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Rehana Zaman is an artist living and working in London. Her work speaks to notions of kinship and sociality, seeking out possibilities of intimacy and transgression within hostile contexts. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her films which extend into texts, performances and group work.
She stands in support of Palestinian struggles for liberation and against genocide, apartheid and colonialism.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and Internationally. Recent presentations include Serpentine Civic, BFI London Film Festival, Tromsø Kunstforening, BEK – Bergen Centre for Electronic Arts, British Art Show 9 (Touring), ICA Miami, Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Borås International Sculpture Biennial and Artist Film International Whitechapel (Intnl Touring). In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle. In 2023 she was the winner of the Film London Jarman Award. She is a member of not/nowhere artist workers cooperative and her films are distributed by LUX.
Plantation (2026), Everything Worthwhile is Done with Other People (2023), Alternative Economies (2021), Your Estatic Self (2019), Lourdes (2018), How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear (2018), Tell me the story Of all these things (2017), Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena (2016), Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen (2014), 5 (2014), Netball (2013), I, I, I, I and I (2013)
Filmed in Angus, Scotland, Soft Fruit follows migrant seasonal workers on an industrial berry farm as they pick, prepare and transport crops. Candid conversations and scenes of rebellious, collective gathering appear alongside observational footage in shifting visual formats – from high-definition video to 16mm, and CGI inspired by medieval Islamic cosmography – building a layered sense of time and place.
This screening will be accompanied with in person conversations with Éiméar McClay & Cat McClay (a body is a body is a body) and Rehana Zaman (Alternative Economies).
Alternative Economies was made in conversation with herbalist Rasheeqa Ahmad and financial services regulator Rachel Bardiger. The film discusses the imperialist exploits of the Disney character Scrooge McDuck, and the apparently radical yet deeply compromised promises of cryptocurrency. Between these two strands, possibilities for an alternative network of exchange and subsistence are sought.
How Does an Invisible Boy Disappear? emerges from a nine-month collaboration with Liverpool Black Women Filmmakers, a new women’s film collective made up of young women from a Somali & Pakistani background. The film documents the group as they work together to create a thriller focusing on a teenage girl’s attempt to find a missing local boy. Comprised of candid footage captured during the workshop process, behind the scenes filming and archive footage of anti-racist organising in the aftermath of the Toxteth race riots, the film questions how modes of representation and societal structures are gendered and racialised.
Commissioned by Liverpool Biennial and supported by Tenderpixel, London
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