPG" data-mid="227209502" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b38454324d7da2fed1e9c0c76a444e99ff24dccd5e9109406eefa7cc2e740fde/_O2A4780.JPG" /> Through the window of his mother’s home, Sarkar observes a murder of crows—their oblique silhouettes as opaque, inscrutable, and enigmatic as their journeys in the sky. In a series of portraits, the crows are perched in stillness against a velvet sky, holding the dramaturgical depth Sarkar reveals in the crafting of each image. The crows are companions to his mother, sharing the threshold of the windows, the parapets of the terrace, places where boundaries evaporate. Not unlike a parent and child, this is the friendship that grows from shared hours, from the ineluctable fact of the other. In the poem God’s Mother, Anne Carson writes “Naturalists tell us that the hatching crow is fed by the malebut when it flies, by the mother.” Parent and child, friend and stranger—the rain embraces all, turning the wheels of memory, washing the smog-cloaked air of Dhaka with a sense of release. IV.&nbsp; <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/78d4cba13815799e72a94b62e5b6abc860f51f5a8a091338986ebe28bf85ee25/_O2A4808.JPG" data-mid="227209503" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/78d4cba13815799e72a94b62e5b6abc860f51f5a8a091338986ebe28bf85ee25/_O2A4808.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f2849ee13c4a59c9512b97eb53d0078ab51cd2d38aafe2e68c4bff1c914895bd/_O2A4936.JPG" data-mid="227208202" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f2849ee13c4a59c9512b97eb53d0078ab51cd2d38aafe2e68c4bff1c914895bd/_O2A4936.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7f71279569bb0c284887039361bd61a820acbfa3fd59d7d47b9fa4b81f82f209/_O2A4823.JPG" data-mid="227209678" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7f71279569bb0c284887039361bd61a820acbfa3fd59d7d47b9fa4b81f82f209/_O2A4823.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e25a63f66979e36572ca3bad9dcd8331cff55241b9d2dc821174df9ac8606a60/_O2A4813.JPG" data-mid="227208207" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e25a63f66979e36572ca3bad9dcd8331cff55241b9d2dc821174df9ac8606a60/_O2A4813.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f1bba2df6037dbf6ee283096e638ab5db2cfde1c901abfefac441ba40c3ac434/_O2A4639.JPG" data-mid="227209460" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f1bba2df6037dbf6ee283096e638ab5db2cfde1c901abfefac441ba40c3ac434/_O2A4639.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d7ec0c1c8392fda4d3be113dbf2a72082478e97f260cc1c87a9d1f51b3a512ab/_O2A4837.JPG" data-mid="227208208" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d7ec0c1c8392fda4d3be113dbf2a72082478e97f260cc1c87a9d1f51b3a512ab/_O2A4837.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e38ef0a5dce65a555848cb22499afcb86ab4b565ab98fd839fb507f2da56f32/Sarker-Protick_008.JPG" data-mid="227209470" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3e38ef0a5dce65a555848cb22499afcb86ab4b565ab98fd839fb507f2da56f32/Sarker-Protick_008.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3cae5ad6edc0c26fb024b8f00334c9e1ce4603f805df05bf081a15a4ebc12b2e/_O2A4832.JPG" data-mid="227209511" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3cae5ad6edc0c26fb024b8f00334c9e1ce4603f805df05bf081a15a4ebc12b2e/_O2A4832.JPG" /> <img width="1800" height="1201" width_o="1800" height_o="1201" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10a0f5d9f70a37143e87a3394963270588bbdbfcf6559c7e7464e29fa296e0ca/_O2A4941.JPG" data-mid="227208217" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/10a0f5d9f70a37143e87a3394963270588bbdbfcf6559c7e7464e29fa296e0ca/_O2A4941.JPG" /> In the poem A First Monsoon Again (Bombay, July 2016), Arundhati Subramaniam unravels the knots of monsoon and memory— “The first rains are always this plagiarism of yearningevery momentan echo of another—" Treading the orbit of this neighbourhood are encounters with scaffolds of an unfinished railway track that is suspended in time, stranded as lost echoes of a future deferred. The large concrete pillars are mirrored in the pools of rainwater that gathers at its bay. These are relics of the many stalled projects to be found in the megacities of the Global South, hurtling towards an anaesthetic future. Claws of construction cranes frozen mid-air dot the horizon against which Sarkar makes portraits of his partner Sarah, and others—a ritual of their walks through the detritus of development that skirts their neighbourhood, as life annotates even that which is forsaken.&nbsp; Small pools and muddy trails invert the verticality of these pillars and buildings, pinning them to the ground that they resist. In these pictures, Sarkar draws our eyes to where—as Walter Benjamin claimed in One-Way Street—the city is palpable: to the dirty pools that reflect its grand structures and bright signs. The megacity will write itself in palimpsests of cement and steel, and yet the rain will smudge its stony ink with the impertinence of something that is unfettered. However slight its trespass may appear to our eyes; however quietly its song may echo—in these images, it is undeniably here. https://sarkerprotick.com/PHOTOGRAPHY-IN-THE-TIME-OF-EXTRACTION-Sria-Chatterjee Tue, 25 Mar 2025 05:20:44 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/PHOTOGRAPHY-IN-THE-TIME-OF-EXTRACTION-Sria-Chatterjee ALL THAT REMAINS: Photography in the Time of Extraction Sria Chatterjee I A Bitumen Glow <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3a2334fc6225de149993c65b4183f02e3e63df32910a6ec30d9a6b93d05652a8/COB_Room-III_005.JPG" data-mid="228748732" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3a2334fc6225de149993c65b4183f02e3e63df32910a6ec30d9a6b93d05652a8/COB_Room-III_005.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d8b081ade3e360c5e8e8a85ed0ebf4f49e777b0a35f5734c2203c9210ca48114/COB_Room-III_006.JPG" data-mid="228748731" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d8b081ade3e360c5e8e8a85ed0ebf4f49e777b0a35f5734c2203c9210ca48114/COB_Room-III_006.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fb14d0f6e89889caeb9ff4fa4e0dad54f951b39b31f5e9786b9d659c3f359774/COB_Room-III_004.JPG" data-mid="228748730" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fb14d0f6e89889caeb9ff4fa4e0dad54f951b39b31f5e9786b9d659c3f359774/COB_Room-III_004.JPG" /> A blue and pink smog suffuses the surface of a photograph, filling it to its surface limits with an atmospheric haze, a bitumen glow. Part of a series of photographs taken in Narayankuri, it documents India’s first mine. Once underground, the photographs capture what is now an open pit mine, part of the larger Raniganj Coalfield. In Sarker Protick’s photographs, the harsh headlights of the earth-moving equipment and trucks, softened by the smoggy glow of night, afford fuzzy glimpses into a rubbly landscape. Slag heaps rise from the ground in smoky silhouette in some photographs. In others, mining machinery take center stage, leaking light and spreading dust as they stand ungainly yet fixed in their natural habitat. <img width="1500" height="1199" width_o="1500" height_o="1199" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9bbe51696c51c1e471d17b82d4e7387e259636ae6bf22a64caf4cdf363c050ee/SARKER_006.JPG" data-mid="228749275" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9bbe51696c51c1e471d17b82d4e7387e259636ae6bf22a64caf4cdf363c050ee/SARKER_006.JPG" /> If there is an ethereal sublime that the photographs evince, it is a reminder of the materiality of bitumen. When hot, the air above asphalt surfaces changes density, causing light to refract. Slurred into the dust and gas clouds of open-pit mines, the stillness of the night in which shift work continues is reflected in pools of stagnant coal water, moonlike. Coal mining in this province began as early as 1774, but when several British agency firms collapsed in the economic crisis of the 1830s, Bengali entrepreneur Dwarkanath Tagore (famously the grandfather of the poet/reformer Rabindranath Tagore), joined forces with the British indigo broker William Carr to purchase various mines and open new ones in the region. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ad3301e894aaaf33f9c83d0c0aebfc46293c6daf7e07efd8cc76eedc45b84def/COB_Room-I_012.JPG" data-mid="228749420" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ad3301e894aaaf33f9c83d0c0aebfc46293c6daf7e07efd8cc76eedc45b84def/COB_Room-I_012.JPG" /> The fuzziness of Protick’s Narayankuri photographs is not about light, heat, and dust alone. It speaks to the blurred histories of colonialism, capitalism, and elite Bengali nationalism. A zamindar (landowner) and early Indian capitalist, Tagore understood logistics well and wanted to control as much of the production, processing, shipping, and marketing infrastructures as possible. Taking a lead from the British agency houses that integrated their interests in plantations, factories, and trade in indigo and sugar, he used his ancestral estates, such as those in Berhampore for the indigo, sugar, and silk exported by his firm, Carr, Tagore and Company. Radical free thinkers of the Young Bengal movement idolized Dwarakanath for his initiative and the promise of an indigenous industry that would wrest the power of capitalist production and global consumption from European hands, disproving the environmental racist characterization of Hindus as idle and ignorant. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/22218279687f25554dec2035175ff861910b5b3cbdefb2eff898d85777a66436/COB_Room-I_007.JPG" data-mid="228749418" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/22218279687f25554dec2035175ff861910b5b3cbdefb2eff898d85777a66436/COB_Room-I_007.JPG" /> And yet, what did Tagore’s investments in the global exchange of commodities from coal to opium mean for the people of Bengal, for the Adivasi Santhals and Bauris who worked the mines in Raniganj and Chinakuri, or the violence of the opium wars unleashed in East Asia? Protick’s Narayankuri photographs run the risk of aestheticizing an extractive sublime, but the research-led thoroughness of the project makes visible the material conditions that undergird the histories of resource extraction, production, consumption, and markets. It shows how what Deborah Cowen calls logistics space (constituted by flows of infrastructures, information, goods, and people) formed the basis of imperial space in Dwarkanath’s time. The roots of the contemporary logistics space or the “pipeline” lie in the reorganizing of space and connectivity that formed a core project of the colonial enterprise. This has been carried on faithfully by contemporary capitalism (which, as Cowen observes, resonates so clearly with the supply line of the colonial frontier). II Awngar/Ahonkar <img width="1500" height="1199" width_o="1500" height_o="1199" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a249c8a611b2fc8fdffd786ffd39cca9668c7aedc36b55b8358b0d6ab0d5b5ea/SARKER_007.JPG" data-mid="228749284" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a249c8a611b2fc8fdffd786ffd39cca9668c7aedc36b55b8358b0d6ab0d5b5ea/SARKER_007.JPG" /> Railways, the harbinger of modernity and mobility that enabled Dwarkanath’s coal mines to break even and succeed run as a subtext through Protick’s Awngar, making clear that the cinders burning in the coalfields of contemporary Dhanbad or Asansol are not separate from their longer messy histories of colonial capital. Protick’s productive obsession with the passage of time across all his work comes through particularly powerfully in this project. In this series, a photograph taken in present-day Chinakuri lays bare the ribs of the earth through a disused railway track. Wood and steel warp agape, bringing into focus the indivisible processes of industrial production and decay. It is decaying wood and plant matter after all that produces coal, compacted by heat and pressure over millions of years. Overgrown and wild, the train tracks in all the photographs in this series lead nowhere. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8d853f4507a58347b53c9e7521ab85238144167c5cbea4f8d90924c187b448ff/COB_Room-II_001.JPG" data-mid="228749279" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8d853f4507a58347b53c9e7521ab85238144167c5cbea4f8d90924c187b448ff/COB_Room-II_001.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/38bd83cfce23e3ee59e8cbc069e022b2a8194332242458e6b57e6d8f3ed2643c/COB_Room-II_003.JPG" data-mid="228749280" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/38bd83cfce23e3ee59e8cbc069e022b2a8194332242458e6b57e6d8f3ed2643c/COB_Room-II_003.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9c36de97351e6ba446f9ce6405f567758a76ec1892bcffe55c3c6c18f0d38307/COB_Room-II_007.JPG" data-mid="228749278" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9c36de97351e6ba446f9ce6405f567758a76ec1892bcffe55c3c6c18f0d38307/COB_Room-II_007.