This is particularly apparent in his enthralling work, Raśmi / Ray (2020), that he describes as a depiction, a commentary on duality of lives, contradictory and often overlapping. The nine-minute video is an arrangement of images and soundscapes composed by Protick that shift between feelings of comfort and unsettlement. As I write this, the sounds of introspection from the video echo through the room, paving way for my own visual universe within his own.

“There’s always a tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow does not exist.”

“Tomorrow everything will be alright.”

The words flash in intervals, revealing the spectrum of lived emotions. Appearing and disappearing diptychs and triptychs discuss what ‘was’ but also what will ‘be,’ visualised by the recurrent presence of a circular shape, gleaming against silver, and sometimes vacant. Since Raśmi was initially born out of the archive spanning Protick’s practice, I ask if he noticed patterns through his imagery that would have possibly gone unnoticed. He muses on his fondness for photographing water, trees, shapes, tv screens, and lines in the sky, which are all treated with a certain hue. A blue-ish golden atmosphere reveals itself in his sequencing, iterating that often, the edit revels itself subconsciously.

While the projection begins with a visual of a seemingly dispersed universe, it ends with a condensed cluster, meditative of a time when the world paused, struck within its own confinement.

It brings me to introspect on Protick’s prognostic work about his grandparents, Reverend John Swapn Das and Konok Prova Das, which he titles Mr. and Mrs. Das (2012-2016), that speaks about isolation much before it became the norm. The photographer relays that after many years of working for the Baptist Mission in post partition East Pakistan and eventually Bangladesh, his grandparents settled and moved to Dhaka where they started living in an old apartment called ‘Haque Mansion’ in Eskaton, Mogbazer. Protick mentions that within a few years, his grandfather suffered from cancer and his grandmother had several strokes, which caused a life of confinement within the four walls of their home.

He documents this through stark visuals of hair, skin, touch, and everyday objects, interspersing them with archival material to further stretch its timelessness. The imagery is soaked with a sense of longing even when Protick is right there, almost as if he were photographing with the knowledge of its fleeting reality. In retrospect, he wishes he was more consistent in capturing his grandmother’s ritual of brushing her hair every day after a bath, an act that fascinated him since he was young. Now, the longing continues outside of a photograph.

Since Protick is the kind of artist who makes images every single day, I wonder if there is a frustration that arises from being unable to switch off from the medium; or experience a burn out with one’s own ways of seeing. He pauses and then interestingly connects it with the process of using different instruments to make music, which allows the mind to shift and start afresh. Similarly, switching between photographic tools might enable an artist to view things differently, or find a new language to convey a recurring thought. While Protick usually photographs with his phone, digital cameras, or using polaroids, it was during the lockdown that he decided to shoot the outside world with a telephoto lens.

It culminated into an ongoing photo series of crows and ravens whom he closely observed during mundane days with seemingly no respite. This allowed him to play with light, distance, and the limitations that come with each device, which also behaved as a stimulus during a difficult time. In an excerpt describing the work which is titled Murder, he writes “I would watch these creatures - calm, majestic, resting. Sometimes they’d sit in a brief pause between flights; and sometimes they’d take long breaks, soaking in the monsoon rain. They reminded me of Masahisa Fukase.”

While photography as a practice tangibly freezes time, Protick’s imagery is also telling of a time that has passed. In imagery of abandoned feudal or landowner estates from pre-colonial India captured in his body of work, Jirno / Ruins (2016- ongoing), or in Of River and Lost Lands (2011-ongoing) where he documents the eroding soil around The River Padma (Ganges) that is directly affecting families, homes, and farmlands - Protick attempts to capture disappearing histories as they disappear, making them historic accounts of migration, ecology, and architecture.

Change is constant, and with it comes humanity’s infinite ability to adapt and evolve. The way we consume and display artforms is also largely governed by accessibility, opportunity, and technological progression. In this aspect, Protick’s thoughts on the world of NFT’s is one which is focused on serving the artist, through the generation of income and the collection of work in an alternative manner. Since he is a practitioner who mulls over the passage of time and its possible materiality ; as a viewer, it’s interesting to contemplate the intangibility of the metaverse through his work –built in a universe of its own.