What is art for? That is the question ‘The sky held it, the earth remembered’ keeps returning to, although never quite directly.

At Dubai’s Ishara Art Foundation, Shahana Rajani, Rohini Devasher and Sarker Protick approach the question from radically different distances: a village submerged in the Indus Delta, a city changing block by block in Dhaka, and a phenomena unfolding across the surface of the sun. What connects them is not immediately obvious — the exhibition asks you to work it out.

Presented by Ishara in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation, the exhibition brings together artists from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh around the idea of land, water and cosmos as “living archives of memory and history.” Its curatorial premise is that environments bear “material traces” of ecological change across deep time — traces that can be obscured, submerged or simply beyond human perception.

At the centre of this is Lines That World a River by the Karachi-based artist Shahana Rajani, the recipient of the inaugural Han Nefkens Foundation South Asian Video Art Production Grant. The three-channel film is an expanded iteration of Four Acts of Recovery, produced through the grant, where communities of the Indus Delta, displaced by dams and barrages reconstruct their submerged villages........

© Dawn (Magazines)