The River Sublime brings together three films that sit alongside the Indus at different points in its long and uneven journey. Rather than attempting to capture the river as a whole, the project moves through three distinct ecospheres, each approached through the lens of an artist embedded within that landscape. The Indus is a presence that is worked with, lived beside, altered, and endured. The films remain close to the ground, attentive to rhythms of water, labour, and land, allowing the river to be understood through proximity. The “sublime” in accumulation: in what the river holds, and in what it slowly gives way to.
Films by Nadeem Al Karimi, Sadequain Riaz, and Qadir Jhatial
Curated by Nusrat Khwaja, Supported by the British Council International Collaboration Grant
Curated by Nusrat Khwaja, the project creates space for these works to exist in conversation, without collapsing their differences. Together, they gesture toward the river as a fragile and contested ecology, shaped as much by human intervention as by time and movement. The River Sublime asks us to sit with the river, to pay attention to how it continues to shape life along its course.
Photographs courtesy of Manoj Kumar