In this Wednesday Walkthrough, researcher, writer and sound practitioner Syma Tariq will guide visitors through Lines That World a River لکیروں سے دریا تھامنا, the first European solo exhibition by multi-disciplinary artist Shahana Rajani (b.1987, Pakistan) with contributions from Ustad Abdul Aziz, Abdul Sattar and Aziza Ahmad. The 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.
Syma Tariq will present a short excerpt of her audio essay series Partitioned Listening, produced in collaboration with Shahana Rajani and many others, which formed a key part of her doctoral research on the archival forms and processes of knowledge production around the 1947 Partition of British India. Departing from this clip, she will present the works of the exhibition through reflections on aural history, temporal/geographical separation and the concept of 're-existence'.
Dr Syma Tariq is a researcher, sound practitioner and writer based in London. Drawing on feminist practices and theory, colonial a/temporality and audio archiving experiments, she is interested in the relationship listening has to time, violence and extractive and differentiating knowledge systems. Her pedagogical work encompasses teaching, workshops, and talks in public, artistic and academic settings. Syma’s tēchne AHRC-funded doctoral research project Partitioned Listening, completed at University of the Arts London in 2023, focused on the forms and processes of aural-archival knowledge production relating to the 1947 Partition of British India. She is an arts associate at the British School of Athens and is actively engaged with the centre for Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice, UAL, and the Tape Letters research team. She is currently working with ECHO, Free University Brussels.
Partitioned Listening has been presented in The Contemporary Journal, World Records journal, BL79 Tunis gallery and the anthologies Pakistan Desires (Duke University Press, 2023) and Bodies of Sound (Silver Press, 2024). She has recently co-written her first piece for theatre, Unheard: a live radio play, commissioned by Justice Project Pakistan and performed at the National Council of Arts, Islamabad in 2025.