Text by Prem Sahib
June 2021
Rehana Zaman, Tell me the story Of all these things, 2017
HD video, colour, stereo
22 min
Courtesy the artist and LUX, London
I first encountered Rehana Zaman’s Tell me the story Of all these things, as a short clip presented during a panel conversation we were both part of. The video brings together a number of narrative threads, some of which include intimate conversations with Rehana’s sister, a cooking demonstration, performed gestures and visuals from ‘Prevent’ –– the current UK government’s e-learning tool and counter terrorism strategy.
I had only seen a few minutes of the work initially, but the image of an animated body striding through the extremes of a desert-like landscape really stayed with me. In fact, I sometimes anticipate its reemergence when I close my eyes or accidentally zoom in too close to an object in SketchUp, or see porn gifs where bodies swell to disconcerting extremes. Rehana explained the lineage of this figure as emerging from a previous exhibition Giantess (StudioRCA, London 2016), which was partly inspired by macrophilic fetish videos on YouTube. These videos are often racialised and cast women of colour as destructive forces to be feared and venerated or, as Rehana explains, where ‘fear and desire conflate’.
As viewers, we enter the work through the mouth of this figure, who seemingly awaits our arrival with a can of digital cola, until they consume us whole. This body resides amongst a strange set of registers for me. Rendered in CGI, it’s like an avatar from a video game. Its skin is formed of topographic contours that are suggestive of depth and an ever-shifting sense of place. It also reminds me of an experience I used to have as a child –– the sensation of my body shrinking or growing to exceed the limitations of a room or environment, a type of spatial distortion that would often occur when I was ill and leave me with residual feelings of disorientation and confusion about where my body begins and ends.
I think my affinity to this figure is also the result of a book I was reading at the time about Jinns, Islamic spirit entities. In his book Jinneology: Time, Islam & Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi (2017), Anand Vivek Taneja describes Jinns as having the capacity to supersede human institutions of memory and time. Thus, connecting otherwise disparate modes of knowledge through non-linear and non-genealogical transmission, into what he describes as ‘Jinneology’. In the ruin described in the book, communication with Jinns is used to reimagine political frameworks and bypass the realities of life in a postcolonial state.
I think of the animated body in this work as possessing a similar power –– as a borderless, shapeshifting, interstitial witness that sits between multiple temporalities, between raw and cooked states, between the past, present and speculative. We return to its amorphous site as a landmark between conversations and material that is centred around lived experience. Specifically, that of Rehana’s sister who speaks frankly about her life, sexuality and identity, reflecting on the categories we are made to inhabit or understand ourselves through, or become regulated by.
In her essay Mixed Orientations (2014), Sara Ahmed introduces the idea of ‘sweaty concepts’ as ‘concepts that show the bodily work of their own creation, concepts that in coming from bodies return to them, allowing us to re-inhabit our worlds’. This sentiment resonates with my feelings towards this work and its title. Tell me the story Of all these things reads to me as a plea and a command –– one that seeks to re-orientate a narrative away from the clutches of representation bestowed onto bodies and redirect it, much like the ingredients we see getting chopped, heated and eventually re-constituted.
— Prem Sahib, June 2021