Sarker Protick

With Sarker Protick, FOTOHOF is presenting a contemporary artist from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose long-term investigations combine the media of photography, video and sound in order to create an ongoing meditation on a single moment’s transience as well as on larger historical and political formations. In seemingly melancholic images, he makes his way through Dhaka, through the neighborhood where he grew up and still lives today. Looking at the people, animals and plants, which are all to be found in front of a monumental setting of giant construction sites, the aesthetic sentiment fades and reveals itself as a means of interweaving multiple layers of time. As such, the unfinished pieces of concrete and steel seem like frozen relics of an era when mega- cities of the global South were rushing towards a future whose deafening sound still seems to resonate through the images. It is against this backdrop that Sarker Protick creates a personal narrative, an epic vision dedicated to life between the disruptions of capitalist and post-colonialist processes.

born 1986, is an artist, lecturer and curator. He studied at the South Asian Media Institute – Pathshala in Dhaka, where he has now been teaching for 12 years. Sarker Protick is also co-curator of Chobi Mela International Photography Festival, the longest running photography festival in Asia. He has received numerous grants and awards for his work (including the After Nature Prize 2024, awarded by C/O Berlin and Crespo Foundation, Foam Talent Amsterdam 2021, Magnum Foundation Fund 2018). Sarker Protick lives and works in Dhaka, Bangladesh.