Shahana Rajani In Conversation with Niall Ó Faircheallaigh

About this event

Join artist Shahana Rajani (b. 1987, Pakistan) and Nottingham Contemporary Curator Niall Ó Faircheallaigh for an in conversation 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.

Shahana Rajani is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work engages with the visualities and infrastructures of development, militarisation and the climate crisis. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her practice. She is the co-founder of Karachi LaJamia, an experimental pedagogical project founded with Zahra Malkani in 2015.

Niall Ó Faircheallaigh is Curator of Exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary and an independent writer with texts appearing in Plinth, Frieze, Museums Journal and Corridor8. At Nottingham Contemporary he has experience working on major thematic exhibitions such as Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen (2025), Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker (2024), Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary (2022) and Assemble + Schools of Tomorrow: The Place We Imagine (2022). He has also worked closely with artists to realise ambitious new commissions and solo exhibitions such as Shahana Rajani: Four Acts of Recovery (2026), Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom (2025), Daniel Lind-Ramos: Ensamblajes (2025), Julian Abraham ‘Togar’: Rekonciliation (2024), Dora Budor: Again (2024) and Eva Koťátková: How many giraffes are in the air we breathe?(2023). At Nottingham Contemporary he served as editor of the recently published book accompanying the first international institutional solo exhibition of the late Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih “Murni”: Feels Strangely Good, Ya?

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This event will be held in the Galleries. Meet at Reception.

Speakers will use microphones.

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