A Trilogy of Time: Memory, Architecture and Landscape in Sarker Protick’s Images

Where do images place themselves in time? What is it about relationships that linger on in memory? For Dhaka-based artist and photographer, Sarker Protick, time appears as both witness and protagonist in the images he creates. As a lens-based practitioner and storyteller, Protick narrativises memory to create distinct layers of time. This enables the experience of heightened emotions and sensitivities, amplified further by other elements such as sound, light, nature, loss and architecture.

In this conversation, Protick discusses three bodies of work, namely Mr. & Mrs. Das (জন ও প্রভার গল্প) (2012–16), Of River and Lost Lands (2011–2021), and জীর্ণ (Ruins) (2016–ongoing), which he ties together as the Time Trilogy. In these works, architecture moves from being an observer of an ageing couple—his grandparents, living in Haque Mansion—to becoming a protagonist in the form of crumbling structures. In an anthology of visual elegies for Bangladesh’s partition histories of 1947 and 1971, the artist deploys architecture as a time teller to map decay and abandonment. Working with the interior and exterior, Protick draws on both fragile personal memories as well as more stark collective ones that reference the lives affected by the country’s history. Nostalgia and loss are embedded into the images, revealing the acceptance and rejection of time in human relationships. The river meanders its way through this trilogy as a motif, alluding to the loss of land and of homes, while also standing witness to the nostalgic arrival and departure of absent time.

^{(Featured Image: From the series জীর্ণ (Ruins) by Sarker Protick, 2016–ongoing. Image courtesy of the artist.)}

Conversation recorded on 27 September 2021.