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d2f668ddf2cc5e6b1a8a2b9329dfec511abec8fe320928fbecdbcc8c5b1891ec/COB_Room-II_009.JPG" data-mid="228749277" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d2f668ddf2cc5e6b1a8a2b9329dfec511abec8fe320928fbecdbcc8c5b1891ec/COB_Room-II_009.JPG" /> There is an antiquarian quality in this series of photographs, in its pale long exposures and light-gray tones of black and white. What Protick seeks to capture is not simply the passage of time. His ruins are cloaked gently, and not without a hint of irony, in what I call the postindustrial picturesque. A literary and visual aesthetic which developed in the latter half of the eighteenth century in imperial Britain, “the picturesque” sought to capture “that peculiar kind of beauty which is agreeable in a picture.” When British artists, antiquarians, and surveyors traveled to the colonies, they softened/erased out of their pictures the “natives,” the too-exotic, as well as poverty, violence, and the large-scale industrial projects of empire. In India, a particular fascination with ancient ruins in dense, overgrown foliage, in states of abandoned and rugged beauty formed the core of the picturesque aesthetic (fig. 1). It fed into a larger colonial aesthetic construction in which ancient India (synonymous with Aryan “purity”) was seen as the high point of Indian civilization, with anything coming after it tinged with progressive decline. <img width="1500" height="1199" width_o="1500" height_o="1199" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fcbe07a26fc66c4226966346f149561ad8644bef81e897d44c9ae7a3dee7afa7/SARKER_008.JPG" data-mid="228749283" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fcbe07a26fc66c4226966346f149561ad8644bef81e897d44c9ae7a3dee7afa7/SARKER_008.JPG" /> The domains of aesthetic theory, philology, racial theory, geology, industry, and the flow of capital bled into each other. Members of the Asiatic Society such as James Prinsep were keenly interested in geology, fossils, and archaeological and philological studies of India’s ancient past. His brother William Prinsep, an amateur painter of picturesque landscapes, worked with Dwarkanath Tagore at Carr, Tagore and Company. Landscape painting as a means of knowing colonial lands gave way to photography, which was quickly and extensively adopted by geological survey projects. In fact, army official and photographer James Waterhouse was tasked with consolidating the territories of the British East India Company through photographs. He ran the Photo-Litho Office of the Survey of India and took on in-depth studies of photo-mechanical printing for topographical and survey purposes, including several processes that used bitumen. The Geological Survey of India was established in 1851 and its primary objective was to identify and extract coal and other mineral resources across India, though central India became a major focus. The search for minerals not only relied on photography, but as Pratik Chakrabarti has shown, kick-started ethnological and paleontological speculations which sustained complex interdisciplinary investigations within the mining enterprises. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a6139469272e302576e39cc91fc79aabf2efd9ff5c443cd08ba853b8b8696285/COB_Room-II_019.JPG" data-mid="228749294" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a6139469272e302576e39cc91fc79aabf2efd9ff5c443cd08ba853b8b8696285/COB_Room-II_019.JPG" /> Protick’s photographs capture the ruins of late capitalism. Mining was one of the earliest ventures that disrupted the night and changed the nature of work, with its continuous cycle of eight-hour shifts “eroding,” as Jonathan Crary puts it, “forms of community and political expression.” The market now never sleeps. Awngar are the embers that are left behind but still burning. Protick’s photographs are taken at a time when the Indian government has started to privatize their mining ventures, and many mines are owned by business conglomerates such as Tata and Adani. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b29b0a1d6c42cbea7b69119807efde9350d3e19d220541171e0e8a4d15c7251/_DSF4205.JPG" data-mid="228749383" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b29b0a1d6c42cbea7b69119807efde9350d3e19d220541171e0e8a4d15c7251/_DSF4205.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d6ea91e5c7c9aa4918667cb7a86da0530a92f360b7aecac15777ba19b198bb23/_DSF3942.JPG" data-mid="228749412" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d6ea91e5c7c9aa4918667cb7a86da0530a92f360b7aecac15777ba19b198bb23/_DSF3942.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f289bd40537ab0cd0bd8d4b4b588de5b95af74c327e9d6a4523b14f42d77c910/_DSF4159.JPG" data-mid="228749413" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f289bd40537ab0cd0bd8d4b4b588de5b95af74c327e9d6a4523b14f42d77c910/_DSF4159.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e000382327671e9c1c9d4271a5b3e13096e631a475f475f327faf4ebf2c011f9/_DSF3946.JPG" data-mid="228749415" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e000382327671e9c1c9d4271a5b3e13096e631a475f475f327faf4ebf2c011f9/_DSF3946.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/95abed477af94a80403da37ee1544b45b0a3a6f5c104fed28edaf582a6cca926/_DSF4490.JPG" data-mid="228749411" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/95abed477af94a80403da37ee1544b45b0a3a6f5c104fed28edaf582a6cca926/_DSF4490.JPG" /> The wistful landscapes of decline and loss that Protick captures are by no means a marker of a phasing out of fossil fuels, a slow movement towards a just transition. They are instead a story of an altered Earth changing (powerful) hands. They are also about loss: a complex, messy sense of loss, of communities that have been displaced, mining towns built on precarious conditions that have boomed, busted, and moved as patterns of mining have changed. The exploitation of labor, especially tribal labor, continues, but the sense of loss lies not simply in the fact of exploitation, but in the erratic ways in which communities are moved and exploited, their small wins, employment, and livelihoods taken away as accidents happen and mines close, change hands, or move. <img width="2000" height="1599" width_o="2000" height_o="1599" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3e7db624e6d3280b704079dd2a0f3ff5b3a5b1c6eda95117fdaa1398d997b175/Sarker-Protick_AWNGAR_010.JPG" data-mid="228749718" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3e7db624e6d3280b704079dd2a0f3ff5b3a5b1c6eda95117fdaa1398d997b175/Sarker-Protick_AWNGAR_010.JPG" /> <img width="720" height="720" width_o="720" height_o="720" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10589301f68b932cf3662aa09d515945b54783c77310a94b3bc274b62dbdfd3f/hb_sp_an_mockup_6.jpg" data-mid="238272250" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/720/i/10589301f68b932cf3662aa09d515945b54783c77310a94b3bc274b62dbdfd3f/hb_sp_an_mockup_6.jpg" /> Protick’s photographs are not nostalgic. And yet each one is about time: deep geologic time, colonial, capitalist time, awngar (cinder) time, ahonkari (arrogant) time. Just as the alteration of the Earth is an ongoing process, Protick’s project too is unfinished. It is a persistent, ongoing attempt at making sense of the arrogance and audacity of a few to imagine an altered Earth, to reconstitute and reorganize human life and labor. III Heat &amp; Pressure <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36b6afa6fbb94fdc804400ffeee99a112370d98fd223ca1be4c795e3cbe94e0d/COB_Room-III_001.JPG" data-mid="228748734" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/36b6afa6fbb94fdc804400ffeee99a112370d98fd223ca1be4c795e3cbe94e0d/COB_Room-III_001.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/335e3611839e172a90b8de810d4c02bbed581feb654c13d2c7e5c282029b2ea8/COB_Room-III_003.JPG" data-mid="228748733" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/335e3611839e172a90b8de810d4c02bbed581feb654c13d2c7e5c282029b2ea8/COB_Room-III_003.JPG" /> Over centuries, heat and pressure work to force oxygen and hydrogen out of the soil, leaving carbon-rich deposits—coal—in layers known as seams. As moisture is squeezed out, these deposits compress further, their carbon content rising. Close-up vertical photos of open-pit mines in Asansol and Dhanbad are accompanied by sweeping views of the coalscape eroded, burning, heaped, and waterlogged. The faded antiquarian aesthetic is quickly lost as we move closer to the skin of the Earth. <img width="3000" height="2398" width_o="3000" height_o="2398" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f1921fec0395a4d1e14d81e557b965e5a1f8cea3f14e8f2bbcff271971b240c/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_009.JPG" data-mid="228750354" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3f1921fec0395a4d1e14d81e557b965e5a1f8cea3f14e8f2bbcff271971b240c/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_009.JPG" /> In all of these photographs, we sense the heat and pressure on the land, centuries of compression, cracked open with dynamite, moved in swathes, with shattering force by earth-moving equipment. In one photograph, we enter a mine, the hollowed silent blackness offset by photographs beside it. In another, the surface of the land burns with an orange glow through large cracks of rock. Visually arresting, these photographs too flirt with the sublime. They abstract visual form and transform them into arresting, aesthetic images. What happens when we put Protick’s photographs under pressure? <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ccd704d82e9f5da924236afbcf5e945b36f3269a7accc29e3a5818b1bdff1845/COB_Room-II_017.JPG" data-mid="228749311" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ccd704d82e9f5da924236afbcf5e945b36f3269a7accc29e3a5818b1bdff1845/COB_Room-II_017.JPG" /> One of the first questions I asked Protick when we first spoke about his photographs was about the conspicuous absence of human beings in his photographs. In one photograph, we catch a glimpse of a woman monumentally dwarfed by the burning sands and coal spoil around her, racing downhill. What comes through here is the scale of the mine and how insignificant human figures are in it. Protick spoke to me about structures of illegal trading of coal orchestrated by local mafia, which sustains some of the families who live around coalfields. It is an open secret with the authorities, but identifying faces would be a violation of their safety. It is not a very peopled landscape anymore, anyway. Workers, when you see them, are machine operators or security personnel. <img width="3000" height="2398" width_o="3000" height_o="2398" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ea1841831ca3c328845f745782e2ca91f7fc729ffa5b6ba3da21771eb4322183/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_002.JPG" data-mid="228750475" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ea1841831ca3c328845f745782e2ca91f7fc729ffa5b6ba3da21771eb4322183/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_002.JPG" /> It was a choice not to photograph miners, gather testimonies, juxtapose people and land, or do, for instance, what American artist LaToya Ruby Frazier does strikingly in her project And From the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise (2016). It is also both quite like and quite unlike American photographer and writer Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1989–95), which integrates text and image to provide a critical documentary of economic catastrophe and the materiality of oil in relation to corporations and governments prioritizing profit over people and ecosystems. <img width="1500" height="1199" width_o="1500" height_o="1199" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd130580232816539d375a4c8837994ceb1885a0756758e1381f1f84bc44fbe3/SARKER_020.JPG" data-mid="228749312" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cd130580232816539d375a4c8837994ceb1885a0756758e1381f1f84bc44fbe3/SARKER_020.JPG" /> It is a tricky business making photographs speak. And Protick makes his photographs do a lot of work. Awngar makes the connections clearly—between extractivism and colonial and capitalist histories, between railways, mobility, flows of minerals, materials, and people, an abstracted logistics space, structures that dwarf and swallow those that work on mines—but does so visually. IV Steel <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/766a016756ece9e7b1419c8021587471c7100130d1df93b5a13fb09c300979f0/COB_Room-II_024.JPG" data-mid="228748789" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/766a016756ece9e7b1419c8021587471c7100130d1df93b5a13fb09c300979f0/COB_Room-II_024.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/841f4d9889256a09d5c8c13598ea47278bd66b0d1c27e1c19d8dfa646280df22/COB_Room-II_026.JPG" data-mid="228748787" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/841f4d9889256a09d5c8c13598ea47278bd66b0d1c27e1c19d8dfa646280df22/COB_Room-II_026.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1b7499ebf3b9f826d9a1a6850de90398209f2e7162c03401da681b897ca97b2e/COB_Room-II_025.JPG" data-mid="228748786" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1b7499ebf3b9f826d9a1a6850de90398209f2e7162c03401da681b897ca97b2e/COB_Room-II_025.JPG" /> A further series of photographs ostensibly of the Hardinge Bridge over the Padma River in what is now Bangladesh produces, in my view, a visual clarification of Protick’s position (fig. p. #). Breaking from the pale long exposure, antiquarian views, and the direct, heavy, arresting images of the coalfield, what we are presented with in this series is structures. The structures are abstracted, silhouetted, and thoroughly over the top. Named after Lord Hardinge, the bridge is a steel railway truss bridge that was constructed between 1910 and 1915 in colonial India. The bridge is a testament to colonial feats of engineering, the use of steel (an alloy of iron and carbon, for which metallurgical coal is an essential ingredient), the mobility that railways ensured (of migrant workers in central and eastern India, of surveyors, archeologists, scholars, minerals, goods), of brutal histories of the partition of Bengal, of the river it rests on, another site of ecological devastation and leaky logistics space. Hardinge Bridge connects. This series with its thick, crisscrossing lines and filigrees of steel stand testament not simply to a railway bridge, but to the sheer weight of invisible structures that underlie the long histories and material conditions of global exchange and extraction.