Sa'dia Rehman

Sa’dia Rehman (all pronouns) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator focusing on race, empire, and labor. Their work explores structures of the family, the nation, the border. Rehman questions how we live within these systems and how they impact who we are, the desire to rearrange, and take them apart. They center familial history to expand on harm and survival in an ongoing project tracing their family’s displacement in the late 1960s from an area on the Indus River due to the building of a hydroelectric dam. In 2023, Rehman premiered their three-year project on grief, memory and displacement at the Wexner Center for the Arts in their solo show the river runs slow and deep and all the bones of my ancestors / have risen to the surface to knock and click like the sounds of trees in the air. Rehman has collaborated with the Global Imagination of Racial Justice at the University of California, Santa Barbara for a commission linking narratives of the California Mission Dams and Pakistan’s Tarbela Dam. In 2025 Rehman received the Ohio Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. Rehman has exhibited work at venues including the Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia, PA), Governors Island (New York), Queens Museum (NYC), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), Kentler International Drawing Space (Brooklyn, NY), Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU (NYC), and Pakistan National Council of the Arts (Islamabad), among others. Rehman was awarded residencies at the ArtLab at Harvard University, Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Omi, Abrons Art Center, KODA, Asian American Arts Alliance, Edward Albee Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and NARS Foundation. Their work was featured in Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, The New York Times, Harpers, The Center for Sustainable Practice in the Arts, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, Colonize This! Young Women of Color On Today’s Feminism, Breakthru Radio and HyperAllergic. Rehman was a Visiting Critic at Rhode Island School of Design (2024) and New York University (2023) and has taught classes in Drawing/Painting, Video, and Art&Tech at The Ohio State University (2015-2023).