Sa’dia Rehman (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. Rehman explores how contemporary and historical images communicate, consolidate, and contest ideas about race, empire, and labor. Their work examines structures of the family, the nation, and the border. Rehman questions how we live within these systems and how they impact who we are, and probes the desire to rearrange and take them apart. They center familial history to expand on harm and survival. As an ArtLab Fellow, Rehman will continue to trace their family’s displacement in the late 1960s from an area on the Indus River due to the building of a hydroelectric dam.
In 2023, Rehman premiered their three-year project on grief, memory, and displacement at the Wexner Center for the Arts in their solo show The river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air. They have collaborated with the Global Imagination of Racial Justice at the University of California, Santa Barbara for a commission linking narratives of the California Mission Dams and Pakistan’s Tarbela Dam. In 2021, Rehman was selected by the Ohio Arts Council as an Artist to Watch. They have exhibited work at venues including the Queens Museum, Kentler International Drawing Space, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Pakistan National Council of the Arts, among others. Rehman has received the Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Fellowship and the Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Fellowship. They have been awarded residencies at the Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and NARS Foundation. Rehman’s work has been featured in Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Colonize This! Young Women of Color On Today’s Feminism, Breakthru Radio, and HyperAllergic.