Friday 19 September 2025
Artist Sadqain Riaz explores how rivers hold memory
Still from River Sublime - Water as a Memory of Memory and Crisis by 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 the Thames 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. Eelyn’s language about the Thames is distinct, yet echoes 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 a subcontinent produced by Partition, the crisis that flows from past to present.”
– Sadqain Riaz
Sadqain’s film in the River Sublime film trilogy is currently on view at Orleans House Gallery until 21 September 2025 in the exhibition Imagining the Forest.
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.