Asrafun Nahar Ruhin

In the midst of “Dryness”, a mist is an offering, it holds and releases where warmth turns to breath… Growing up on a peninsula where residential roads often dissolved into water left its mark. The line between land and sea shifted constantly, and the refrain was always the same: this place would be swallowed soon. That steady rise and fall of water still shapes how I sense land under pressure. Meeting the Dutch coastal regions, especially the salinity gradient in the Wadden Sea and around Texel, brought immediate echoes. The rising salt in the soil, the strange dryness in lowland areas, the small shifts in tidal behaviour all carried a familiar charge, recalling earlier changes witnessed in another place and time. Aerial roots/ Breathing roots return again and again in this practice for that reason. The work listens to the slow negotiation between water, salt, soil, and more-than-human life. It is rooted in the shifting force of monsoon and drought, in aerial roots adapting to survive, and in the ongoing question of how we continue to live with eroding coastlines that are changing faster than we can fully process.

After 20 days of activation; substances performing in space, rusting, growing, contaminating, and leaving permanent traces; echoing the mangrove as an archive of sediment, salinity, and extraction, where materials records as an adaptive archive of sedimentation, salinity shifts, and material residues of extraction.

Intimacy grows where the body leans toward roots in silence. Fingers meet soil as if meeting an ancestor, with warmth, pause, breath-- making and taking space with each inhale and exhale. Together, we gather to listen with our gesture. A slow offering: breathing roots planted with care, around a contaminated mangrove, where salt and time are thinning its hold. Embrace the alchemy of efflorescence inside the living body of roots; for its own becoming.

In my recent work for 0Y0–9, I created a spatial fragment drawn from my memories of the mangrove forests. The installation explored the rising salinity in coastal and lowland environments, where dryness and salt slowly harden the ground. By focusing on the aerial roots of mangroves—acting as buffers that absorb and negotiate this growing salt stress i built a dry, crunchy, saline landscape that is not tied to one specific place. Instead, it gestures toward a universal condition: the increasing extremity of salinity and the fragile ways ecosystems adapt.

A Site Responsive Performative Installation 2025

A Site Responsive Performative Installation 2025

A performative installation: a ritual for countering the presence of white phosphorus used during genocide that tales the story and history of soil abuse, shows the process of re-assembling and regenerating soil.

A performative installation: a ritual for countering the presence of white phosphorus used during genocide that tales the story and history of soil abuse, shows the process of re-assembling and regenerating soil.

In this work, I focus on the reality of the situation of women in a male dominating society. Although a strong position of women has been created in our society but truth behind the curtain is completely different. We can’t ignore the issues like rape, domestic violence above all Gender domination. During this pandemic those social problems have increased even more. Here I tried to create an impression which represents very sensitive n hidden sufferings of an women. In this lockdown, I tried to portray situations around me such as changing of nature, society, human behavior over all my own situations. It was very hard time to arrange my thinking in a single canvas. Lack of materials gave me another dimension to create my art work. I tried available natural color at home such as aalta, flower stain, turmeric, coffee, used paper etc. I have also drawn my own portrait to keep documentation of what I am going through.