SHOR: a Community Art Movement
Written by Aishwarya Korwar
Edited by Beata Li
SHOR is a community art initiative, which, in its very name, means “noise” or “tumult” in multiple South Asian languages. It champions art and culture through human connection and multisensory experiencesencouraging you to touch, taste, listen and even smell.
What began as intimate meet-ups across cultural institutions in the city have blossomed into a series of curated interventions and creative workshops. These gatherings foreground connections between emerging artists, global majority voices, and anyone seeking real-world engagement.
Founded by London-based curator, researcher, and creative practitioner Ananya Jain, SHOR draws from the relentless hum of her childhood in Delhi—alarm clocks, street chatter, the fluttering of pigeons overhead. Ananya conceived “noise” as a metaphor for life and art, demanding that we listen and interact, rather than merely observe.
Growing up in India and now crafting experiences in the UK, Ananya has a natural flair for bridging worlds: the sensorial richness of South Asian home traditions meets the vibrant and contemporary art spaces of London. Through SHOR, she aims to disrupt the traditional or singular experience of art. Instead, the community she’s building gets to experience hands-on, taste-driven activities – from writing collective poetry to hand-sewing tokens of love and remembrance, slathering colourful dough around and turning the art gallery into a space for knowledge sharing.
Each experience repeatedly reminds us how, in the white-cube gallery culture, we too often privilege the visual over the visceral and why we need to re-engage more deeply with our other senses. SHOR asks us to go beyond the art object and consider sharing lived experiences.
This year, SHOR’s events programme foregrounds “Taste”, inviting the audience to explore the simultaneously simple and complex relationship between food and love. Eating, cooking, growing, and feeding are all acts of care and love across communities. Through ‘Taste’, SHOR draws on that collective yet diverse experience, connecting them to contemporary artistic practice.
The season began with Ferment’ a Kanji-making workshop programmed to respond to Pickled, an exhibition of artist-collective Thin Red Lion, exploring time-based practices, curated by Nastia Svarevska with Sid Smith at APT Studio Gallery.
Kanji is a savoury fermented drink made from spiced carrots or beets and traditionally brewed at the end of winter to welcome spring across the Indian subcontinent. Ferment! wasn’t just a cooking lesson, but a collective act of sharing knowledge and reflecting on cultural practices. In the process of making something that was quite specifically coded to South Asia, many other stories began to flow and unfold. Ananya says, ‘It was incredible to see and hear just how easily people began sharing the moment they were engaged in making. Childhood stories, memories of eating specific fermented foods, time spent in the kitchen, each person had an instance to contribute.’
A simple act of making a traditional drink encouraged reconnection with care, patience, and love, transforming the gallery into an interactive kitchen lab of culture and memory. This was also particularly suited to the space of APT Gallery and Studios due to its long history of fostering disruptive and experimental art practices that are grounded in community.
The second workshop was held at artist-led curatorial space Small Time Projects, in collaboration with food-based design studio Maisongb and contemporary artist Lila Loisse. Kneading: Draw with Flour was an interactive flatbread-making session presented alongside the group exhibition Line Shifu, Bakery Shifu. Held on view this April. Ananya’s role as a facilitator and storyteller encourages experimentation and cultural exchange. The word “companion” derives from the Latin com (with) and panis (bread). Whether in its etymology or its making and sharing, bread is a universal symbol of friendship and culture, a tactile material for collective expression. Participants mixed flour, water, and natural pigments, imprinting the dough with drawings, words and shapes, and each story folding into the dough like an ingredient. ‘Kneading’’ unearthed how food carries stories and how making together can bring people together. Across both workshops, the emphasis lay on activating all the senses and breaking down barriers between people, allowing a shared act of doing to serve as the beginning of an organic connection.
This approach to curating and experiencing art is equally about access and community building as it is about creative expression. SHOR’s emphasis on emerging artists and practitioners from global-majority backgrounds further amplifies voices and techniques traditionally sidelined in mainstream art discourse. In a digital age where screens often mediate our interactions, SHOR’s in-person collective feels refreshingly grounded, breathing and alive
As a young brown curator who also made the leap to London’s art world myself, I know firsthand how isolating it can feel to search for community and a sense of belonging. Due to this personal connection, watching Ananya nurture SHOR into a space where craft, culture and conversation thrive has been both refreshing and inspiring. Here, I see a model for the kind of boundary-breaking, diasporic dialogue that I have long wanted to spark and engage with. It is proof that our voices and traditions can reshape how art lives and breathes in this multifaceted city of strangers waiting to become friends. Over the next few months, SHOR will continue to programme city-wide activations and cross-disciplinary collaborations for ‘Taste’, aiming to push new boundaries with each one. For Ananya, it is not only about the volume of experiences they produce but also about ensuring that each one is meaningful and fosters an environment of care and connection. Whilst you will have to stay tuned and watch their social media for what is to come next, one thing is clear: SHOR is not a passing exhibit but a movement that’s here to stay.
