Shahana Rajani, Lines That World a River (2026). Video still. Three-channel video, sound, 14 min 46 sec. Expanded iteration of Four Acts of Recovery (2025), produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation. Image courtesy of the artist
Ishara Art Foundation presents The sky held it, the earth remembered in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation, an exhibition that showcases major works by Shahana Rajani, the recipient of the inaugural South Asian Video Art Production Grant, Rohini Devasher, and Sarker Protick.
The exhibition examines how land, water, and the cosmos serve as living archives of memory and history. Through photography, moving image, and installation, the exhibition proposes that the environment bears the material traces of ecological change, preserving them across deep time.
The sky held it, the earth remembered engages with contemporary critiques of the Anthropocene, rejecting a human-centred vision of the world in favour of the view that people and non-human forces are irrevocably intertwined. Rather than a passive witness to history, the earth embodies the effects of environmental destruction and infrastructural violence.
These traces are inscribed on the environment as residues and stratified layers that often elude human perception. Dense urban infrastructure belies the vegetation that preceded it, and which now fills only liminal spaces; the banks of the Indus River, erased by flooding, turn into brushstrokes on a mural painted from memory; and celestial phenomena become repositories of information invisible to the naked eye.
In Shahana Rajani’s Lines That World a River, the Indus emerges as a site of extraction, erasure and contested memory. The three-channel film traces the experiences of displaced communities of the delta who create murals and paintings to reconstruct and memorialise their ancestral villages, submerged underwater due to the building of hydraulic dams and barrages. An enclosure evoking a dargah – often the only structures that remain standing amid inundated settlements – sits in the centre of the three screens.
Rohini Devasher’s Latent Fields consists of three monumental habotai silk panels suspended from the ceiling, each measuring 3 x 5.5 metres. The works are emblazoned with images inspired by sun spots and other solar phenomena, shifting in scale from the microscopic to the atmospheric, as though taking the viewer through the body of a star. To create the images, she draws on specialised technologies used to observe distant stars and subatomic particles. Layered with these luminous forms and delicate tracings, the installation represents the atmosphere as a palimpsest of cosmic time.
A selection from Sarker Protick’s Dhaka 1217, a recent series of 135 black-and-white photographs, is displayed at Ishara. The complete body of work forms the basis of a forthcoming book of the same title (co-published by Nokta Books and Sarker Protick, Autumn 2026). Captured between 2011 and 2026, the works document the transformation of a one-square-mile radius around the neighbourhood where the artist was born and continues to live. These scenes position the city of Dhaka as a contested terrain in which social, ecological and individual histories converge.
Bringing together perspectives from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, The sky held it, the earth remembered foregrounds shared experiences of ecological decline, revealing how rivers, landscapes, and skies testify to changes that transcend national borders. Rather than offering a definitive historical account, the exhibition invites sustained and close attentiveness to subtle traces that narrate stories of both dispossession and resilience, for those who are willing to hear them.
Artworks for The sky held it, the earth remembered have been loaned from Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco and Shrine Empire, New Delhi.
The Han Nefkens Foundation – South Asian Video Art Production Grant 2023 in collaboration with Prameya Art Foundation, New Delhi, is presented in partnership with Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai; Nottingham Contemporary; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo (MOT); Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA); and Para Site, Hong Kong.
The exhibition has been generously supported by Emirates Insurance.
About Han Nefkens Foundation
Founded in 2009 in Barcelona by writer and collector Han Nefkens, the Han Nefkens Foundation is a non-profit organization that supports emerging and mid-career artists working with video. Through awards and collaborative commissions with international art institutions, the foundation provides support for the production of new work and opportunities to exhibit internationally.
