Nottingham Contemporary

We are excited to be sharing the first European solo exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Shahana Rajani (b.1987, Pakistan).

In Arabic the word for universe, 'alam', and the word for knowledge, 'ilm', share their origin in the word, 'alamah', meaning 'a mark'. To make a mark, to draw a line, is a way of knowing the world. As the world is changed, and continues to be changed through human intervention and the resultant effects on our environment and climate, marks also become a point at which we can tether ourselves to each other, our communities and our sacred spaces.

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.

For fisher communities, the meeting of the river and sea is a sacred union giving birth to all life and land. As rivers are barraged, mined and ravaged, elders explain that the sea is coming forward in search of its beloved, the river. In the midst of this ongoing catastrophe, new practices of visual expression and devotion emerge, through which communities return the river to the sea, land to water, and art to the promise of survival. These expansive visual practices draw on older Islamic traditions of drawing talismans and charms for protection, remembrance and recovery. While conservative revisionings of Islam have sought to erase the centrality of image-making, the works presented explore how these mystical practices have persisted, transformed and survived, and are now being mobilised by coastal communities. By foregrounding this sacred lineage, the exhibition centres drawing as a vital method which allows for passage, encounter and relation in a world rendered increasingly unstable.