Three artists from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are exploring how art can preserve memories of disappearing landscapes, changing cities and phenomena beyond human perception at a newly opened exhibition in Dubai, DAWN reports.

Titled The Sky Held It, the Earth Remembered, the exhibition features works by Bangladeshi photographer Sarker Protick, Pakistani artist Shahana Rajani and Indian artist Rohini Devasher at the Ishara Art Foundation.

Presented in collaboration with the Han Nefkens Foundation, the exhibition runs from September 11 to December 15, 2026, bringing together three distinct artistic practices around the relationship between land, water, the cosmos and collective memory.

The exhibition examines how environments preserve traces of ecological change and human experience, even when landscapes disappear, communities are displaced or transformations remain beyond ordinary perception.

Rajani's Lines That World a River centres on communities in Pakistan's Indus Delta whose villages were submerged following the construction of dams and barrages. Through a three-channel film, the Karachi-based artist documents how residents reconstruct their lost homes and surroundings through paintings.

Houses, boats, winding creeks and shrines emerge in the murals as remembered landscapes, allowing displaced communities to reconnect with places they can no longer inhabit as they once did.

One villager describes the experience of seeing the murals as feeling as though the community is living inside the paintings, adding that the land feels alive again.

The work explores how art can become more than a representation of a lost place, offering communities a way to recover their connection to a landscape altered by environmental and infrastructural changes.

Indian artist Devasher approaches memory from a vastly different perspective in Latent Fields, a series of three large silk panels inspired by sunspots and other solar phenomena.

Combining drawing, photography, digital printing and other techniques, her work explores how artistic and scientific methods can make visible phenomena that cannot be directly observed by the human eye.

Protick's Dhaka 1217 series, meanwhile, documents the transformation of the neighbourhood where he was born and continues to live.

The series draws on 135 black-and-white photographs taken between 2011 and 2026, capturing the gradual encroachment of construction on parks, lakes and vegetation, alongside the changing presence of railway infrastructure.

The photographs also preserve smaller, intimate details of everyday life, including fallen hair, old photographs and dusty books, placing personal memory alongside the broader transformation of the city.

Speaking to the Ishara Art Foundation, Protick said the passage of time had always been central to his photographic practice, shaping both his method and his understanding of the places he documents.

“Perception itself develops over time. The longer you stay with a place, the more your understanding changes with it,” he said.

Protick said his relationship with Dhaka was inseparable from his identity, as he was born and raised in the city and had never lived elsewhere.

“I’m not observing it from a distance. I’m living in it. It is part of my existence and has shaped my identity,” he said.

After photographing Dhaka for more than 15 years, the city has also changed the way he sees and interprets his surroundings, redefining his questions and understanding of the place, he added.

Despite their different subjects and approaches, the three artists examine what survives as the world changes. Their works document submerged settlements, urban transformation and cosmic phenomena, inviting visitors to consider what disappears, what remains and how those traces can be preserved.

Rather than offering a single interpretation, the exhibition asks viewers to piece together fragments of memory and history, connecting personal experiences with wider ecological and environmental changes.

At its heart lies a question that runs throughout the exhibition: what is art for?

The works suggest that art can serve as a living archive, preserving the memory of places and experiences that might otherwise become invisible or be lost to time.