Ort Gallery is thrilled to present Rooted Through Realms, a solo exhibition featuring a new body of work by artist Shaheen Kasmani. This exhibition was conceived by Shaheen Kasmani and co-curated with Aaisha Akhtar.

Rooted through Realms calls upon us to bear witness and connect the dots between ongoing settler colonialism, climate change, and local and global injustices, whilst also encouraging us to employ our senses and otherworldly faculties to collectively imagine new possibilities as inspired by the gardens of paradise.

In developing this exhibition together, Shaheen and Aaisha have been in conversation since 2023. In 2024, Shaheen undertook a residency with Ort Gallery to focus on her artistic research and development, allowing her to create this new body of work. Together, they explored themes of divine justice, mercy, and life-affirming ways of seeing in relation to this earthly plane. 

This exhibition was made possible with support from Arts Council England. Shaheen’s residency and Ort Gallery’s professional development work in the lead up to the exhibition were generously supported by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.

Shaheen Kasmani is an artist, creative producer, curator and educator. With a MA in Visual Traditional & Islamic Arts, her interests lie in narratives around coloniality and heritage, art, architecture and patterns. Shaheen was the lead curator for the Ramadan Pavilion at the V&A Museum, and co-curated The Past is Now exhibition at Birmingham Museum. She has exhibited her work in the UK and Europe, and guest lectures at universities in the US.

shaheenkasmani.com

@shaheen.kasmani

Aaisha Akhtar is a Birmingham-based curator, writer, and producer. She currently serves as Artistic Lead at Ort Gallery (2021 – present), where she works with artists and creatives, supporting them in their professional development and artistic practice via Warmth. Beyond her role at Ort Gallery, she is a custodian at Birmingham Resistance Library. Her interests include, but are not limited to, anti-colonial/alternative and care-centred approaches to making, producing, and engaging with art and literature, as well as pop culture, the gaze, disability, language, libraries and emotion.

Ort Gallery is a community-led visual arts and poetry organisation practicing equity in the minutiae of our daily work. We create spaces for artists and communities to slow down, unlearn, and rebuild ways of working grounded in care, access and collective wellbeing.

We centre those most excluded from the arts - working-class, disabled, queer and global majority - and celebrate the languages, faiths and heritages that shape our communities. From Hayati Nights, our halal poetry night and exhibitions by Black and Brown artists to our Crip Resistance programme, we honour the stories, rhythms and identities that are too often left unheard.

Rooted in Warmth and Crip Time, we place people before productivity, process before perfection and collaboration before hierarchy. We are developing Ort into a community-led organisation that is ethical by design, modelling equitable systems through small, intentional acts that accumulate into meaningful change.

Through exhibitions, residencies and public programmes, we nurture artists who challenge norms and reimagine what sustainability, leadership and creativity can look like when shaped by care, accountability and interdependence.

The current team are the custodians of Ort Gallery. We acknowledge the wisdom and work of those who came before us, and we pave the way for those who will follow - with integrity.

Friction Arts is a Birmingham-based arts organisation creating socially engaged projects and programmes from its home at The Edge in Deritend/Highgate. Since 2004, Friction has worked with communities to help people find their voice, tell their stories, build confidence and explore the world and their place within it. Our work is responsive and collaborative, using creative approaches to support individual and social change.