your ecstatic self

Your Ecstatic Self  (2019) by Rehana Zaman (commissioned by LUX and ICO) was released in February 2020. This teaser for Flatness nods to the invisible work (and pleasure) of a dinner for south Asian womxn organised by Rehana in June 2019 and a performative text co-scripted with Shama presented at Goldsmiths in May 2019.

Your Ecstatic Self is a conversation unfolding in a car with Sajid, the artist’s brother. As the journey progresses Sajid discusses his engagement with the philosophy and practice of Tantra, having spent the majority of his 44 years as a strict Sunni Pakistani Muslim. Placing the idiosyncrasies of western fetishism towards eastern philosophical traditions alongside cultural orthodoxies and ancestral knowledge, Your Ecstatic Self takes up multifaceted expressions of desire, intimacy and sexual agency.

Read more writing by Rehana about the film in Artwork magazine and by Chandra Frank on the Second Sight website here.

Rehana Zaman works predominantly with moving image and performance to examine how social dynamics are produced and performed. Her work speaks to the entanglement of personal experience and social life where intimacy is framed against the hostility of state legislation, surveillance and control. She was the recipient of a British Council research grant with Museo de Art Carrillo Gil, Mexico City (2015), a Gasworks International Fellowship to Beirut (2013), and was a LUX Associate Artist (2012–13). Recent solo exhibitions include Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018, Kerala, India, Liverpool Biennial 2018, Liverpool, UK, Serpentine Projects, London, UK (2018), CCA, Glasgow, UK (2018); and Material Art Fair IV, Mexico City, Mexico (2017). Her films and installations have been shown at Oberhausen Film Festival, ICA and Whitechapel, London and Bétonsalon Paris. In 2017 Zaman was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists.