Two intriguing new exhibitions titled Lines That World A River and Cemetery of Martyrs have found a home at the Nottingham Contemporary, exploring culture and history in Pakistan and the Middle East.
It is a strange thing to walk into a gallery and feel as though the ground has shifted beneath your feet. Nottingham Contemporary’s Spring season – from Saturday 7 February to Sunday 10 May – does not just deal in mere spectacle, but in substance. Water that will not recede. Soil that will not wash off. Voices that refuse to be buried.
The season opens with a sense of mourning, in Dala Nasser’s Cemetery of Martyrs – her first solo exhibition in a major UK institution. She transforms two galleries into a suspended graveyard, using frottage – charcoal rubbings taken from the graves of Egyptian, English, Jordanian, and Lebanese writers, poets, filmmakers, historians, and journalists. Her cemetery spans from the mid-nineteenth century Nahda, Arab Renaissance, to the present day.
These remarkable figures appear as lengths of black mourning fabric hung from an overhead structure, with cyanotype replacements standing in for lost or unreachable sites. The charcoal preserves the grain and cracks of stone - the wear of history itself.
As you walk among the graves, the effect is unsettling. They are usually anchored to the ground, yet here they hover and surround you, forming a canopy of cultural memory. Nasser’s installation asks for slowness, a reminder that martyrdom lives in the body as much as the mind. They are usually anchored to the ground, yet here they hover and surround you, forming a canopy of cultural memory
The exhibitions show memory pressed into stone, carried in fabric, held in water, traced by lines
In the next gallery, Shahana Rajani’s Lines That World a River – her first European solo exhibition – shifts focus to the Indus Delta in Pakistan. The show begins with spoken language, the Arabic word for universe – ‘alam’ –and word for knowledge – ‘ilm’. Both share the origin word ‘alamah’, meaning ‘a mark’.
For Rajani, to draw a line is to know and be known. In a region where rivers are disappearing and the sea is consuming the land, painting a river becomes urgent and symbolic. Her work centres around the drawing practices of Pakistani coastal communities who map rivers and paint sea murals to maintain connections with sacred ecologies. The sea in her films and drawings is not picturesque, it reshapes the land and its history. Her work suggests drawing is not simply representation, but memory and way of holding onto home.
Together, the exhibitions show memory pressed into stone, carried in fabric, held in water, traced by lines. Visitors move differently through these spaces - leaning, crouching, following edges and boundaries with fingers and eyes.
This season signals Nottingham Contemporary’s commitment to art as something physically experienced and shared. The most radical gesture on offer is also the simplest – keep drawing and keep remembering.
Find Dala Nasser’s Cemetery of Martyrs and Shahana Rajani’s Lines That World a River at Nottingham Contemporary from Saturday 7 February to Sunday 10 May.
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