Rehana Zaman, Tell me the story Of all these things

‘Tell me the story Of all these things’ is an accumulation of several narrative threads drawing together intimate conversations between the artist and her two sisters, ominous animated visions of a metamorphosing body, e-learning training on Prevent, and staged, performed gestures. The work takes its title from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s ‘Dictee’, a novel that deploys a variety of texts to examine themes of dislocation and fragmentation. Taking Cha’s work as a departure point, ‘Tell me the story Of all these things’ explores processes of disassembling as constitutive of lived experience.

Working predominantly with moving image and performance, Zaman’s work considers how the interplay of multiple social dynamics on individuals and groups, condition sociality. These narrative based artworks, often deadpan and neurotic, are frequently generated through conversation or collaboration with others. Recent works such as ‘Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena’, ‘Five’ and ‘Some Women Other Women and all the Bittermen’ have taken up the entanglement of subjective experience and social life whilst riffing on a number of tropes and genres from film and television, from audition tape to soap opera, B Movie to observational documentary.

‘Tell me the story Of all these things’ attends to the particular experiences of British Muslim women, staging a cookery demonstration alongside candid conversations whilst conjuring the amorphous figure of a woman emerging from a barren landscape – a figure placed at the convergence of terror and desire.