Sa'dia Rehman: Desire Lines

May 5, 2023 – June 25, 2023
KODA House

Building #404B
Colonels Row
Governors Island, NY

Sa’dia Rehman, There isn’t a stone I don’t remember, 2022. Video still.

Sa’dia Rehman, There isn’t a stone I don’t remember, 2022. Video still.

KODA presents a solo exhibition and three-month residency with Queens-born multimedia artist Sa’dia Rehman. Rehman’s solo show titled Desire Lines will feature a video, works on paper, and an evolving  installation. For the past three years, Rehman has been working on a new body of work tracing their family’s displacement from their village in Pakistan. Between 1968 and 1976, the family, along with 184  villages were forced to migrate due to the construction of  the Tarbela Dam, the second largest earth-filled dam in the world. Like many dam projects in the Global South, the project was funded by the World Bank. This hydroelectric infrastructure was built by the US, British, Italian, French, German and Japanese engineers, architects and designers.

Oftentimes desire lines are imaginary lines marking pathways tracking the movement of people, commerce, and transportation. Rehman’s exhibition Desire Lines reckons with a global history of displacement in the name of modernity that in turn mutates into climate devastation. In the 10-minute looped experimental video There isn’t a stone I don’t remember, 2022, Rehman reflects on a 2022  journey to the Indus River. Using personalized symbologies, documentation, architecture and landscape, ritual and sound, they memorialize an unwritten history.  In several works on paper, including monoprints and ink drawings, Rehman traces the roots of the trauma of the loss of home—physical and emotional—with broken images of mosques, cemeteries, shrines, and the striation on rock formations tracking  water levels. During the three-month residency Rehman will create a structure temporary and changing with their time at the residency. The large-scale tent-like structure invokes  the possibilities in a time of peril. It is an afterlife of the colonial project of the dam itself.

Opening Hours: Fridays-Sundays at 11am-5pm

RSVP Artist Tour of Sa’dia Rehman: Desire Lines on June 3 at 1-2pm