Hi, art fellows. We do have some good news. What is it? An artistic one, for sure! There is a new exhibition in Dubai that belongs firmly on your must-visit list, and I am happy to share the details. The Sky Held It, the Earth Remembered is currently on view at Ishara Art Foundation until December 15.

The show brings together three artists — Shahana Rajani from Pakistan, Rohini Devasher from India, and Sarker Protick from Bangladesh — working across wildly different scales: from the Indus Delta and one small corner of Dhaka, all the way out to the Sun and deep space.

So what could possibly connect a flooded village, a sunspot and a park in Dhaka? Quite a lot, actually. Through three very different environmental perspectives, the artists trace what change leaves behind — and what we choose to remember. So, let’s get into the how, what and why.

We begin our story with water. It takes us straight to the Indus River Delta, where Pakistani artist Shahana Rajani looks at coastal and fishing communities that have lived where the river meets the Arabian Sea for generations. Her work, Lines That World a River, asks what happens when the geography people call home begins to disappear — and what, if anything, can remain afterwards.

What does the work actually look like?

Lines That World a River is a three-channel video installation with sound, running for 14 minutes and 46 seconds. At the centre of the installation is a structure resembling a dargah — a shrine built around the tomb of a revered Muslim saint. And its presence here isn't accidental: as villages in the delta became submerged, these sacred structures were often among the few buildings left standing above the water.

So, what is the project actually about?

At the heart of the story is disappearance and flooding. The construction of dams and barrages on the Indus altered the river's natural flow, submerging homes, villages and shrines. Some of these places now lie underwater, while their communities have been forced to resettle in other towns and cities.

But this isn't just an ecological story. It is also about memory — and the connection between people and the places they have lost. Displaced communities from the delta commission artists to create murals and paintings that reconstruct and memorialise their ancestral villages, including the shrines they have left behind. These dargahs, dedicated to saints believed to protect the delta, carry spiritual as well as physical significance.

Why doesn't Rajani just go and film the flooded delta herself?

Because that isn't really the point. Rajani isn't trying to arrive with a camera and show us the delta through her own eyes. She is much more interested in how the people who lived there remember it themselves — what makes it into the picture, what doesn't, and how a place is rebuilt from memory.

And perhaps this is what stays with you from the story: disappearing doesn't necessarily mean being gone. A village might now sit beneath the water, but on a wall, it is suddenly there again. You can lose access to a place without quite losing the place itself.

The second part of the exhibition also keeps memory close — but this time, it is the memory of space. This is where Rohini Devasher comes in, an Indian artist whose practice lives somewhere between art and astronomy. For this exhibition, she has selected Latent Fields — a three-part silk installation inspired by solar phenomena and the tools we use to observe what lies beyond ordinary sight.

What does the work actually look like?

The piece consists of three enormous panels of habotai silk, suspended from the ceiling. Across them unfold images inspired by sunspots and other solar phenomena. But these aren't just imagined visions of space — Devasher works directly with material drawn from real scientific observation technology. She has pulled from CERN’s archives, looking at scientific imagery tied to research on subatomic particles, and turned to the Hubble Deep Field — images created by pointing the Hubble Space Telescope at a seemingly empty patch of sky, only to reveal thousands of incredibly distant galaxies.

So, what is Latent Fields actually about?

At its simplest, it is about trying to see things we cannot see on our own. The Sun, distant galaxies, subatomic particles — much of what Devasher is interested in only becomes visible through telescopes, cameras, scientific instruments and other technologies. Latent Fields looks at that gap between what is out there and what eventually reaches our eyes.

And that brings us to one of the central ideas behind the work: “observation is never unmediated.” We might think of looking as something simple — you open your eyes and there it is. But when it comes to the universe, there is almost always something in between: a lens, a machine, a screen, a set of data.

There is a paradox at the centre of all this: sunlight is what makes human vision possible, yet the Sun itself exceeds what our eyes can safely and fully perceive. And our vision has other limits too: in astronomy, a faint object can sometimes become clearer not when we look directly at it, but when we shift our gaze slightly away.

The final part of the exhibition takes us to Sarker Protick, a Bangladeshi artist and photographer who's brought a project called Dhaka 1217 — a long-running visual record tracking how his native Dhaka has changed, year by year, since 2011.

What does the work actually look like?

Dhaka 1217 is a series of 135 black-and-white photographs taken between 2011 and 2026, with a selection shown in the exhibition. And Protick didn't have to go far to make them. Almost the entire project unfolds within roughly one square mile of Dhaka — the neighbourhood where he was born and still lives today.

So what is the project actually about?

At first, Dhaka 1217 might look like a record of one neighbourhood. But 15 years of photographing the same square mile inevitably turns into something bigger: a record of what the city has lost, what has replaced it, and how dramatically a familiar landscape can change without one obvious moment when it happens.

That last part is important to Protick. Most of these changes didn't arrive as a single event he could simply go out and photograph. They accumulated. An old house disappeared here, a larger building appeared there; roads expanded, new infrastructure arrived, greenery and open space gradually gave way to concrete.

But Protick doesn't just point out the changes — he invites viewers to trace them for themselves. In that sense, time itself becomes another active character in the story. To notice change, sometimes looking isn't enough — you have to look for long enough.

Three artists, three countries, three completely different scales — and yet, by the end, the distance between a flooded village, the Sun and a changing neighbourhood in Dhaka feels surprisingly small. So rather than over-explaining the connection, I will leave this one to the exhibition's curator.

And perhaps that is the best way to leave the exhibition, too: looking a little more closely at what the world around us has been quietly keeping track of.