Nottingham Contemporary

This is a recording of a conversation between artist Shahana Rajani, her collaborator Aziza Ahmad and Nottingham Contemporary Curator Niall Ó Faircheallaigh exploring key themes in Lines That World a River لکیروں سے دریا تھامنا - Shahana’s first European solo exhibition currently on display at Nottingham Contemporary. The body of work in this exhibition centres practices and lineages of drawing and painting through which coastal communities in Pakistan remain connected to sacred ecologies of rivers and sea amidst the violence and erasure of infrastructure and the climate emergency. Situated across the Indus Delta – where infrastructure is causing rivers to disappear, and the sea is disappearing land – Rajani's works collectively explore community-based practices of drawing river-maps and painting sea-murals as ways of maintaining sacred relation to disappearing worlds. Unlike the colonial approach of drawing lines to divide and enclose, drawing here is a ritual that protects, animates and enlivens endangered worlds.