&nbsp; V Relics <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f7f8b02685d7c029556ed55b6207736bfc3718ce5fa2362b60082b8441e7d6cc/COB_Room-II_012.JPG" data-mid="228749297" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f7f8b02685d7c029556ed55b6207736bfc3718ce5fa2362b60082b8441e7d6cc/COB_Room-II_012.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5db0f1594d43737959f5af79fe71e016d3c7402303a23321e3577834f03bf6cd/COB_Room-II_013.JPG" data-mid="228749298" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5db0f1594d43737959f5af79fe71e016d3c7402303a23321e3577834f03bf6cd/COB_Room-II_013.JPG" /> In the last series, Protick focuses on objects as ruins. The typewriter, corroded and silent, is a relic of the administration of extraction. In another photograph wires spill out, exposed. As processes of communication and industrial excavation change, what happens to the things that get left behind? A meditation on loss, planned and unplanned obsolescence, these relics come into their own as objects and characters in a story in which the dehumanization of work and workers endures. The abandoned mine too is a relic, posing a constant threat to those who live around it. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/05bc79f454f27be855331d02f7d4263431eb975973358bfabefb142e8d413854/COB_Room-I_002.JPG" data-mid="228749227" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/05bc79f454f27be855331d02f7d4263431eb975973358bfabefb142e8d413854/COB_Room-I_002.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f88b4a8d86d05048a004043bb7aa180efae6fe787e04e00b7c324b679709141/COB_Room-I_005.JPG" data-mid="228749225" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2f88b4a8d86d05048a004043bb7aa180efae6fe787e04e00b7c324b679709141/COB_Room-I_005.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fbab2916163968b0f1c58cdd6385497c76db68276457651b538b63a7b42734c3/COB_Room-II_022.JPG" data-mid="228748802" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fbab2916163968b0f1c58cdd6385497c76db68276457651b538b63a7b42734c3/COB_Room-II_022.JPG" /> An ongoing project, Awngar is ultimately about those embers that keep burning in the ground. It is not a departure from but a commentary on ongoingness and the structures of capital and political reorganization that dwarf and cripple. Photography and capitalism operate on a “shared logic of abstraction, alienation, and the conversion of use value into exchange value” and these photographs don’t aim to be an exception. Even as Protick plays with the picturesque, sticking himself within a longer history of photography as a tool of imperial surveys, of constructions of race and ethnology, he is aware of the potential of pathos. For all its intensity and glances outwards to the material and political conditions of extraction, the photographs simmer with a woundedness that speaks for the landscape and its moving populations. Sria Chatterjee is an art historian and an environmental humanities scholar. She is Head of Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, where she currently directs the Climate &amp; Colonialism research project. https://sarkerprotick.com/LIVING-WITH-GHOSTS-Tausif-Noor Thu, 31 Oct 2024 19:02:17 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/LIVING-WITH-GHOSTS-Tausif-Noor LIVING WITH GHOSTSInstallation views from Bristol Photo 2024 Essay by Tausif Noor <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b1a9b7d04d8183861ff7c9d7265168976b698b1fa85c07ca9e68a7b369993d26/B0004516.JPG" data-mid="220886156" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b1a9b7d04d8183861ff7c9d7265168976b698b1fa85c07ca9e68a7b369993d26/B0004516.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/657b2338652160e8a82663084909c3469de5b6bc1223979d510440048a7cdd48/B0004599.JPG" data-mid="220886164" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/657b2338652160e8a82663084909c3469de5b6bc1223979d510440048a7cdd48/B0004599.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7d6b1f1643b22528d4451de3f1eab63ac166b6651635a5cec264f161199b8d86/B0004728.JPG" data-mid="220886170" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7d6b1f1643b22528d4451de3f1eab63ac166b6651635a5cec264f161199b8d86/B0004728.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cfdcfcac62563c488c250dbfbfc45efd6d51d3587480344ea2fc3f5bae81793a/B0004566.JPG" data-mid="220886154" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cfdcfcac62563c488c250dbfbfc45efd6d51d3587480344ea2fc3f5bae81793a/B0004566.JPG" /> Born in 1808 in Scotland, the second son of a medical officer, James Fergusson moved to Calcutta in 1829 to work at the mercantile company Fairlie, Fergusson, and Co., established by his elder brother. The company was among many such entrepreneurial endeavors launched in the years after the British had declared Permanent Settlement in Bengal in 1793 and established the region as a colonial extension of their empire. Like&nbsp; so many of these British companies, it failed. That failure did not deter the younger Fergusson, who established an indigo factory in Jessore, on the eastern outskirts of Bengal. Within ten years, James Fergusson had amassed enough wealth from the cash crop so as to be able to retire, and to devote his life to that which intrigued him the most: Indian architecture. Armed with a draftsman’s pad and camera Lucida, made extensive travels across the region beginning in 1835, during which he spent hours surveying the landscape and making detailed drawings using a camera lucida—drawings that would later be published in the two-volume Comprehensive Illustrated Handbook of Architecture (1855), a comparative study of architecture across Europe, India, and Japan. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ef2583a809d6dcbc7a14d93f5de99e22c05b65a92204355a229685a0b518e886/B0004558.JPG" data-mid="220886160" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ef2583a809d6dcbc7a14d93f5de99e22c05b65a92204355a229685a0b518e886/B0004558.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3415111776ad0235e82e2f77c43640fa5022bc38499bc95eaeaa360e655f8802/B0004577.JPG" data-mid="220886161" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3415111776ad0235e82e2f77c43640fa5022bc38499bc95eaeaa360e655f8802/B0004577.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b50c8a00d6f51e86cb11b0511cdb3f6ca0f867f88f8a8a94f30a1d5d88f4da0/B0004552.JPG" data-mid="220886159" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/8b50c8a00d6f51e86cb11b0511cdb3f6ca0f867f88f8a8a94f30a1d5d88f4da0/B0004552.JPG" /> While Fergusson’s meticulous approach to drawing helped to form the foundations for archaeology and architecture as serious disciplines of study, it was his exaltation of photography that proves to be his most lasting impact on the field of architecture. They helped to disseminate architectural studies far more cheaply and widely, so much so that he declared that he had learned “as much, if not more, of Indian architecture [from photographs]” in the late 1860s than he did during his entire time residing in India.[1] Photography, introduced into colonial India soon after its emergence in the metropole in the 1830s, became a lucrative project. Firms like Bourne and Shepard, among others, began amassing photographs of Indian architectural sites not just for study, but for commercial consumption. Postcards and cartes-de-visite abounded with views of picturesque vistas of ruins framed by sprawling hills and snow-capped mountains. Undergirding this mass consumption was the colonial notion that the inhabitants of the region had little regard for their past and were far too unsophisticated to appreciate its importance. For Fergusson and his compatriots, the sprawl of the ancient past was wasted upon the Indian subjects. They had little regard for the Neoclassical buildings that were cropping up in the empire’s capital of Calcutta, the “white towns” that functioned as the political and cultural symbols of Britain’s imperial might. To so many of these critics, these evocations of Roman and Greek temples—modeled explicitly on the Palladian buildings that defined British government architecture in London and the English countryside—were nothing more than cheap copies, blurring the distinction between the “purity” of Indian architectural forms.What these colonial emissaries perhaps should have anticipated is that cultural symbolism could not be theirs alone in the colony. By the middle of the 19th century, well before the publication of Fergusson’s History of Indian and Eastern Architecture in 1876, Bengali merchants—largely drawn from the Hindu elite classes—had amassed their own wealth as intermediaries of empire. Feeding their desire to make this wealth known, they began erecting bagan baris, or garden houses in the Bengal suburbs.. Many of these mercantile elites had come from rural areas, and their construction of these pleasure palaces far from the urban center of Calcutta were a mélange of Bengali and Mughal architectural precedents with European facades and decorative styles. As hybrid architectural forms, they combined a sense of these merchants’ prosperity in the present with an acknowledgement of distant forms. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4c4275f32e4465c1f49bba4860b6b2cc06dfe4ce9d8480fced1ed46d9dcc6bc1/B0004583.JPG" data-mid="220886162" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4c4275f32e4465c1f49bba4860b6b2cc06dfe4ce9d8480fced1ed46d9dcc6bc1/B0004583.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b91e4d693085175633592daccf5795eb572afb6535b88f7d044a25d09fced693/B0004601.JPG" data-mid="220886165" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b91e4d693085175633592daccf5795eb572afb6535b88f7d044a25d09fced693/B0004601.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cd90c2d1d0392f24b08e2c7b9848068e87a75d7f17065c33a4fbbfa1efea6069/B0004531.JPG" data-mid="220886157" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cd90c2d1d0392f24b08e2c7b9848068e87a75d7f17065c33a4fbbfa1efea6069/B0004531.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3be46680fed693e18436f33e22f4f8c7792b1e70fef6c92dd5b6dae13835901f/B0004547.JPG" data-mid="220886158" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3be46680fed693e18436f33e22f4f8c7792b1e70fef6c92dd5b6dae13835901f/B0004547.JPG" /> Across still photography and film, Sarker Protick’s explores the ruins of these houses in an exercise that highlights the conjuncture between the colonial past and the postcolonial present. Training his camera on the decayed garden houses across present day West Bengal and Bangladesh, Protick understands these hybrid buildings as not simply decayed symbols of once-prosperous middlemen, but as revelations of the contradictions of colonialism itself. Hybridity, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, is not merely about the mixing together of disparate styles and materials but is a dynamic interaction between a dominant culture and how its elements are appropriated by the dominated, estranging authority in a “third space” beyond the ruler and the ruled.[2] Thus, in Protik’s series Jirno, begun in 2016, the stark monochrome of the photographic image hauntingly recalls and inverts the colonial photographs of Fergusson and his ilk, alerting the viewer to the yawning gap between the colonial past and our present through the ruination of the buildings themselves, overgrown with vegetation and haunted by the mists of time. They are linked to Fergusson’s images not only by their formal qualities, but their tacit indictment of the origin of the architect’s scholarship; that is, Fergusson’s extraction of wealth through his indigo factory in Jessore—an extraction that has come into view through its colonial double, the merchant houses of the Bengali zamindars. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d21c71f714b3d4fc51b496d88693839e6d76b1a256b4f556a792760c7d104f7b/L1140907.JPG" data-mid="220886172" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d21c71f714b3d4fc51b496d88693839e6d76b1a256b4f556a792760c7d104f7b/L1140907.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/aafc3136b6fe9b8268d50cfecb0149830f14af455f31677667ab9f8e8bc25efb/L1140971.JPG" data-mid="220886178" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/aafc3136b6fe9b8268d50cfecb0149830f14af455f31677667ab9f8e8bc25efb/L1140971.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/83ad1bdf538e9964437fbe08d731c17a4fca782269e449254d0dfd2da467eb2f/L1140915.JPG" data-mid="220886173" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/83ad1bdf538e9964437fbe08d731c17a4fca782269e449254d0dfd2da467eb2f/L1140915.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/11475bd0156c98edaea91460470cbd8b327df2c0849925b7d5f6328ea75bf81b/L1140946.JPG" data-mid="220886175" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/11475bd0156c98edaea91460470cbd8b327df2c0849925b7d5f6328ea75bf81b/L1140946.