Wednesday Walkthrough: Art & Chai
Art South Asia Project (ASAP) was 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 or painting through which coastal communities in Pakistan remain connected to sacred ecologies of rivers and sea.
Lines That World a River is situated in the Indus Delta, where urban development is shrinking rivers affecting the movements of the sea, which is pushing in and disappearing land inhabited by coastal communities. Rajani explores the impact of this shrinking landscape on the local residents who are now migrants. She asks us to consider how community-based mark-making, mapping, and painting has become a way for the people 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 was a two-hour collective reading session where participants were guided through themes within the exhibition mentioned above. The programme was developed to think together about our social ecologies (our changing relationship with water and land) and turn our attention to submerged (decolonial) perspectives. For this purpose, Team ASAP used a companion reader, ‘Life Otherwise at the Sea’s Edge’ by Macarena Gómez- Barris, a moving letter to the earth where the author maps her interactions with the Pacific Ocean in Chile and examines the role literature and art in understanding the natural world.
To mitigate our own climate anxieties, ASAP insisted on creating space for participants to share their responses to the exhibition and their personal experiences, memories of ancestral lands, migration and the changing climate. We read parts of the text and reflected on the sea’s edge as a metaphor of conquest, encounter, resource extraction, resilience and hidden imaginaries — in other words a metaphor for our current planetary existence. These discussions were paired with chai & snacks, offering a relaxing ‘chai-time’ environment where stories and anecdotes were 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.
More on the exhibition here
Event Details:
Date: Wednesday, 22 April 2026, 1 - 3PM
Location: Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross, Nottingham NG1 2GB, UK
Companion Reader: Macarena Gòmez- Barris ‘Life Otherwise at the Sea’s Edge’, Open rivers: Rethinking Water, Place & Community, Issue 13, Spring 2019
