Of Land, River, and Body (Mati, Nodi, Deho), the first solo exhibition in India by Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman, transforms Vadehra Art gallery into an archive of voices, memories, and struggles that refuse to disappear. On view from 17 December 2025 to 24 January 2026, the exhibition brings together three ongoing projects — Than Para, Files of the Disappeared, and Behula These Days — into a cohesive, immersive environment intertwining history, myth, and lived experience.
Rahman, the 2024 winner of the Future Generation Art Prize presented by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation in Ukraine, employs photography, textile, installation, sound, video, and text in her practice. Her works travel between art and documentation, seeking to build what she calls “alternative archives” grounded in collaboration with marginalized and indigenous communities across Bangladesh. These communities — often victims of land-grabbing, state violence, and climate-induced displacement — find in her art both testimony and dignity.
The body as evidence
In Files of the Disappeared, Rahman revisits cases of enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions carried out under political regimes preceding the Revolution in Bangladesh. Working closely with psycho-social counsellors, she transforms the trauma narratives of survivors into participatory installations, subverting bureaucratic tools like case files and interrogation documents into symbols of collective resistance. The approach echoes Roland Barthes’ reflection on photography’s power as “a certificate of presence” — a framework cited by Dr. Melia Belli Bose in the exhibition essay. Each image insists, with quiet defiance, that someone existed, that something happened, and that forgetting is an act of complicity.
Where myth meets ecology
In Behula These Days, Rahman draws from one of Bengal’s enduring myths, the legend of Behula, to reflect on gendered violence and climate catastrophe along riverine communities in Bangladesh and India. Here, water becomes both life and threat, myth and memory, body and border. Rahman’s large-scale photographs and textile works ripple with the voices of women negotiating their survival along shrinking riverbanks, connecting ancient mythic resilience with the urgency of ecological disaster.
Similarly, Than Para examines the dispossession of indigenous land in Bangladesh’s hill tracts, where state-backed encroachments and poverty erase traditional modes of living. Through embroidered portraits, field documentation, and collective storytelling, Rahman restages ownership and belonging as deeply spiritual, communal acts.
Archiving presence, resisting erasure
Rahman’s mother, a social worker in Bangladesh, serves as a deeply personal influence behind the artist’s empathetic fieldwork. Her practice is rooted less in voyeuristic observation and more in collaboration, inviting those she photographs to write, sew, or speak their own narratives. The resulting works blur the line between author and subject, forcing us to confront how history is written and for whom.
As Dr. Belli Bose notes, Rahman’s art “goes beyond archiving injustices and resisting their subjects’ erasure; they celebrate gods and make heroes relevant in troubled times.” This duality — of documentation and devotion — shapes Of Land, River, and Body into more than a political statement. It becomes an act of care. In a world conditioned by asymmetries of power and displacement, Rahman’s images compel not pity but recognition.
Athmaja Biju is the Editor at Abir Pothi. She is a Translator and Writer working on Visual Culture.
