Tales of Injustice from the Land of Rivers
In the light of escalating violent protests in Bangladesh and growing anti-India sentiment over harbouring fugitive former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, the significance of Vadehra Art Gallery presenting Bangladeshi artist Ashfika Rahman (b. 1988) for the first time in India cannot be overlooked. “It is important to show this work here, at this moment, because art has power. It is a global passport; it can even travel to places where law or activism cannot reach,” Rahman observes. She adds that the ethnic crimes addressed in her exhibition, Of Land, River, and Body (Mati, Nodi, Deho) “are all her [the former Prime Minister’s] doing.”
Dhaka-born Rahman is a faculty member at the Pathshala South Asian Media Institute, from where she holds a degree in Documentary Photography. She completed photography studies at Hochschule University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hannover. She began as a lens-based practitioner, but has expanded her practice, as evident in recent works that encompass fabric, letters, embroidery, sound and found objects. Her oeuvre focuses on atrocities against indigenous minority communities in Bangladesh, the very issues she watched her mother, social activist-worker Rashida Begum, take on. This engagement led to early works such as “Rape is Political” (2016), addressing sexual violence as a weapon of war.
Rahman considers all participants in her works as fellow collaborators, giving them a chance to vent and experience closure, however fleetingly, through testimonies and photographs of their silhouettes. She prefers this over asserting an authorial voice. The first work one encounters at Vadehra, “Than Para (Not Land Without Us)” (2025), is a hanging rhomboid structure, resembling a carillon, made of 838 temple bells, found objects collected by Rahman. Each bell is anointed with kumkum by a minority indigenous member, forcibly dispossessed of ancestral land due to lack of documentation by discriminatory laws such as the Vested Property Act. Two grided panels of photographs record this participatory exercise, while a radio set reverberates with a song lamenting loss of land and hope.
The thumbprint on each bell -- an object that, across religions, calls on the divine -- implies collective imploring. It “unites the community, perhaps for the last time,” says Rahman, before they are displaced, receive compensatory lands (which look like soulless geometric slabs like the rhomboid), or flee to bordering South Asian countries. The installation, with its red tilaks, surrounded by painted green walls, can feel like walking into the Bangladeshi national flag. It represents both the land’s fertility but also the sacrifice of the 1971 martyrs.
Rahman’s collaborative creative approach turns macabre in “Files of the Disappeared” (ongoing), which documents survivors wrongfully detained and brutally tortured by state police, and now left with broken lives. Rahman traced such people, and then partnered with psychotherapists to help them cope with the trauma, which continues to disrupt their everyday lives and families. Gold embroidered masks obscure their faces in photographs positioned on a multipronged pedestal. Their fate appears seemingly better than the images in the next room -- early morning shots of lush landscapes, that Rahman shot moments after dead bodies were discovered at the spot.
Rahman has also explored the ecological vulnerability of Bangladesh through the “Land of the Rivers” project, which revisits the Chalan Beel wetlands. The “Rebirth of Water” (2023) reflects the photography and printmaking workshops she organized on a boat for students, whose lives get completely disrupted in monsoon, when their homes and schools in the floodplains are submerged. Rahman traversed the wetland on a raft again, from Bangladesh to India, for the work, “Behula These Days” (2024), based on Behula, a mythical figure from Bengali folklore, who is traditionally upheld as an ideal woman. The tale goes that Behula travels with her husband’s corpse on a heaven-bound boat, overcoming challenges en route, and ultimately appeases the snake goddess Manasa Devi, who resurrects him back to life. Rahman, however, interprets the tale as misogynistic, arguing that Behula’s father-in-law had first denied Manasa full divine status, and that the goddess and Behula were pitted against each other.
In Rahman’s feminist reworking, she makes Manasa the sole confidante of contemporary “Behulas” -- women refugees from Bangladesh, India and Myanmar settled in Chalan Beel, seen in photographs from “Behula These Days.” In this exhibit for which Rahman won the Future Generation Art Prize (2024), gold silk threads evoke shafts of sunlight as green fabric swatches are suspended, looking like an aerial view of low-lying bighas of farmland along Chalan Beel. The work will be on permanent display at the historic July Revolution Memorial Museum, being built within Sheikh Hasina’s former residence. For the Behula project, Rahman encouraged the women to confide their ordeals to Behula, as embroidered letters on the green fabric, which also highlights their generational skills.
English translations of these letters in Bangla, Chakma and Marma tribal languages are presented on the walls, and in audio and printed formats. In one letter, a Rohingya Muslim refugee in Bangladesh reveals her pregnancy after being raped during the Myanmar military’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. In another letter, a Bangladeshi Hindu refugee in India still aches for the night-blooming jasmine tree she left behind after false accusations of blasphemy and communal violence forced her to leave her home.
