Experience nature through a multicultural lens

As South Asian Heritage Month continues, Orleans House Gallery invites everyone to rethink our relationship with nature through a multicultural lens.

The River Sublime

As part of this cross-cultural project, Pakistani Karachi Biennale artists Nadeem Alkarimi, Sadqain Riaz and Qadir Jhatial created ‘The River Sublime’, a video that beautifully aligns with the South Asian Heritage Month’s theme 'Roots to Routes'.

Each artist contributes a chapter to the film, which captures the connection between the people and the River Indus, from the glaciers of Hunza, through the junction in Punjab, and finally to the river mouth on the Arabian Sea. 

Hear from Qadir Jhatial and Sadqain Riaz, whose chapters explore the journeys of Pakistan’s rivers. 

Qadir Jhatial

From the riverbanks of Sindh to a gallery by the Thames… it fills me with joy to see the River Indus’ story travel so far to find a voice in the UK. 

My film chapter called River Allegories was the third chapter in the film trilogy The River Sublime that opened at the Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival. I also displayed a large composite drawing in twenty parts made with delicate graphite called Broken Boat. 

Despite its delicacy, the boat is heavy with memory. It speaks of the River Indus, of boats perishing on the banks, their wooden ribs breaking under the weight of time and neglect. To me the broken boat is a witness – a vessel of stories about water, people, and the fragile bond between humanity and nature strained by our own actions. 

When the Riverside Gallery, showing our artwork, opened to the public for the Richmond Arts & Ideas Festival, I was nervous at first. Would a river flowing through Sindh resonate with people by the Thames? Would they feel the grief of a vanishing delta, or the silence of boats abandoned on dry beds? What did it mean for a boat drawn on the banks of the Indus to speak in a foreign land? 

But then something beautiful happened. Visitors came up to me and said: "Your river feels like our river." 

"There’s a sense of loss here…but also so much resilience."

One visitor said: "This isn’t just a boat. It feels like it carries all our rivers, all our histories." 

I was deeply moved by these words. I realized that rivers don’t belong to just one place; they carry stories, emotions, and sorrows that flow across borders. I realized that even a fragile pencil line can hold the weight of centuries. And even a broken boat can cross oceans. 

This experience, these moments along the Thames, are unforgettable. I can’t wait to see where the river flows next. 

Sadqain Riaz 

I had the honour of exhibiting my chapter from The River Sublime trilogy at the Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival and now at Orleans House Gallery in the Imagining the Forest exhibition. My film is a meditation on the River Ravi that was once alive with stories, now gasping under the weight of industrial and sewage pollution. 

To screen this work in Richmond, a place where Turner once painted the Thames in all its light and shadow, felt like a quiet collision of worlds. The river there still holds a kind of reverence. It was lovely to see the legacy of the masters who painted Thames is being carried forward via festivals like the Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival, its presence woven into the fabric of art and community, even as time reshapes its banks. 

In that space, our Ravi arrived carrying with it the burdens of a different geography, a different grief. It asked: what happens when an artwork leaves home? When context shifts, how does the story reframe itself? And I thought of the voices of poets like Amrita Pritam and Amna Mufti; through them, I understood the river not just as water, but as witness. And perhaps, as a voice that refuses to drown. 

Eelyn Lee’s artwork, which also features in Imagining the Forest, has stayed with me. Her river [the Thames] was not mine, yet somehow it was. Her language distinct, her gaze intimate, yet echoing the same undercurrent. It reminded me that rivers are both deeply local and profoundly universal. They remember. 

Being in the UK sharpened something else: an awareness of how industries once rooted in Global North were later exported to the Global South. How our rivers became the price of someone else’s progress. What began as a film about the Ravi widened into a deeper inquiry: the colonially-carved Indus system, the water politics of subcontinent produced by Partition, the crisis that flows from past to present. 

Imagining the Forest exhibition

Qadir’s Broken Boat drawing and the River Sublime film trilogy are currently on view at Orleans House Gallery until 21 September 2025 in the exhibition Imagining the Forest.

Other artworks featured in Imagining the Forest include Anguilla Anguilla, way of the eel by Eelyn Lee and Nhemboaty – Clash of Worlds by Rafael Vilela. Together with The River Sublime, these works find common ground through rivers, caring for ecology and championing marginalised voices. 

Imagining the Forest is supported by the British Council and is a partnership between Richmond Arts Service, the Karachi Biennale and Guarani Mbya community of São Paulo. 

View a video of the exhibition