EXHIBITIONS
The Cost of Entry, February 21 - March 29, 2020, Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY
FLYING WHILE BROWN by Jasmine Wahi
Sa’dia Rehman’s Investigation of Politics, Surveillance, and Identity
The essence of Sa’dia Rehman’s work is a complex exploration of the relationship between individual memory, familial nostalgia, and the body politic. Her 2020 exhibition, The Cost of Entry, creates a dual exploration of personal and collective history within the context of the surveillance state. The works ask us to reflect on how that benefits or harms each of us. Through life-size stencil drawings on vellum, tiny works on newsprint, and performance, Sa’dia is archiving in real time, preserving the rapidly shifting politic of existing. The Cost of Entry plays with the contrast of intimacy and interiority against documentation and control. The large works on vellum, Women (2020), Men (2020) and The body, A mihrab (2020) all consider the self-reflective and intimate image.
More.....
Sa’dia Rehman’s Investigation of Politics, Surveillance, and Identity
The essence of Sa’dia Rehman’s work is a complex exploration of the relationship between individual memory, familial nostalgia, and the body politic. Her 2020 exhibition, The Cost of Entry, creates a dual exploration of personal and collective history within the context of the surveillance state. The works ask us to reflect on how that benefits or harms each of us. Through life-size stencil drawings on vellum, tiny works on newsprint, and performance, Sa’dia is archiving in real time, preserving the rapidly shifting politic of existing. The Cost of Entry plays with the contrast of intimacy and interiority against documentation and control. The large works on vellum, Women (2020), Men (2020) and The body, A mihrab (2020) all consider the self-reflective and intimate image.
More.....
The Here and the Hereafter, September 11 - October 16, 2019, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury, NY
Rehman’s practice employs materials and images commonly found in Pakistani and Muslim domestic spaces. In Even the Persians Are Now Showing Signs of Demanding a Constitutional Government (2019), Islamic prayer mats given to the artist by her relatives are repurposed—either cut out or punctured with holes—and treated as consumer objects appropriated as artistic ready-made. Rehman also creates simulacra of Muslim cultural objects, either by meticulously hand-drawing them or by stenciling parts of industrial objects, resulting in Islamicate patterns on the work’s surface. In her small black-and-white drawings, Rehman uses the intricate construct of Persian and Afghani carpets—replete with various motifs drawn from the Islamic art tradition: figurative images, text, and redaction—to create a diaristic work that forms an ascetic practice.
In Bul Bul ka Bacha (Nightingale’s Child), A Rhyme (2016), a large work on paper installed in grid format, the text of an Urdu lullaby the artist’s mother used to sing is repeatedly traced through a hand-cut stencil using graphite, spray paint, and charcoal. This rubbing and pushing process may be understood as deconstructing and reconstructing a gendered text that refers to a male bird.
The artist’s most recent works, which she calls ‘wall hangings’, incorporate mass media images of immigrant families and individuals targeted by the US administration. Contain (2019) is a large-scale stencil of a printed image of a family embracing as one of its members is about to be deported to their home country. The work is sprayed in somber black in an image that is at once sorrowful and tender.
More.....
In Bul Bul ka Bacha (Nightingale’s Child), A Rhyme (2016), a large work on paper installed in grid format, the text of an Urdu lullaby the artist’s mother used to sing is repeatedly traced through a hand-cut stencil using graphite, spray paint, and charcoal. This rubbing and pushing process may be understood as deconstructing and reconstructing a gendered text that refers to a male bird.
The artist’s most recent works, which she calls ‘wall hangings’, incorporate mass media images of immigrant families and individuals targeted by the US administration. Contain (2019) is a large-scale stencil of a printed image of a family embracing as one of its members is about to be deported to their home country. The work is sprayed in somber black in an image that is at once sorrowful and tender.
More.....