“Than Para” and “Behula These Days” are central, large-scale and suspended, with photographs of their subjects in the periphery. Both installations appear static and resilient, but ring one bell, and the entire rhomboid trembles, or nudge the raft and the fragmented swatches collide and sway disjointedly. This is a sign of the times, where one stray incident of injustice can jolt the entire community, and dismantle decades-old houses and relationships. Against this eerie reality, the element of gold, coursing through all the works in metal and thread, can be perceived as the Sutradhar, illuminating long suppressed narratives of state-sponsored crimes through embroidered text and protective masks. It even intercedes with the divine. From the youth who designed the national flag and those still protesting on the streets or through art like Ashfika’s, hope, even if a glimmer, lives on.
Shadows of Breath
Shadows of Breath, the recent solo exhibition by Bengaluru-based artist Ravikumar Kashi (b. 1968), initially evokes an association with Delhi's persistently high air-quality index. Then, at first glance, the all-white paper sculptures conjure a quiet, wintry landscape, till you proceed to the next room with the last work, of lush blooms in springtime.
Kashi, however, does not completely ascribe to this seasonal narrative. He uses paper to probe the porosity of language and memory -- particularly those shaped by regional dialects. Through different formats of scrolls, bound books, loose pages and cartography, he gives the script of his mother tongue, Kannada, a sculptural form. The works gesture toward the increasing vulnerability of vernacular languages, whose speaker base continues to shrink under the pressures of migration and globalization -- a shift reflected even within the artist’s own family.
Kashi treats paper as a breathing membrane, capable of absorbing both moisture and thought. This conceptual framework finds material form in several key works. In My Beginning is My End… In My End is My Beginning (2016)", an interactive game structured around the concept of karma, foregrounds the act of choice-making. Each of our decisions becomes a node in an expanding web of actions, whose outcomes emerge through their collision with the choices of others. Although the work initially appears disconnected from the surrounding exhibits, Kashi conceptually anchors it to the facing installation, "A Labyrinth of Destinies-A Tribute to Krishna Reddy". This three-dimensional work materialises the same web-like logic, referencing Reddy’s distinctive visual language in which individual figures coalesce into a larger matrix. As Kashi notes, he was personally acquainted with Reddy, whose imagery profoundly shaped this articulation. “Echoes of Loss: Remnants of a Mother Tongue” (2024) comprises 28 eroding book pages, a quiet comment on linguistic disappearance. “Work 30: We Don’t End At Our Edges” (2025) is a 32-foot scroll made from cotton rag fibre pulp, its undulating rise and fall echoing the rhythms of respiration. Here, paper becomes a register of the artist’s shifting mental states, the ebb and flow of thoughts. Kashi says that it is like a “constant stream-of-consciousness,” as he draws on “the Buddhist principle [of mindfulness],” observing each thought as it emerges, then writing it down, and repeating the same process several times over. This makes him conscious of the intimate connection between thought and breath. Different mental states generate different breathing patterns -- some rapid, others heavy. Developed through the act of writing in Kannada, this awareness gives form to the work’s wave-like structure, where language, breath and material converge.
A more explicitly spatial and historical engagement emerges in the Bangalore Map presented in “Work 31: We Don’t End At Our Edges” (2025). The work layers personal reflection with historical reference. “The lower white layer carries a poem by modern Kannada poet Gopalkrishna Adiga, written in the aftermath of Indian Independence and reflecting on the idea of building a new nation. This text is juxtaposed with the contemporary city of Bengaluru, poised on the brink of chaos,” shares Kashi. The two narratives intertwine like an arterial network within the human body, mirroring a city in constant motion through its streets and bylanes.
Kashi’s practice enmeshes visual art and literature. The artist trained in Painting at the College of Fine Arts, Bangalore, and in Printmaking at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda. He also holds a Master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Mysore, and received the 2015 Kannada Sahitya Akademi Award for his book Kannele. His sustained engagement with paper began in 2001, following a Charles Wallace India Trust Grant to study handmade papermaking at the Glasgow School of Art, and was further developed during a three-week hanji papermaking residency in South Korea in 2009.
Today, his practice centres on handmade paper produced from plant-based fibres such as mulberry (hanji), Himalayan daphne (lokta), banana and onion skin, as well as textile-derived materials like recycled cotton. These are shaped into sculptural forms bearing intermittently legible Kannada script, created through a labour-intensive process in which pulped paper is extruded through a nozzle onto plastic sheets. The resulting lattice-like structures balance fragility with resilience, their tactile presence animated by the shadows they cast across the gallery floor and walls.
Even as Kashi’s works generate a sense lightness, suspension, introducing shadows as an ephemeral dimension and speaking to an elevated physical and mental state, they also carry heavier political messages. By championing a regional language and culture, they speak to broader questions of identity and belonging, and offer a critique against linguistic homogenization, such as 'One Nation, One Language' policy.
Land, River, and Body (Mati, Nodi, Deho) is on at Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, from December 17, 2025 to January 24, 2026. Shadows of Breath was on at Threshold Art Gallery, New Delhi, from October 31 to December 3, 2025.