Ishara Art Foundation presents The sky held it, the earth remembered from September 11 through December 15, 2026, in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation. The Dubai exhibition brings together major works by Shahana Rajani, the recipient of the inaugural South Asian Video Art Production Grant, alongside those of Rohini Devasher and Sarker Protick.
Through photography, moving image and installation, the exhibition considers land, water and the cosmos as living archives of memory. Rather than treating nature as a passive backdrop to human history, the artists examine how environmental change and infrastructural violence leave material traces across landscapes and deep time.
Rivers, Memory and Displacement
The exhibition engages with contemporary critiques of the Anthropocene by challenging a human-centred understanding of ecological history. Instead, it proposes that human and non-human forces remain fundamentally intertwined.
Shahana Rajani’s Lines That World a River focuses on the Indus as a site of extraction, displacement and contested memory. The three-channel film follows displaced communities in the delta as they create murals and paintings that reconstruct ancestral villages submerged following the construction of hydraulic dams and barrages.
Houses, creeks, boats and dargahs appear within these works. Consequently, the paintings become acts of resistance against ecological destruction and state neglect.
An enclosure evoking a dargah sits between the three screens. Such shrines are often among the few structures left standing after settlements are inundated. Within the installation, the enclosure creates an intimate space that evokes both presence and absence.
Cosmic Time and Urban Change
Rohini Devasher’s Latent Fields shifts the exhibition’s focus from the river to the cosmos. Three monumental habotai silk panels, each measuring 3 x 5.5 metres, hang from the ceiling and carry images inspired by sunspots and other solar phenomena.
The imagery moves from microscopic scales to atmospheric forms. Devasher first rendered the images on copper sheets using drawing, acid washing, embossing and fumage before photographing, scanning and digitally printing them onto silk.
Her research draws on scientific technologies used to observe distant stars and subatomic particles. As a result, the installation treats the atmosphere as a palimpsest of cosmic time.
Sarker Protick’s Dhaka 1217 brings the focus back to the built environment. The series comprises 135 black-and-white photographs made between 2011 and 2026 within a one-square-mile area around the Dhaka neighbourhood where the artist was born and continues to live.
Here, absence becomes a carrier of history. Construction increasingly encroaches on parks, lakes and vegetation, while personal objects and traces of daily life register quieter forms of loss. Images of fallen hair, an old photograph and dust-covered books sit alongside scenes from the 2024 Monsoon Revolution.
Together, the works position Dhaka as a contested terrain where ecological, social and personal histories converge.
Bringing perspectives from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, The sky held it, the earth remembered, ultimately connecting environmental change across national borders. Rather than presenting a definitive historical narrative, the exhibition asks viewers to attend closely to subtle traces of dispossession, resilience and transformation.
Artworks are loaned from Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco, and Shrine Empire, New Delhi. The exhibition has been generously supported by Emirates Insurance.
