Sunset Kino – Sarker Protick
31. 7. 24, 9 p.m.

The Sunset Kino 2024 offers a unique blend of outdoor avant-garde cinema inthe garden of the Salzburger Kunstverein. Each 90-minute screening isintroduced by the invited artist and followed by a Q&A, providing insightfulcontext to the films. The programmers this year are Neha Choksi (USA),Sarker Protick (BD), and Karol Radziszewski (PL).Guests can enjoy picnic tables and an on-site bar, with the option to bringtheir own food or purchase meals from our restaurant. Screenings begin after9 PM, and in the event of rain, they will be held inside the SalzburgerKunstverein. Admission is free.

3 Films by Sarker Protick (BD).
31.07.2024 21:00
Introduction by Simone Rudolph, Salzburg International Summer Academy. Followed by a Q&A with Sarker Protick and Simone Rudolph.

Stitched, 2023, 27 min
O Great Life! / অন্তঃশিরা, 2020, 23 min
রশ্মি / Raśmi / Ray, 2020, 9 min

Stitched, 2023, 27 min
Light and sound travel through ether. Stitched builds its way from Dhaka city to the artist’s neighbourhood since childhood. The installation weaves its way through multiple series of images from Protick’s ongoing work to connect with a film whose sound becomes the narrative for the space. The interspecies bonds that develop with time are observed through the story of a retired woman, a single widowed mother, the artist’s mother. A lifelong passion and relationship, the musical instrument she played on since her childhood was the harmonium. Life in the city leads to this chapter of retirement and longing that turns back outside to the relationships that shift from humans to crows, to animals and plants that take over abandoned spaces, to the streets and into ether, into flight.

O Great Life! / অন্তঃশিরা, 2020, 23 min
“if only the world were ending tomorrow…”, a line from Franz Kafka’s letter to Milena, echoes abysmally in the midst of a global shutdown. Suddenly time seems so elastic, it fails to draw the line of ‘when’ we are. The collective grief of many deaths numbs the mind. The fundamental question rises, the mind attempts to search for answers, and between reason and faith, the existential anxieties deepen.
“O great life” stitches multiple parameters of thought—seemingly disjointed, but within their chronological contradictions find union. Combining video, sound and text, it is a continuum of metaphysical concern. Addressing the genesis of life and light, it closes on the possible extraterrestrial biosignature found in Venus’ atmosphere. As the music intensifies, the scenes slip into colour, to black and white, and to the green monochromes of night vision infrared. The dual channels, often mirroring each other, time to time drift incoherently into their own reality. The film suggests polarity within a mind that is often restless and erratic in its corporeal experience and overwhelmed by the cosmic scale of time.

রশ্মি / Raśmi / Ray, 2020, 9 min
The fragility of light, space and time in Protick’s works hurtle into overwhelming rapidity of contemporary urban experiences in Raśmi as time collapses into a dizzying continuum. Constituted from images captured by Protick daily of his surroundings and encounters from his travels—defying geo-political anchors—for a period of three years, the moving-image work marks the existential anxieties, sensorial excess and continued accelerationism as we drown in the dregs of civilizational ambition. The cacophonous ticking of the visual and sonic cues in this work instils in us the sense of glowing embers just moments before they recede into absolute stillness, darkness and silence. Just as ashes speak of the annihilatory glory and fury they were once capable of, we are left with after-images that carry the imprints of mortality and transience.

In collaboration with Salzburg International Summer Academy