(Note: the gallery is closed between Dec 18 and Jan 10)
A digital woman emerges from a virtual desert. Her skin is the same colour and texture as the sand and rock that she’s surrounded by. She melts into the landscape and re-emerges, disappearing into it yet standing apart. For young British artist Rehana Zaman, she’s a symbol of life as an Asian woman in contemporary Britain.
But it’s not all digi-weirdness. Across three screens and two floors, the desert woman scenes are cut with illustrations of neo-Nazis, screenshots from the government’s ‘Prevent’ anti-extremism website and powerfully intimate conversations between the artist and her sister as she cooks.
With a thick northern accent, her sister talks about an abusive marriage, sex, skiing, about where she feels most at home. As the images of her brown hands cooking Asian food and illustrations of racists mash together, you realise that this is an emotional de-tangling of cultural identity. The symbols are spread out and dissected. Zaman is showing the complexities of identity politics, the layers that make up a person: a person who can be reduced down to a tab on an anti-radicalisation website because of her skin colour, who can be hated by bigots because of her geographic origins.
This is political and relatively combative video art, something we just don’t see enough of. Yes, it’s about being a muslim Asian woman, but it works because it's also wider than that. It’s about desire and conflict, about being yourself but trying to disappear. It’s personal and political, and that’s not just one person’s story, it’s everyone’s.
@eddyfrankel