A Quranic verse anchors Rahman’s practice: We have made you in pairs. As a queer artist, Rahman reads it without gender or sexuality attached — just pairing, relation, and the the fact of twoness.
The Kantha embroidery — a Bengali practice of running stitch on upcycled saris and clothing, traditionally made into blankets — has been contemporised onto pillboxes and cans: birth control, antidepressants, antihistamines, nicotine tabs collected from Rahman and her friends stitched into a growing quilt. A painting figures a mother, a dead child and a clown holding on. The heart, Rahman says, represents her nervous system. Shisha embroidery with mirrors, drawn from South Asian tradition, wards off evil.
Women have been working this way for centuries. Textile art was often a means of sitting alongside the hardness of war, grief, and the state of the world. Rahman takes this on board, reinterpreting these traditions in her own ways.