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c8a8c3a458bb7773d2edbc8cb6cbef267baabba31428d38bf1150019e74b7623/L1140943.JPG" data-mid="220886174" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c8a8c3a458bb7773d2edbc8cb6cbef267baabba31428d38bf1150019e74b7623/L1140943.JPG" /> Simultaneously, Protick’s images place the viewer out of time: we are continuously placed in the position of reconstructing the ruin through our imaginative faculties, filling in the fallen columns and architraves to satisfy the symmetry so passionately espoused by Neoclassical architects, or staring at the face of a clock manufactured by a British company in the former colonial outpost of Karachi. Indeed, the images created by Protick over multiple visits to these once-majestic sites and taken with long exposures, enact the possibility for applying imagination as a bulwark against colonialist ideals. For the Bengali polymath Rabindranath Tagore, it was imagination—through the work of poetry, fiction, and visual art—that could resist the strictures of colonialist history, one which relegated the colonial subject to the past, far from the designations of the modern.[3] By deploying photography as an imaginative medium, Protick has pushed his viewers to reconsider the photographic image beyond its ethnographic colonial applications that fixed peoples and places in an unchanging, immutable time. Inhabiting Protick’s photos of dilapidated structures, the rusted iron foundry instruments that enabled the construction of these structures, and the cobwebbed accoutrement that once furnished these abodes, sparks the imagination. It allows viewers to envision a future that has been shaped by, but is not beholden to, colonialism’s past nor its presumptions of modernity as out of reach to the peoples once governed by imperial rule. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b47a37bc176d4da447aa2a727d662bd211587cca62df9d67e01a3d75b7b520d1/L1140982.JPG" data-mid="220886180" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b47a37bc176d4da447aa2a727d662bd211587cca62df9d67e01a3d75b7b520d1/L1140982.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fba1dce4be3d03c072516cdf06940197f750dc3612d7f44752a45502e2690e73/L1140975.JPG" data-mid="220886179" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fba1dce4be3d03c072516cdf06940197f750dc3612d7f44752a45502e2690e73/L1140975.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e4eb6e6efa0b4dcf059cdd6f001c1871fd2b5c8d2052ff511ec7387720d3b984/L1140960.JPG" data-mid="220886177" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e4eb6e6efa0b4dcf059cdd6f001c1871fd2b5c8d2052ff511ec7387720d3b984/L1140960.JPG" /> In his 1980 treatise on the “necessity for ruins,” J.B. Jackson, speaking to the context of the United States in the twentieth century, asserts that monuments, and the spectacle of reconstructed villages of yore, speak to a new orientation toward history as a “dramatic discontinuity” that unfolds from a golden age, the forgetting of that golden age, and the subsequent rediscovery of that blissful period.[4] Ruins thus provide a nostalgic impetus to return to an unsullied past and can offer lessons on how to revive that landscape for the present. Yet, as the historian Svetlana Boym has cautioned, nostalgia is itself a pernicious affect, one that can enable ethnocentric impulses as certain claims to the past are exaggerated in the pursuit of identitarian logics.[5] Sarker Protick’s images, shrouded as they are in atmospheric mist, are keenly aware of the dangers of nostalgia in the postcolonial context of South Asia, where religion, caste, and ethnicity are mobilized by opportunistic politicians to incite tensions. In the case of the formerly united region of Bengal, riven by multiple partitions in 1905, 1947, and again in 1971 with the creation of Bangladesh, these tensions are often placed along religious lines that divide Muslims and Hindus. Protick’s photographs, in their insistence on the hybridity of the landscape, rife with ruins that speak to the amalgamation of cultures, transcend the fixity and inevitability of ruins. They instruct us to live with others, to scavenge the past as it informs the future, to learn to live with ghosts.&nbsp; <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9ad81498e721518590db8f3a4ad53e33f15120363247a0587b1ccb0abbde7f43/B0004619.JPG" data-mid="220906596" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9ad81498e721518590db8f3a4ad53e33f15120363247a0587b1ccb0abbde7f43/B0004619.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d84dea9b49bb9d0aafd49487f54913c13a0a0bfba9b2f58031664e585864ecb9/B0004683.JPG" data-mid="220906635" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d84dea9b49bb9d0aafd49487f54913c13a0a0bfba9b2f58031664e585864ecb9/B0004683.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" 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height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d091f7787759324b993101b65358549463b2a6f0a5b32af06a9b29565bb6d863/B0004648.JPG" data-mid="220906624" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d091f7787759324b993101b65358549463b2a6f0a5b32af06a9b29565bb6d863/B0004648.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f4e83e786215ab198d653c08bf3b7d34facc917a242888b1d1e0ebb827ee8169/B0004642.JPG" data-mid="220906619" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f4e83e786215ab198d653c08bf3b7d34facc917a242888b1d1e0ebb827ee8169/B0004642.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a48c7b6ecbdadc62b668372caf37549fff64bcf9480f110fdefe5924dc8b04d6/B0004689.JPG" data-mid="220906640" border="0" 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data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e44e09cc3093b78eafc69fb1c7b6a95f5f72032e4c06a5f7bc65617d7e9b8ec8/B0004692.JPG" data-mid="220906646" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e44e09cc3093b78eafc69fb1c7b6a95f5f72032e4c06a5f7bc65617d7e9b8ec8/B0004692.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e96fd4e5305e6c6099972a3001d52e0c47b43d8a3709f1f1490e5ccc44a8eee3/B0004645.JPG" data-mid="220906622" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e96fd4e5305e6c6099972a3001d52e0c47b43d8a3709f1f1490e5ccc44a8eee3/B0004645.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6243a3ef69f22fd80d85e5b433e2c1fd8486e9ad64854a69b5b8dfa4170014a7/B0004659.JPG" data-mid="220906629" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6243a3ef69f22fd80d85e5b433e2c1fd8486e9ad64854a69b5b8dfa4170014a7/B0004659.JPG" /> <img width="2000" 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src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5f0d1d131ffd7235d30434a054cd434a4845cb5bed0bc02b3aaac56e893bccc5/B0004714.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7fa7d51441f2a4e46789cf9765e925fe16bc8d65298d6582543777b82e5a81d8/B0004754.JPG" data-mid="220906674" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7fa7d51441f2a4e46789cf9765e925fe16bc8d65298d6582543777b82e5a81d8/B0004754.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f8397b999602018d738b47a75598f48601263420509b508a66b237841350938a/B0004771.JPG" data-mid="220906679" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f8397b999602018d738b47a75598f48601263420509b508a66b237841350938a/B0004771.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7aacc69eb8869ee8ea1630b574f35573a01b435c7d5275246db142a7bd850fd7/B0004718.JPG" data-mid="220906668" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7aacc69eb8869ee8ea1630b574f35573a01b435c7d5275246db142a7bd850fd7/B0004718.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f584541c2485b7ad0912d70c572acbaa0d9b10ee5a8e020be4b5e1145dadf22c/B0004852.JPG" data-mid="220906695" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f584541c2485b7ad0912d70c572acbaa0d9b10ee5a8e020be4b5e1145dadf22c/B0004852.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6e60900396b1c2a71ef2235db01392a4c785916991ad27eeedb8d433cf83b122/B0004792.JPG" data-mid="220906684" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6e60900396b1c2a71ef2235db01392a4c785916991ad27eeedb8d433cf83b122/B0004792.JPG" /> [1] James Fergusson, Illustrations of Various Styles of Indian Architecture (London: South Kensington Museum, 1869): 6, cited in India Through the Lens, ed. Vidya Dehejiya, p. 76. [2] Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994: 151-153. [3] Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Nation and Imagination,” in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000: 149–79 [4] J.B. Jackson, The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980: 101-2. [5] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books, 2001. https://sarkerprotick.com/Tracing-Colonial-Histories-in-the-Landscape Sat, 05 Jul 2025 17:27:57 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/Tracing-Colonial-Histories-in-the-Landscape INTERVIEW Tracing Colonial Histories in the Landscape: In Conversation with Sarker Protick by Jelena Martinović / July 3rd, 2025 Photographer Sarker Protick traces colonial legacies, industrial history, and environmental change through the layered landscapes of Bengal. <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/36b6afa6fbb94fdc804400ffeee99a112370d98fd223ca1be4c795e3cbe94e0d/COB_Room-III_001.JPG" data-mid="235434046" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/36b6afa6fbb94fdc804400ffeee99a112370d98fd223ca1be4c795e3cbe94e0d/COB_Room-III_001.JPG" /> Sarker Protick, From the series 'Awngar,' ongoing. Courtesy of the artist. Sarker Protick's photographic practice draws us into the layered histories embedded in the landscape of Bengal a region divided by contemporary borders but deeply connected through a shared colonial past. In Awngar, his ongoing project exhibited as part of the inaugural After Nature. Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize at Crespo House in Frankfurt, Protick traces how the infrastructural legacy of the British Empire particularly the expansion of railways and coal mining continues to shape the ecology, politics, and daily life of the region. Moving between Bangladesh and eastern India, Protick documents what remains of this colonial machinery: rusted tracks, derelict workshops, deforested mining zones, and terrain hollowed out by centuries of extraction. His photographs, often devoid of people yet dense with human presence, capture the quiet violence of industrial ambition the slow violence of empire inscribed in soil, steel, and stone. Through his lens, landscape becomes both archive and witness.&nbsp;Awngar exemplifies what the After Nature prize seeks to highlight: urgent, visually rich work that reframes how we perceive land, nature, and time in the Anthropocene. The prize, founded by the Crespo Foundation established by the late Ulrike Crespo, a psychologist, photographer, and philanthropist and initiated in collaboration with C/O Berlin, supports lens-based practices that confront the deep entanglements of environment, history, and power. Curated by Ben Livne Weitzman and Katharina Täschner, the exhibition brought together two distinct yet resonant visions that reckon with the afterlives of colonialism. Protick's approach resists the immediacy of photojournalism in favor of slow looking and depth. His quiet but insistent images reject spectacle in favor of atmospheric, historical excavation, and a slow reading of place. At a time when photography is often expected to explain or expose, Protick’s work instead unsettles and expands offering a visual field shaped by absence, resistance, and the long shadow of empire. In the following conversation, we discuss how Awngar evolved from Protick's earlier research into colonial railways, his approach to photographing slow violence, and the complex intersections of ecology, imperialism, and extraction that shape his work. <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b177b42ad278ee59c26bf11f29cf2fd42e1527ab5f9b20d360dda90408ae8182/_DSF4946.JPG" data-mid="235434041" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b177b42ad278ee59c26bf11f29cf2fd42e1527ab5f9b20d360dda90408ae8182/_DSF4946.JPG" /> অঙ্গার . Awngar, Installation View, Crespo Open Space Frankfurt am Main, Crespo Foundation in collaboration with C/O Berlin <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2f88b4a8d86d05048a004043bb7aa180efae6fe787e04e00b7c324b679709141/COB_Room-I_005.JPG" data-mid="235434043" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2f88b4a8d86d05048a004043bb7aa180efae6fe787e04e00b7c324b679709141/COB_Room-I_005.JPG" /> অঙ্গার . Awngar, Installation View, Crespo Open Space Frankfurt am Main, Crespo Foundation in collaboration with C/O Berlin <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b29b0a1d6c42cbea7b69119807efde9350d3e19d220541171e0e8a4d15c7251/_DSF4205.JPG" data-mid="235434044" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b29b0a1d6c42cbea7b69119807efde9350d3e19d220541171e0e8a4d15c7251/_DSF4205.JPG" /> Three Hundred Million Years (2024). Installation View,&nbsp; C/O Berlin Jelena Martinović: This is the inaugural edition of the After Nature Prize. What does this recognition mean to you at this point in your practice? Sarker Protick: For me, there are a couple of things this prize represents. One major component is the support it provides. The project I was working on had already started with the railways, but in order to develop it further, I needed to travel more. Works such as this are not like studio