Sahana Rahman

INFO

Name	Sahana Rahman (she/they)
Born	1999
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland
Ethnicities	Sri Lankan (Tamil), Bangladeshi
Artform	Craft/Object, Visual arts
Decades Active	2020s

ABOUT

Sahana Rahman is a visual artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau. Her practice incorporates embroidery, painting, drawing, and community activation. Within her art practice Rahman focuses on styles of art that are derived from South Asia, incorporating styles included in Mughal miniature paintings. She uses depictions of flora that are derived from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Aotearoa to reference her diverse cultural perspective.

Rahman uses shisha embroidery, a practice that stems from 17th-century India, in which small mirrors or reflective metal are sewn into fabric as a form of adornment. Her use of these traditional methods signals her interest in decolonial practice and her multicultural background, as she uses methods from across the Indian subcontinent. She describes her practice as a tool for therapeutic release, creating forms that require repeated gestures that build a meditative flow.

She was born and raised in Newlands, Te Whanganui-a-Tara, into a cross-cultural Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan Tamil home. She attended Massey University where she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) in 2022.

The year after graduating she moved to Tāmaki Makaurau, where she began running embroidery workshops, which she has since hosted throughout the country including at Auckland Libraries and MEANWHILE in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. These workshops focus on styles that are culturally specific, such as nakshi kantha, a Bengali communal embroidery practice that uses hand stitching techniques, where many people work on one piece of cloth. In Rahman’s workshops she invites people to work collaboratively and collectively in the same way, using the setting as a time for storytelling and community building. She describes her workshops as “a tactile, communal way of engaging with creating an artwork as a group activity. Being passionate about it, as I am, makes it easy to teach”.

She also sells her artwork and keychains in art spaces throughout Tāmaki Makaurau such as the Queers & Wares market at Studio One Toi Tu and the DEPOT shop Toi Toa in Devonport.