The work of artist, filmmaker and educator Rehana Zaman (b. Heckmondwike, 1982) unfolds across film, performance, writing, group work and collective processes sustained over time. From a feminist, situated perspective, Zaman weaves together polyphonic strategies that transcend fixed identity categories, using collaboration as a political condition of doing/making. Her practice attends closely to psychosocial dynamics in hostile contexts, seeking to create environments of relationality, intimacy, and shared temporal experience that can sustain communal life.

Rehana Zaman’s work operates as a testing ground for practicing, questioning, and reimagining ways of living together, where film sometimes operates as a strategy, and sometimes as a ruse. This working and cooperative environment is rich in oblique movements between registers, and it revolves around responsibility and the politics of representation in both form and process: from fragmented framings of the body that resist capture, to the material textures of analogue film, and editing as a site where affect, narrative, and power are actively negotiated.

In this podcast, we talk to Rehana Zaman about diaspora, collectivity, and infrastructures of care; about the studio as a social testing ground, and about film as both process and result. We reflect on alliances, representation, polyvocality, and authorship. We also discuss institutional agendas and the political urgency of coming together. We consider how to sustain the power of such encounters without slipping into empty gestures, and how to maintain artistic practices grounded in listening, humour, responsibility, and being together.

Listen on the website of Radio Web MACBA.