based practice you need to confront real situations, encounter people in real life, experience the realities on the ground. This process involves a lot of logistics, including travel. Without it, I don't think I would've been able to accomplish what I did in such a short time. I usually self-fund my work, which naturally slows things down. This will still be a long-term project, but what I was able to do in this phase was only possible for the prize. There's another aspect too. Coming from South Asia, and not even from bigger countries like India or Pakistan, but from Bangladesh, a much smaller country whose presence is often overlooked. Not only in the context of art, but more broadly. We rarely get the opportunities to present our work internationally. I've been fortunate in many cases, but to have a show in a space like C/O Berlin, which sits in the heart of the city and draws a wide audience—that’s very special for any artist. And after that, the work went to Frankfurt, which is where you saw it. That is quite different from C/O. Crespo House felt truly community-driven. I've seen other art spaces in Europe, but this here felt very different. Ben and Christiana, and the rest of the team have created a very warm and collaborative space. Showing here was also a wonderful experience. JM: What initially drew you to coal mining as a subject, and how did that interest evolve into the layered exploration we see in Awngar? SP: It has an interesting backstory. I didn't set out to make work about coal mining initially. I have been working on a different project, about the railways in Bengal specifically in Bangladesh tracing their colonial history and how it still has an effect in the present day. I don't know how familiar you are with the region, but Bangladesh and India used to be one country, colonised by the British Empire for over 200 years. The British built the railways to maintain military control and extract resources like Coal, jute, indigo, rice, sugar, cotton, and tea. Bengal is incredibly fertile, so there was a lot to take. That was one of the key reasons they invested in building this railway infrastructure. Just before the British Raj left, they divided the continent into two countries India and Pakistan. But what they also did was, splitting Pakistan into two parts as well, with India in the middle, knowing it would become a crisis in the future. One part of Pakistan was on the west side, and one on the east separated by thousands of miles. In 1971, there was a war and the eastern side, much smaller, eventually became Bangladesh. So the land I am working, holds the history of three countries, all shaped by imperial legacy. And the railway was a critical tool in that transformation. So that was the project I was working on. As I got more immersed in the subject, and in the research, I began to read as much as possible. Sometimes, even basic histories are forgotten. Things we learned in school but didn't carry with us. While reading about the railways, I came across a writer who described the railway as one of the most disturbing elements introduced into Bengal's ecology. Bengal is a water-based region with countless rivers flowing to the sea, which makes it so fertile. I read how to build the tracks, the British East India Company had to interfere with those natural systems and flows of water building embankments, altering water paths, and disrupting the environment. This made me think more deeply about where these infrastructures came from, who built them, how they were built, and what they changed socially, ecologically, politically. At one point, I read a book by a British engineer and writer James Lovelock who spoke about the "Age of Fire," in which he connects to the origins of the Anthropocene. He argued that this epoch began with the invention of the steam engine and the expansion of the railway powered by coal. Coal was central not just as energy, but as the foundation for modern transportation. It enabled a scale of movement and extraction that had never existed before. And that's what gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. I thought it was fascinating how it completely shifted human history. Of course, I knew about steam engines and coal on a basic level, but as a visual artist someone who loves images, books, cinema—I felt there was something deeper there, I began to trace those connections: from the coal mines, to the rail tracks, to the colonial industrial ruins. The first rail track in Bengal was built to transport coal. It all seemed so connected. That became the starting point: how to explore this visually, and how to connect these threads within a body of work. This is how my exploration of coal landscapes and the histories they carry began. <img width="1800" height="1439" width_o="1800" height_o="1439" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e6a850640f88b2a1044cc124e76f20ab6a1d6797a555d65a7ba3d550ab2bd493/Ishpath-er-Poth_038.JPG" data-mid="235434036" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e6a850640f88b2a1044cc124e76f20ab6a1d6797a555d65a7ba3d550ab2bd493/Ishpath-er-Poth_038.JPG" /> Chunati Wildlife Sanctuary, Chittagong, Bangladesh. From the series 'Awngar,' ongoing.&nbsp; JM: Your work traces how the entangled histories of colonialism and capitalism have reshaped both the landscapes and communities of Bengal. How do you see contemporary forms of extraction and privatisation continuing these colonial patterns today? SP: Initially I started exploring older mining sites—those with older technologies, like underground mining. Many of these are now obsolete or hidden within villages across the landscape. But I also wanted to trace the continuation and the evolution of it. As a photographer, I often feel the urge to archive what hasn’t been archived. When people think of Bangladesh, certain fixed images come to mind—poverty, garment workers, "Made in Bangladesh" tags, floods and disaster. That is a narrow idea of the country. It's also necessary to tell other stories that are equally part of the region but rarely acknowledged. The histories I've been exploring are often unknown to outsiders and sometimes they were unknown to me, too, until I started this work. It's been a process of learning as I go. But I also knew I didn't want to only look at the past. I wanted to build a bridge between past and present—to understand the continuity. That led me to present-day mining sites, the more recent images in the series. There's a shift not only in mining technologies but also in who controls the resources. The colonial powers have been replaced by new authorities, operating within&nbsp; a capitalist system that is built on extraction, expansion, and accumulation. And it's only accelerating. That's where the work becomes more speculative. It gestures toward a dystopian future. Not quite science fiction, but there's definitely a post-human lens at play. JM: Well, the video work in the exhibition definitely feels dystopian. SP: Yes, exactly. And that's reflected in the present as well. I don't know if you recall one of the photographs—the blue-toned one with cut-down trees floating on water. It was taken about a year and a half ago in the south of Bangladesh. The government chose a&nbsp; forest— the largest elephant sanctuary in the country, to build a new rail track. They cut down more than 700,000 trees and levelled hills in the process. That image connects directly to the continuation of the historical deforestation that accompanied early railway expansion—not only in this region but globally. This photograph speaks of a past that's still playing out in the present. <img width="1500" height="1199" width_o="1500" height_o="1199" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9bbe51696c51c1e471d17b82d4e7387e259636ae6bf22a64caf4cdf363c050ee/SARKER_006.JPG" data-mid="235434034" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9bbe51696c51c1e471d17b82d4e7387e259636ae6bf22a64caf4cdf363c050ee/SARKER_006.JPG" /> Narayankuri, Raniganj, India. From the series 'Awngar,' ongoing.&nbsp; <img width="3000" height="2398" width_o="3000" height_o="2398" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2d9c5488c3e6793305c6436780e68d5d09da79b117a69dd800d4b9bd4842089d/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_012.JPG" data-mid="235434033" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2d9c5488c3e6793305c6436780e68d5d09da79b117a69dd800d4b9bd4842089d/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_012.JPG" /> From the series 'Awngar,' ongoing.&nbsp; JM: In Awngar, you also touch on the role of local elites in these systems. Why was it important to you to bring these complex, often overlooked histories of power to the forefront? SP: There's one figure in particular I mention there, whose story is incredible. If this were a Hollywood film, he’d be a perfect protagonist. Dwarkanath Tagore was an early industrialist in India, deeply involved in the opium trade under British colonial rule. During the Opium Wars between Britain and China, he oversaw distribution—he managed the ships, the logistics. There was a great demand for opium in China, and this was created and supplied by the British Empire. Eventually, D.T wanted to enter the coal industry. The British had already started mining, but weren't progressing as fast as they wanted because they lacked strong local networks. However, when Tagore tried to enter the business, the British East India Company denied him, as they did not want natives to own such enterprises. So he partnered with a British associate, set up a joint company, and entered the industry anyway. At some point he even almost took over the business. He was a complex figure—on one hand, someone working in the extraction business as a local, and on the other, someone constantly negotiating with colonial power structures. His dream was to build railway tracks. He’d seen their impact abroad and understood how transformative they could be. At that time, railways were what AI is to us today—something seen as a force that would transform the world. The British empire never allowed him to build them, but eventually, after his death the first railway in India was&nbsp; built on his coal mine. That’s one of the major sites of my project. These aren't stories I can always photograph directly. If I were a filmmaker, maybe. But for me, they become part of the project—motivation to go out, to search and explore. These histories aren't easily available; these are not part of the history tours. You need to connect fragments, research, find access. This takes a lot of effort and energy, but these stories work as a push of a kind. A big amount of motivation that drives the work comes from these stories. JM: How do you see the long-term impact of these two interlinked industries on local communities and ecosystems? SP: In many of the areas I photographed, that connection is still very visible—railways built to serve the mines. Some of the new images I've made—after the exhibition—show villages collapsing because of mining nearby. The blasting destabilised the land, and of course, the toxic air, which deeply affects people’s health. I'e avoided photographing people too directly.&nbsp; I'm aware that I'm entering these communities as someone who doesn't live there. There's always a risk of parachuting into a place and extracting stories. That happens in photography, in art, in curation. I am a bit cautious about that. At the same time, It's not just how it affects communities; it's extremely hazardous to the environment. A lot of these conversations—and the reason why the term Anthropocene is sometimes seen as problematic—is because it puts the blame on the entire human species. It suggests we are all responsible for what we did to planet Earth: all these extractions, the usage of fossil fuel, etc. But the entire human species is not responsible for that! Rather a very small percentage of certain countries who are responsible—and still to this day are producing more than 80% of carbon emissions. That has nothing to do with the rest of the world. We talk about these things often, and yet expect countries like India or China to stop mining and industrialisation. But the reality is, such a capitalist system has already been developed where these practices are necessary just to survive and function. India, for example, still gets over 80% of its power from coal. India and China are major coal users—but still not on the scale of the West. Without coal, it is not possible to survive in the current economic system. JM: I don't think there's an ecological solution within capitalism—it feels like an oxymoron. SP: Exactly. At the same time, these coal industries provide jobs in local villages. In mining towns, people make their living from this work. They don’t have the option to change careers. It's a complex situation. But it’s not just about saying, "You've done it for so long, now it's our turn." That's not the right approach either. But we have to understand where we are now. And think seriously about alternative energy sources. Western countries have been doing this for more than 200 years and only now are they thinking about alternatives. It's not something you can exit from so easily. And even when we speak of renewable energy—electric vehicles, battery-powered technologies—those also come with problems. Lithium mining, copper mining—have their own devastating consequences. So-called clean energy is also part of the same cycle of exploitation. We just don't talk about it enough. That's why I felt it is important to look at these landscapes as objectively as possible. To see how we've transformed the Earth, and to consider where it’s leading us. Not to say "this must stop" or "this should continue," but to understand it as a multi-layered issue. My aim is simply to present it in a way that lets the audience form their own understanding and response. <img width="1439" height="1800" width_o="1439" height_o="1800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4d8f243286bb2173236147f0b474a7395f765930b909b19e300d0830631f6441/Ishpath-er-Poth_016.JPG" data-mid="235434029" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4d8f243286bb2173236147f0b474a7395f765930b909b19e300d0830631f6441/Ishpath-er-Poth_016.JPG" /> Saidpur Railway Workshop, Bangladesh, from the series 'Crossing,' ongoing.&nbsp; <img width="1800" height="1439" width_o="1800" height_o="1439" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/16005667b6822f1dbeec4cddf72e7377b7d5af993bbaa33e0275eb73aa6b0df9/Ishpath-er-Poth_040.JPG" data-mid="235434027" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/16005667b6822f1dbeec4cddf72e7377b7d5af993bbaa33e0275eb73aa6b0df9/Ishpath-er-Poth_040.JPG" /> Parbatipur Railyard, Bangladesh, from the series 'Crossing,' ongoing.&nbsp; JM: Looking at these landscapes, slow violence — processes like erosion, abandonment, and collapse — seems to run through much of the work. What drew you to this mode of storytelling, rather than focusing on more immediate forms of crisis or catastrophe? SP: I think part of it comes from the school I was studying at around 2010–11, in Dhaka—where I also now teach for more than 12, 13 years. Back then, storytelling was often immediate, reactive—like "this happened, so let's respond." But I was drawn to stories with more layers instead of reacting to things. What happens around us is rarely a single event; there’s always a backlog, a history often ignored or forgotten. There is a drive to dig deeper, almost like an archaeologist—constantly uncovering layers over time. That mindset shapes my work, which requires observing things over a longer period. For example, I’ve told you how railways brought me to coal mining. But it was a project about a river, the biggest river in Bangladesh, that brought me to railways. At that point I was working on this for almost eight years. There's a rail town by the river I visited often, a small lunch spot with distinct colonial architecture and landscape. Over years of going there, I developed an interest and started making Polaroids of the place, which eventually led to the Railway series. From there, I expanded my work across the country and even into India, the other side of Bengal. Time is crucial in my practice, and this focus on longer, slower forms naturally emerged. JM: You often navigate between various timeframes, such as geological, industrial, and the immediate present. How do you approach representing these different temporal layers in your work? SP: When I started working on these subjects, I was mostly looking at them through the lens of the colonial era or the industrial age, which spans around 200 to 300 years at most. One day at the mine, I held a piece of coal in my hand and I realized that this small black rock that I was holding was created somewhere between 350 million to 260 million years ago. That's just incomprehensible. Our brains can't really grasp that kind of timescale. When you compare that with 200 or 300 years of the industrial era, it feels like a speck of dust. So instead of only thinking about what the British Empire, or other colonial powers like the French or the Dutch, have done—how recklessly they've damaged, not just the environment but entire cultures, civilisations, and people, one can argue that this growth also built the modern technological age we are living in. Even the fact that we’re speaking over Zoom across continents is a result of that. But again, that "growth" is just a blink of an eye compared to when the coal was formed. So I became more conscious of geological time. I couldn't look at the work purely as a human, just thinking about the human condition in the present moment. I had to think of it from the perspective of the planet—as something alive, something breathing. And in that view, we’re almost like insects. Especially when you look at mining activity—you can literally see how tiny we are. And yet, the kind of damage or impact these tiny beings cause is grand. So, I started stepping further and further back, trying to take a wider view. With film, you get to work with sound, which I’m very interested in. Sound can push the experience into another register. It helps us feel time differently. So, there's colonial time, yes—but the work also tries to stretch into geological or planetary time. <img width="3000" height="2398" width_o="3000" height_o="2398" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/9bfe21010285c94cb46e580121098833fef765fb5ee739de1c0e5cffc60f4ae6/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_004.JPG" data-mid="235434026" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/9bfe21010285c94cb46e580121098833fef765fb5ee739de1c0e5cffc60f4ae6/Sarker-Protick_Ash-to-Ash_004.JPG" /> From the series 'Awngar,' ongoing. <img width="1199" height="1500" width_o="1199" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/6aa33936471afba690e81088460822e51961f7e3a265cc90b5e3457417880576/SARKER_012.JPG" data-mid="235434024" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/6aa33936471afba690e81088460822e51961f7e3a265cc90b5e3457417880576/SARKER_012.JPG" /> From the series 'Awngar,' ongoing. JM: The landscapes you photograph hold the weight of human activity but rarely feature people. How do you think this absence or indirect presence shapes our understanding of these spaces and their histories? SP: In many of these photographs, I look at these places from a distant vantage point. I think what makes these landscapes interesting, lies in how they still carry the human presence—whether it's visible or not. The surface of the land, its texture, the scars, the machineries—it all speaks of human intervention. So for me, all landscapes are, in a way, loaded with human presence. Personally, I feel that the less I show people, the more I'm revealing what we’ve done—to these places, and to ourselves. JM: As you've mentioned, your work involves a lot of research. How do you see the role of research in your photographic practice? How do you approach uncovering these overlooked or forgotten narratives and incorporating them into your visual practice? SP: I wouldn't describe myself as very bookish or someone who follows a rigid research methodology. But once I get obsessed with a subject, I get very curious and want to learn everything I can about it. There’s a whole category of art making that's described as "research-based," and in some ways, I think most art is research-based to some extent. In my case, it's less formal. When something strikes a chord, I follow it wherever it leads. As I mentioned, I started to work on the river, then that led me to the railways, and from there to coal—and coal, in turn, brought me to opium. I'm not saying opium will become my next project—it's incredibly complex, and I don't know how I would even begin to approach it visually—but if it were possible, I think that would be the next step, because all of these things are connected. It's not just about regional or colonial history. These threads tie into the Opium Wars, trade with China, and even present-day pharmaceutical industries. And if we talk about the current opioid crisis, we have to trace it back to how this all started—through colonial practices, especially by the British empire, who used opium as a trade commodity that devastated generations in the east. So these seemingly separate elements—opium, coal, railways—actually form a kind of triangle, a tightly interconnected web. That's how my research tends to unfold: organically, intuitively, through connections that begin to reveal themselves the deeper I go. <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/33876016b5ac429586b5c1acc8890d5fee8e3aa168875487a31a5749fbd1655c/_DSC2380.jpg" data-mid="235433753" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/33876016b5ac429586b5c1acc8890d5fee8e3aa168875487a31a5749fbd1655c/_DSC2380.jpg" /> From the series 'Of River and Lost Lands' (2011 - 2023).&nbsp; <img width="2000" height="1599" width_o="2000" height_o="1599" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/50347b44cb1593161ad3802911952c8e4925342e09092fbda3114bd9cdf1000e/_DSC9909.jpg" data-mid="235433842" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/50347b44cb1593161ad3802911952c8e4925342e09092fbda3114bd9cdf1000e/_DSC9909.jpg" /> From the series 'Of River and Lost Lands' (2011 - 2023). JM: So for the end—this fire that's been burning in the coal mine for over a century speaks to the ongoing exploitation of the land. How does this enduring fire fit into the larger themes of your work? SP: The fire has such an important context. The city Dhanbad, is known as the coal capital of India, and the fire has been burning there for over a hundred years. It started back when the British began mining there, and later, local businessmen joined in. But there were protocols supposed to followed—basic safety measures, especially concerning the release of underground gases. But unfortunately, it wasn't. So methane leaked, came into contact with oxygen, and the fire started. It's never stopped. That fire, in a way, is like a story within a story. And fire itself carries so many metaphorical meanings. Across cultures, we associate fire with destruction, imagining hell, with the underworld. These imaginations are often rooted in physical reality. When I see these burning landscapes, it does feel like the closest to hell. That's why the film ends with the fire. It brings the work to its most visceral, elemental core. It becomes a symbolic closure, returning to something ancient and unstoppable. <img width="1500" height="1200" width_o="1500" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a36ec42d4f38c2529f4c5da7c12ac464eab86c9ffa84c487f9c615efbc21c3dc/H_0013.jpg" data-mid="235433844" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a36ec42d4f38c2529f4c5da7c12ac464eab86c9ffa84c487f9c615efbc21c3dc/H_0013.jpg" /> From the series 'Jirno / Ruins', (2016 - 2022).&nbsp; <img width="1500" height="1200" width_o="1500" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b0a2e570d525ab80b56c55374358b05576212b13354fa840a9c48edaa85c6a9/H_0004.jpg" data-mid="235434022" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4b0a2e570d525ab80b56c55374358b05576212b13354fa840a9c48edaa85c6a9/H_0004.jpg" /> From the series 'Jirno / Ruins', (2016 - 2022).&nbsp;JM: I agree. Seeing the work, I felt this fire holds such symbolic power. SP: It was also the title of the chapter The Age of Fire, in the book which we spoke about earlier. It marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, and it begins with coal mining. So, in a way, the work ends there — with fire — almost on a subconscious level. It closes the circle. https://sarkerprotick.com/IT-FEELS-LIKE-FLIGHT-Annalisa-Mansukhani Mon, 24 Mar 2025 19:03:39 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/IT-FEELS-LIKE-FLIGHT-Annalisa-Mansukhani IT FEELS LIKE FLIGHT: Sarker Protick’s Akash Kalo Megh ANNALISA MANSUKHANI Oringinally published:&nbsp;https://asapconnect.in/post/857/singleevents/it-feels-like-flight “In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing.” American poet Mark Strand, in his poem “Keeping Things Whole,” wrote pensively of what it means to build entireties in the presence of an elsewhere, an emptiness that could arrive at any moment. How we move to sustain that which sustains us—home, family, identity, land—defines in so many ways the method and metaphor of our lives. Reflecting on the absence that permeates our sense of self and place, Sarker Protick’s Akash Kalo Megh explored the blur of inner and outer landscapes, tracing the weight of how we remember—in its different, distended forms within us. <img width="1800" height="1142" width_o="1800" height_o="1142" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/134233e0f9a23d29b01fe9b670e9fae5d2a6f54eaa5facc5360cb3f741baaf1b/IMG_6997.jpeg" data-mid="228730139" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/134233e0f9a23d29b01fe9b670e9fae5d2a6f54eaa5facc5360cb3f741baaf1b/IMG_6997.jpeg" />Installation view of Stitched / আকাশ কালো মেঘ / Shadows in the sky (2023. Single Channel Video, B/W, 26:30 minutes, stereo sound. Edition of 3 + 1 AP. Image courtesy of the author.) Presented by Shrine Empire, Akash Kalo Megh (Shadows in the Sky) was Dhaka-based Protick’s second solo exhibition, on view in conjunction with the India Art Fair. Spanning multiple bodies of work, the exhibition unfolded as a singular, seamless experience—an invitation to see through the artist’s eyes. In Akash Kalo Megh, Protick’s images rendered a city of belonging through the verb of incompletion. Dhaka—capital, centre, home—holds familiarity and change in shifting degrees of separation, both house and host at once. The familiar is traced through the shifting outlines of his mother Bina’s many selves in Stitched (2023), a single-channel video where Protick captures her presence ever so gently in light and rain. As both title and impulse, Stitched reflects a process of bringing together glimpses of home and belonging. In the quiet constancy of his mother’s presence, Protick finds an anchor—not only for the exhibition space itself but also for the other works within it. Bina is pictured as she moves through her space, her writing and her songs, and Protick witnesses her—against the rain, in between frames—always with immense love. Mother and city fold into each other in his gaze, mantled in a tapestry that to him is at once obvious and beloved, a passage through Protick’s process of image-making itself. Stitched does not ask to be deciphered; it asks only to be witnessed, to be seen in its quiet vacillations. Where one begins and the other ends is no longer relevant—perhaps it never was.<img width="1800" height="1350" width_o="1800" height_o="1350" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac9f1ac1721d43593638d5e59d41dff49bec3218925dd43de0bec3a6f9f4c981/IMG_7003.jpeg" data-mid="228730120" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ac9f1ac1721d43593638d5e59d41dff49bec3218925dd43de0bec3a6f9f4c981/IMG_7003.jpeg" /> Installation view of Akash Kalo Megh (2025. Image courtesy of the author.) Birds are a way to write about loneliness. Often, they evoke solitude and distance—sometimes, their wings spell longing, departure and the possibility of return. Murder (2020–21), a series of striking lightboxes, directed the exhibitory experience of the works, each image capturing the crows mid-metamorphosis, suspended between form and transformation. As a visitor, you are led by the crows’ light, by their illuminations—theatrical, almost operatic gestures in the darkness. But here, the crows are not ominous, and they do not portend. Instead, they are friendships—companions to the city and its towering nests, to Protick’s mother and the spaces they share, flitting across routine and domesticity. Their gathering presents itself as an offering, a silent kinship. The lightboxes punctuate the space, weaving a fractured, beckoning continuity between the rooms. In Scaffolds and Tracks, a series of photographs, Protick traces the outline of the city he calls home, fleshing out the contours of its skyline with the relationships that hold him close. How do we chart ‘ritual’—our everyday cartographies—against disintegration? Protick’s lens turns toward Dhaka—the city drenched, its pillars and cranes leaning to the sky, its people moving through uncertainty, perpetuating life as they always have.&nbsp; Like most cities, Dhaka has a language that has little to do with the spoken or written word. Instead, this language—its skeletal substructure—is stretched and shaped by the limbs and bodies that carry it. Here, scaffolds and tracks act as punctuations in this language—things that hold other things up—and through these photographs of his own neighbourhood, Protick annotates his familiarity with care. To picture what we know too well is to produce a different kind of affect than when we encounter something for the first time. There is more sentiment, and we become guarded about the meanings we allow in. In Protick’s photographs, we witness this relationship—reflected in open pools of rainwater and in the curve of roads lifting into buildings. <img width="1600" height="2000" width_o="1600" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cfe7210c3e37325f9e1f5a42b953303961cc42f7adfc8f44571cb2e5cbc89ebc/02.-Sarker-Protick_001_11.JPG" data-mid="228730180" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cfe7210c3e37325f9e1f5a42b953303961cc42f7adfc8f44571cb2e5cbc89ebc/02.-Sarker-Protick_001_11.JPG" /> <img width="1600" height="2000" width_o="1600" height_o="2000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/916da8a98d776929c6c618d11477bfcf0e51804c32957ba9db35124368204540/03.-Sarker-Protick_002_1.JPG" data-mid="228730181" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/916da8a98d776929c6c618d11477bfcf0e51804c32957ba9db35124368204540/03.-Sarker-Protick_002_1.JPG" /> From the series Scaffolds and Tracks (2024—ongoing. Inkjet Prints,17.5 X 12.5 inches each, set of 6. Edition of 5 + 2 AP.) A welcome addition to navigating the exhibition, Arushi Vats’ texts wove poetic insertions into the space, unfolding alongside the works and enveloping the viewer in verse and its possibilities. With great sensitivity, they attuned one to the many nuances of Protick’s work, conversing with and reading his images as one might read a poem—closely, intuitively and with care. In a city, the open sky is an affordance. Across the composite parts of Akash Kalo Megh, the image of the sky becomes a letter to its inordinacy. Protick moves away from placid blues and into richer greys, into wetter seasons and deeper relationships, making us more than viewers—confidantes in this homecoming. His images trace the ways in which progress or development continues to be misspelled, the ways in which these misspellings shape the landscape. And yet, the act of making the unfamiliar familiar is what eventually defines the everyday as it is performed. More than an accepted reality, the everyday—experienced by different people, across different lives—is a performance in itself. Upon a closer look, Protick’s images hold certain motifs to which he returns, almost lyrically. The train echoes in the video, its silhouette appearing in fragments across photographs of his neighbourhood; the rain repeats, in sound and in his visual diaries; his mother emerges as a poem in vignettes, narrated verse by verse. These motifs—repetitions, the same journey taken over and over—become a study of our orbital ways of being. They are akin to the minutiae we reread every day, tracing the rhythms of memory, movement and belonging that shape our lexicons—our languages of the self. <img width="1135" height="1419" width_o="1135" height_o="1419" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/280737a0ce01073fe1e2f5ede4bdf26e76c10548e38e50762d764e68d6fd14af/01.-Sarker-Protick_Murder.jpg" data-mid="228730243" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/280737a0ce01073fe1e2f5ede4bdf26e76c10548e38e50762d764e68d6fd14af/01.-Sarker-Protick_Murder.jpg" /> From the series Murder (2020–21. Lightbox, 40 x 30 inches. Edition of 5 + 2 AP.) To learn more about Sarker Protick’s work, revisit the episode of In Person in which the artist and curator presents a walkthrough of his exhibition Nirbodhi/Time Stands Still (2022) as well as Veerangana Solanki’s two-part conversation with the artist about his Time Trilogy and on his light and sound installations. All works from Akash Kalo Megh (2025) by Sarker Protick. Images courtesy of the artist unless otherwise mentioned. https://sarkerprotick.com/ASIA-Pacific-Triennial-of-Contemporary-Art-Tarun-Nagesh Sat, 31 Aug 2024 09:10:29 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/ASIA-Pacific-Triennial-of-Contemporary-Art-Tarun-Nagesh LEEN The 11th ASIA Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4053d0e3e6e46f733bad9fdf87abc5b2d278d0580327e0f1d446127f5d468bbb/APT_001.JPG" data-mid="226353227" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4053d0e3e6e46f733bad9fdf87abc5b2d278d0580327e0f1d446127f5d468bbb/APT_001.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4a8e4fbf2691d0412ef6b9eeabcc6b4f0fdad4dba8be2486d6e30d367fe0c5b5/APT_002.JPG" data-mid="226353233" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4a8e4fbf2691d0412ef6b9eeabcc6b4f0fdad4dba8be2486d6e30d367fe0c5b5/APT_002.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c5932a8ac54f310ce92871d8fb4f406f1b4883e32b3f2fe1c0ded7fbeec16776/APT_003.JPG" data-mid="226353238" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c5932a8ac54f310ce92871d8fb4f406f1b4883e32b3f2fe1c0ded7fbeec16776/APT_003.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ed10e49f07193854b661911f85b40d969b55dd35f69950658791e968435551ce/APT_004.JPG" data-mid="226353243" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ed10e49f07193854b661911f85b40d969b55dd35f69950658791e968435551ce/APT_004.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1333" width_o="2000" height_o="1333" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c61c75427591b16f0357c71eff5930caf44c42cbe70b679c49d59069bf68c216/APT_005.JPG" data-mid="226353245" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c61c75427591b16f0357c71eff5930caf44c42cbe70b679c49d59069bf68c216/APT_005.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/506abefda14a741af39e09bfec2def2337a0d6b950336afad3f583cc9b3bd09a/APT_006.JPG" data-mid="226353246" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/506abefda14a741af39e09bfec2def2337a0d6b950336afad3f583cc9b3bd09a/APT_006.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/1a1caa8dcca9c43c67f7ae0c0524b6de543a91f39003658754185436c2875a64/APT_007.JPG" data-mid="226353247" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/1a1caa8dcca9c43c67f7ae0c0524b6de543a91f39003658754185436c2875a64/APT_007.JPG" /> <img width="2000" height="1334" width_o="2000" height_o="1334" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4af1b08774e0a3537b3a7238bc7842c98a5ec9ffa484c1d4139869f344f1cdbb/APT_008.JPG" data-mid="226353248" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4af1b08774e0a3537b3a7238bc7842c98a5ec9ffa484c1d4139869f344f1cdbb/APT_008.JPG" /> Sarker Protick’s preoccupation with the waterways of the Padma River – which branches from the Ganges across India’s border and continues through Bangladesh – has spanned his career. Created over 13 years, Protick’s ‘লীন, Of River and Lost Lands’ series 2011–ongoing chronicles a web of narratives across time and place to reveal what he describes as a ‘relationship of intimacy and ruthlessness between nature and humans on the margins’. Damming from across the border with India together with periodic flooding and the impacts of industrial facilities, have had devastating effects on the Padma River, resulting in decades of widespread erosion, broader environmental changes and large numbers of ecological refugees. ‘লীন, Of River and Lost Lands’ captures the incongruous river system and reveals the human presence playing quiet witness in the background. The series is split across several groups of images that ruminate on different energies and aspects of the changing river environments, and the disappearance of landscape and life along the vast river system is a continuing theme. In the artist’s words, his photographs exist ‘as the last remnants of these vanished and vanishing lands. Most places seen in these photographs have ceased to exist.’ সরকার প্রতীকের জলধারা, নদ-নদী, তার পথ ও প্রবাহ নিয়ে ভাবনা তাকে পদ্মার অববাহিকায় পৌঁছে দেয়। পদ্মাকে ঘিরে তার কর্মজীবনের বৃহদাংশ, এক যুগের অধিক সময় (১৩ বছর ও চলমান) ধরে বিস্তৃত। পদ্মা-গঙ্গার বৃহত্তর শাখা নদী, ভারতীয় সীমানা অতিক্রম করে বাংলাদেশে প্রবেশ করে পদ্মা নামে রূপান্তরিত ও প্রবাহিত হয়। নিরীক্ষার প্রয়াসে প্রতীক ভিন্ন ঋতু, তার পরিবর্তন, তাকে ঘিরে জনপদের পরিবর্তিত জীবনধারণ ও যাপন, প্রতিভূত সমস্যা ও সংগ্রামের বিবর্ণ চিত্র রচিত করছেন। তার ভাষায় “প্রকৃতি ও প্রান্তিক মানুষের আত্মিক ও বৈরী সম্পর্কের কথা বলে’’ - তার এই কাজ। ভৌগলিক অবস্থানে ভাটির দেশের অপর সীমানায় উজানের ভারত বাঁধ নির্মান ও ইচ্ছামাফিক জলবন্টন, যার ফলে ধারাবাহিক বন্যা ও প্রাকৃতিক বিপর্যয় বাংলাদেশের জন্য এক অমিমাংসিত রাজনৈতিক পরিহাস হিসেবে দেখেন অনেক পরিবেশ বিশেষজ্ঞরা। তাছাড়া অপরিকল্পিত বৈধ-অবৈধ স্থাপনা, শিল্প কারখানা ও তার দূষণ পদ্মার উপর ধ্বংসাত্মক প্রভাব বিস্তার করেছে। যার প্রভাবে বিগত কয়েক দশক ধরে ব্যাপক পরিবেশগত পরিবর্তন ও ক্ষয়-ক্ষতির সম্মুখীন হয় এই জনপদ ঘিরে থাকা মানুষ ও জীববৈচিত্রের, এবং সৃষ্টি হয় বিপুল সংখ্যক পরিবেশ শরনার্থী। “লীন, Of River and Lost Lands”. অসংঙ্গতিপূর্ণ নদ-নদী ও তার বণ্টন ব্যবস্থাকে ঘিরে তৈরি হওয়া প্রাকৃতিক ও মনুষ্যসৃষ্ট সংঘাতের নীরব সাক্ষী। যা সময়ের যাত্রায় বিভিন্ন শাখা-প্রশাখার বিস্তার করছে স্থির-চলমান চিত্রে ও জনপদের সেসব প্রান্তিক মানুষের সাক্ষাৎকারে যারা এই ভাঙ্গা-গড়ার প্রতিচ্ছবি বহণ করে। এ কাজ পরিবর্তনশীল নদ-নদী, পরিবেশকে ঘিরে বিভিন্ন শক্তি, তার প্রভাব এবং জল ও স্থলের সম্পর্ক ও তাকে ঘিরে তৈরি হওয়া রাজনীতি, ভূ-রাজনীতি তার প্রেক্ষিতে মানুষের ও জীব বৈচিত্রের চলমান দূর্ভোগ, বিলীন হয়ে যাওয়া জনপদ, ভূমি ও আবাস্থল, জীবন ও স্মৃতির গাঁথা। শিল্পীর ভাষায় তার চিত্রগুলি এই বিলুপ্ত ও বিলুপ্তপ্রায় ভূমির শেষ অবশিষ্টাংশ। এই ছবিগুলোতে দেখা বেশিরভাগ স্থানের অস্তিত্ব আর নেই, বিলীন হয়ে গেছে বিশাল নদীগহ্বরে। https://sarkerprotick.com/Aperture-Introducing Sat, 05 Jul 2025 18:30:50 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/Aperture-Introducing A Photographer Who Built a Career Through ListeningBy Varun Nayar&nbsp; https://aperture.org/editorial/a-photographer-who-built-a-career-through-listening/ <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/33876016b5ac429586b5c1acc8890d5fee8e3aa168875487a31a5749fbd1655c/_DSC2380.jpg" data-mid="235434811" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/33876016b5ac429586b5c1acc8890d5fee8e3aa168875487a31a5749fbd1655c/_DSC2380.jpg" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing Sarker Protick found photography through music. Growing up in Dhaka in the 1990s, he remembers his mother’s fondness for singing and his father’s love of the Doors, Leonard Cohen, and the Beatles. “My father wasn’t a musician,” he recalls. “But he was a very good listener.” In college, Protick learned to play guitar and then the piano, formed a band, and began writing his own music. Photography was merely a hobby then, a way of documenting life in college, his friends, and