EXHIBITIONS
The Land of Promise, The Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, August 2020-August 2021
Justice in America: A Visual Inquiry
“Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.” —James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street, 1972
Posed in the wake of the Black freedom struggle of the 1960s, Baldwin’s question about the nature of justice in America has lost none of its urgency. As civil rights activists have long argued, the concept of justice enshrined within America’s legal system allows for numerous forms of oppression and discrimination, especially based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, and immigration status. In spite of this contradictory legacy, the love of justice continues to inspire, just as the persistence of injustice in American society remains a source of outrage.
The Center for Art and Social Engagement (CASE) is an initiative to forge deeper connections between the Museum, its collections, and communities near and far. This related installation features a dialogue between works from the collection and 2020–21 CASE Artist Fellow Sa’dia Rehman. Expanding in February 2021, it is the first phase of an evolving conversation that asks visitors to reflect upon the past, present, and future of justice in America.
The Land of Promise
Inspired by her research into CMA’s permanent collection, Center for Art and Social Engagement (CASE) Artist Fellow Sa’dia Rehman has created The Land of Promise. In line with Rehman’s practice, the wall drawing engages the gallery architecture, and combines motifs from a range of sources. Decorative patterns, typical of art of the Islamic world, interweave with images of migration, incarceration, and protest. Visitors may recognize some of these motifs from works in CMA’s collection.
Rehman describes The Land of Promise as a border. The term evokes the geography of migration and detention, but also traditions of decoration and adornment. Stenciled and hand-drawn onto the gallery walls, Rehman’s drawing will expand over the course of her yearlong fellowship and engage feedback from visitors.
Rehman has designated each of the four walls with a specific theme: Horizon; Land; Future; and Afterlife. Ultimately, the drawing will run continuously around the room.
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The Center for Art and Social Engagement is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through their Museums for America program. CASE was designed through new, experimental, cross-departmental collaborations by Daniel Marcus, Roy Lichtenstein Curatorial Fellow, Hannah Mason-Macklin, Manager of Interpretation and Engagement, and Jennifer Lehe, Manager of Strategic Partnerships, Learning and Engagement.
“Ask any Mexican, any Puerto Rican, any black man, any poor person—ask the wretched how they fare in the halls of justice, and then you will know, not whether or not the country is just, but whether or not it has any love for justice, or any concept of it.” —James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street, 1972
Posed in the wake of the Black freedom struggle of the 1960s, Baldwin’s question about the nature of justice in America has lost none of its urgency. As civil rights activists have long argued, the concept of justice enshrined within America’s legal system allows for numerous forms of oppression and discrimination, especially based on race, gender, sexuality, religion, and immigration status. In spite of this contradictory legacy, the love of justice continues to inspire, just as the persistence of injustice in American society remains a source of outrage.
The Center for Art and Social Engagement (CASE) is an initiative to forge deeper connections between the Museum, its collections, and communities near and far. This related installation features a dialogue between works from the collection and 2020–21 CASE Artist Fellow Sa’dia Rehman. Expanding in February 2021, it is the first phase of an evolving conversation that asks visitors to reflect upon the past, present, and future of justice in America.
The Land of Promise
Inspired by her research into CMA’s permanent collection, Center for Art and Social Engagement (CASE) Artist Fellow Sa’dia Rehman has created The Land of Promise. In line with Rehman’s practice, the wall drawing engages the gallery architecture, and combines motifs from a range of sources. Decorative patterns, typical of art of the Islamic world, interweave with images of migration, incarceration, and protest. Visitors may recognize some of these motifs from works in CMA’s collection.
Rehman describes The Land of Promise as a border. The term evokes the geography of migration and detention, but also traditions of decoration and adornment. Stenciled and hand-drawn onto the gallery walls, Rehman’s drawing will expand over the course of her yearlong fellowship and engage feedback from visitors.
Rehman has designated each of the four walls with a specific theme: Horizon; Land; Future; and Afterlife. Ultimately, the drawing will run continuously around the room.
More.....
The Center for Art and Social Engagement is funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, through their Museums for America program. CASE was designed through new, experimental, cross-departmental collaborations by Daniel Marcus, Roy Lichtenstein Curatorial Fellow, Hannah Mason-Macklin, Manager of Interpretation and Engagement, and Jennifer Lehe, Manager of Strategic Partnerships, Learning and Engagement.
The Cost of Entry, Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY, February 21 - March 29, 2020
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, Amelie A. Wallace Gallery, SUNY Old Westbury, NY, September 11 - October 16, 2019
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.....