Wednesday Walkthrough: Art & Chai

Art South Asia Project (ASAP) has been invited by Nottingham Contemporary to lead a walkthrough for artist Shahana Rajani’s first European solo exhibition, ‘Lines That World a River’. Shahana Rajani (b.1987, Pakistan) is a multi-disciplinary artist who has developed works with contributions from Ustad Abdul Aziz, Abdul Sattar and Aziza Ahmad. The exhibition centres practices and lineages of drawing & 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.

Lines That World a River is situated in the Indus Delta, where infrastructure is shrinking rivers and the sea is pushing in and disappearing land. Rajani explores the impact of the shrinking landscape on coastal communities and how community-based mark-making, mapping, and painting has become a way for the communities to document, remember and grieve their land. Keeping in mind the central theme of care and community, ASAP developed an informal collective reading event where food, art, and community converge, called Art & Chai.

Art & Chai is a two-hour session where participants will be guided through themes within the exhibition Shahana Rajani: Lines That World a River, using a companion reader that explores our changing relationship with water and land. Together, we will think through social ecologies (our changing relationship with water and land) and turn our attention to submerged (decolonial) perspectives.

To mitigate our own climate anxieties, ASAP insists on creating space for participants to share their responses to the exhibition and their personal experiences related to climate change. These discussions will be paired with chai & snacks, offering a relaxing ‘chai-time’ environment where stories and anecdotes are exchanged and subsequently preserved in our collective memory. Art & Chai with ASAP has been developed in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary. The programme is part of the ‘Wednesday Walkthrough’ programming at the gallery.

Nottingham Contemporary

Nottingham Contemporary is one of the leading centres of contemporary art in Europe. Since opening in 2009, they have welcomed over 2 million visitors – with free admission for all – to their highly ambitious programme that has featured hundreds of artists and cultural practitioners from across the globe. Their programme champions international art and artists who invite visitors to imagine the world in new ways, and empower different perspectives into the most pressing cultural, social, and political questions of today. Nottingham Contemporary support artists at different stages of their careers – from first time solo shows in the UK to surveys of renowned or overlooked figures – and regularly present significant thematic exhibitions and major artist–curated projects.

Event Details:

Date: Wednesday, 22 April 2026, 1 - 3PM
Location: Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB, UK
Companion Reader: Macarena Gómez-Barris, “A Fish-Eye Episteme: Seeing Below the River’s Colonization” in The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Duke University, 2017)

Register Now (Free):

https://www.tickettailor.com/events/nottinghamcontemporary/2014268

* The chapter will be shared when you register for the event