his city. After some encouragement from an uncle who saw his pictures, Protick decided to enroll in night classes at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute in 2009. Established in 1998 by the photographer and activist Shahidul Alam, Pathshala was (and still is) unlike any other institution in South Asia, founded with a strong documentary focus. When Protick arrived, he was surrounded by photojournalists from the region, but it wasn’t until he saw the work of Robert Adams and William Eggleston, another photographer-musician, that he felt a deep resonance. “This is what photography can also be,” he recalls thinking. “This is what I wanted to create.” <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/69a9c3e092659c4014ba7b4e0708d32c069bfdfe937f51e53a96540b87cc83c8/_DSC5677.jpg" data-mid="235434711" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/69a9c3e092659c4014ba7b4e0708d32c069bfdfe937f51e53a96540b87cc83c8/_DSC5677.jpg" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing Protick splits music and images as two distinct parts of his journey as an artist, but over the last fifteen years—and across projects spanning photography, video, and sound—he’s built a career out of listening. His work uses historical frameworks rooted in Bangladesh and the wider Bengal region to unpack questions about photography’s relationship to time and memory. Combining deep research, a patient eye, and an intuition for visual rhythm, his approach negotiates the impulses of the photojournalist with those of the musician. “Musical composition is such an editorial process; you build a logic through it,” he says. “That selectiveness is vital, and it came to me naturally as a photographer.” Protick’s compositions are quiet and spacious, inviting a wide field for association despite their highly specific context. In one of his earliest series, Leen (Of River and Lost Lands) (2011–ongoing), he photographs the Padma River that cuts through Bangladesh. Waterways dominate the country’s topography, and the river is embedded into its national and cultural story. In college, Protick read the novel Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of the Padma) by prolific Bengali writer Manik Bandopadhyay, which exposed him to the narrative potential of the river, an artery signaling both life and destruction. <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/afe6eea59a390f6cf268ead8a08785da45a4dda1884c8b059e13f90ae74564f1/Mr.---Mrs-Das_0031.jpg" data-mid="235434786" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/afe6eea59a390f6cf268ead8a08785da45a4dda1884c8b059e13f90ae74564f1/Mr.---Mrs-Das_0031.jpg" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. &amp; Mrs. Das, 2012–16 <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/10249d9e136799ecb6c5f9d5dfb915b437fc8fb12d17465411a556ed62e0df89/Mr.---Mrs-Das_0029.jpg" data-mid="235434787" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/10249d9e136799ecb6c5f9d5dfb915b437fc8fb12d17465411a556ed62e0df89/Mr.---Mrs-Das_0029.jpg" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Mr. &amp; Mrs. Das, 2012–16 He later drew a connection to the American highway, and the work of Robert Frank, Ed Ruscha, and Stephen Shore from the 1950s to ’70s. “In the US, the entire country is road,” Protick says. “But it’s not the same here. The traveling mode is the river, and it’s always been the lifeblood.” On the riverbanks, land and livelihoods are at perpetual risk of being swallowed up by flooding. Over multiple trips, Protick observed the Padma’s eroding embankments with great care, using a subdued photographic palette to represent the calm yet alarming ticking of a geological clock. In the series Mr. &amp; Mrs. Das (2012–16), Protick telescopes into a single apartment in Dhaka, where he photographs his aging grandparents in their final days. His images of sparse interiors contrast with archival imagery of his subjects’ life as a young couple. The whitened, near-clinical palette reappears, isolating seemingly nondescript objects—telephones, vases, frames, loose wires, suitcases—to tell a larger story through fragments. As on the river, Protick attempts to grasp time’s pervasive crawl, and from this stillness honors the ordinary, intimate details that furnish a shared life. <img width="2000" height="1500" width_o="2000" height_o="1500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b91e4d693085175633592daccf5795eb572afb6535b88f7d044a25d09fced693/B0004601.JPG" data-mid="235434792" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b91e4d693085175633592daccf5795eb572afb6535b88f7d044a25d09fced693/B0004601.JPG" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation), 2016–21 Nature, memory, and time gradually became thematic tentpoles for Protick. His video work Raśmi (2017–20) projects these ideas onto a cosmic scale. A montage of images creates a constellation of flashing associations between light and dark, abstract and figurative scenes, and planetary and microscopic degrees—all layered over music composed by Protick himself. We move from lightspeed to the lumbered march of historical time in the series Jirno (2016–ongoing), meaning “ruins” in Bangla. Here, Protick uses serene, long-exposure compositions to depict abandoned feudal estates, once owned by Hindu landlords from pre-Partition Bengal, now decayed and returning to the landscape. <img width="1439" height="1800" width_o="1439" height_o="1800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/44f7dc3038cc5e617ed3b99fbaf9620c9dc459ee32d4624bbb2e8c13a6a2f9a1/JIRNO_Sarker-Protick_0014.jpg" data-mid="235434803" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/44f7dc3038cc5e617ed3b99fbaf9620c9dc459ee32d4624bbb2e8c13a6a2f9a1/JIRNO_Sarker-Protick_0014.jpg" /> <img width="1439" height="1800" width_o="1439" height_o="1800" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4f68a061672417e79a078bdbe28edb99d656a4d0efc2f4d75aefefa5052cfdce/JIRNO_Sarker-Protick_0023.jpg" data-mid="235434805" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4f68a061672417e79a078bdbe28edb99d656a4d0efc2f4d75aefefa5052cfdce/JIRNO_Sarker-Protick_0023.jpg" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Jirno (Spaces of Separation),&nbsp; 2016–21 The images, shot in black-and-white and often in hazy conditions, force dense greenery to flatten against the buildings’ architectural contours. “There’s always an extra thing happening, even in a very static, still moment,” Protick says of his approach. “Nature becomes more present in the photograph.” The colonial-era buildings stand as frozen testaments of the region’s transformation (or lack thereof), and the place of the past in the present. If the story of Bengal over the twentieth century is in some ways the story of migration, Protick mines for what is left behind. <img width="2000" height="1600" width_o="2000" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e10c05ba014431fa6f3676c3dcd11617ec89a05961c588bcad21a06047f3b8ca/_DSC5373.jpg" data-mid="235434818" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e10c05ba014431fa6f3676c3dcd11617ec89a05961c588bcad21a06047f3b8ca/_DSC5373.jpg" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Leen (Of River and Lost Lands), 2011–ongoing <img width="1800" height="1439" width_o="1800" height_o="1439" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0d8ce79a20f5dc73b2cf442cca0f710b37b59cc227a1c586a308e50e64e10667/Ishpath-er-Poth_035.JPG" data-mid="235434823" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0d8ce79a20f5dc73b2cf442cca0f710b37b59cc227a1c586a308e50e64e10667/Ishpath-er-Poth_035.JPG" /> Sarker Protick, from the series Ishpather Poth (Crossing), 2019–23 The marks of movement reemerge as a theme in Ishpather Poth (Crossing) (2017–23), which traces the built legacy of the Bangladesh Railway, once part of the sprawling train network that traversed the historical Bengal region. Following two partitions—of India in 1947 and Pakistan in 1971—many lines on the railway were severed from their ends. As in Jirno, Protick expresses historical time through the stoic language of the built form; industrial remnants of colonial rail workshops and power stations, abandoned offices and bungalows, and aging railway towns. In one image, the steel mouth of the Hardinge Bridge opens into a mile of track over the Padma. The bridge—which evokes the twin legacies of colonial engineering and the Bangladesh Liberation War—also appears in the Leen series, this time from the perspective of the Padma below. Both projects brought Protick back to the Pabna District in central Bangladesh, home to one of the largest railway junctions in the country, and to the Padma. “Every time I finish a project, I somehow find a layer for another,” he says. https://sarkerprotick.com/STIR-WORLD-Sukanya-Deb Fri, 25 Nov 2022 21:46:34 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/STIR-WORLD-Sukanya-Deb <img width="300" height="108" width_o="300" height_o="108" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5532b18c5f4bdff9c18b19add510aed8008d3e90ab19bc4bbaf9d311c971e203/stirworld-logo-d.svg" data-mid="160167344" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/300/i/5532b18c5f4bdff9c18b19add510aed8008d3e90ab19bc4bbaf9d311c971e203/stirworld-logo-d.svg" /> Solo exhibition by Sarker Protick looks at the unyielding passage of time. Sukanya Deb 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. -&nbsp;by Sukanya Deb <img width="2000" height="1429" width_o="2000" height_o="1429" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f495c630ad8b43a9c04105b862ee8f3ccb4158ea126ae7890454eacada62bc69/_1370448.JPG" data-mid="160167329" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/f495c630ad8b43a9c04105b862ee8f3ccb4158ea126ae7890454eacada62bc69/_1370448.JPG" /> 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.” <img width="1500" height="1200" width_o="1500" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0bc624b539adb3388bbb0e17afa04ce6c0eec15371d62efeedb86ee0818c1938/Jirno_0001.jpg" data-mid="160167493" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0bc624b539adb3388bbb0e17afa04ce6c0eec15371d62efeedb86ee0818c1938/Jirno_0001.jpg" /> 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. <img width="2000" height="1429" width_o="2000" height_o="1429" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fa3fa2d7f966f6e5acfc7b4ab5372bc03c918fbabb1980f583d0c4934cdeee2f/_1370035.JPG" data-mid="160167499" border="0" data-no-zoom data-icon-mode src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/fa3fa2d7f966f6e5acfc7b4ab5372bc03c918fbabb1980f583d0c4934cdeee2f/_1370035.JPG" /> Installation view: Jirno / Ruins at Nirobodhi&nbsp;at Shrine Empire. Image Courtesy of the artist and Shrine EmpireProtick 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.” <img width="1800" height="1200" width_o="1800" height_o="1200" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3872f95b401426fe58438cc5e594defe956d4db0740fd7fe00368858ada26a7b/Mr.---Mrs-Das_0029.jpg" data-mid="167298759" border="0" data-no-zoom src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3872f95b401426fe58438cc5e594defe956d4db0740fd7fe00368858ada26a7b/Mr.---Mrs-Das_0029.jpg" /> From the series, Mr and Mrs Das, 2012-16,&nbsp;Image: Courtesy of the artist and Shrine EmpireProtick’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. <img width="2000" height="1429" width_o="2000" height_o="1429" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dceca3c2685d977452daec4ee4a9f2be6feb9297cd9a271e97b72b4ab95b4f21/_1370240.JPG" data-mid="160167621" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dceca3c2685d977452daec4ee4a9f2be6feb9297cd9a271e97b72b4ab95b4f21/_1370240.JPG" />Installation image of ‘Mr and Mrs Das’ at Nirobodhi&nbsp;at Shrine Empire. Image: Courtesy of the artist and Shrine Empire Given 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. <img width="2000" height="1429" width_o="2000" height_o="1429" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4b20fca2a4220d30b551d164f4147665edfa285630f30cacc0cd939dd4a6fee3/_1370474.JPG" data-mid="160167648" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4b20fca2a4220d30b551d164f4147665edfa285630f30cacc0cd939dd4a6fee3/_1370474.JPG" />Still from Raśmi / Ray, 2017-20, Film. Image: Courtesy of – the artist and Shrine Empire ORIGINAL ARTICLE ︎ &nbsp;https://tinyurl.com/3saacmem https://sarkerprotick.com/Crossing-Bengal-Naeem-Mohaiemen Fri, 23 Sep 2022 15:11:14 +0000 Sarker Protick https://sarkerprotick.com/Crossing-Bengal-Naeem-Mohaiemen CROSSING [compiliation] <img width="1999" height="2500" width_o="1999" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c7cd47cc316ace84eb05db33337414a3fe34f22bdd2470b1d8405e205ba77154/MM9935_220630_0037.jpg" data-mid="155472967" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c7cd47cc316ace84eb05db33337414a3fe34f22bdd2470b1d8405e205ba77154/MM9935_220630_0037.jpg" /> <img width="1999" height="2500" width_o="1999" height_o="2500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/bb44a536b7770ec6c5b7e59fb3bf9dace1c4b756d113c123df0751d4280c017a/MM9935_220523_0008.jpg" data-mid="153773549" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/bb44a536b7770ec6c5b7e59fb3bf9dace1c4b756d113c123df0751d4280c017a/MM9935_220523_0008.jpg" /> ︎READ: ︎︎︎&nbsp;CHAPTER ONE: https://sarkerprotick.com/Ishpater-Poth ︎︎︎ NATIONAL GEOGRAPHY:&nbsp; https://tinyurl.com/2ejj5rnu ︎︎︎&nbsp;DHAKA TRIBUNE:&nbsp; https://tinyurl.com/4tj69adw