6 August 2022
Register for your place and Buy your Beer & Berries ticket
Hospitalfield have commissioned Rehana Zaman to develop a new moving image work around our annual event Beer & Berries.
In August 2022, Zaman will present the first iteration of the piece under the working title Rubus. Orientated around rubus fruits (raspberries, blackberries, blueberries), the project takes up a multi-dimensional conversation on the social currencies and economies of modern agriculture. Developed over 2 years, the artist has undertaken extensive research in the region with visits to farms in Angus organised with Angus Growers and conversations with farmers, pickers and scientists at the James Hutton Institute.
This first iteration of Rubus will take place on Saturday 6 August from 3.30 – 4.30pm at Beer & Berries Festival in the FEAST with Hospitalfield Tent and is supported by The Elephant Trust.
Encompassing moving image and performance, the art work invites writers and poets Seán Elder, Nat Raha and Daniella Valz Gen to dialogue with Al Qazwini’s The Wonders of Creation and the Oddities of Existing Things; an influential work of Islamic cosmography from the 12th century. These newly commissioned texts will orientate how relationships to land, configured through capital, are subverted and felt.
This project was initiated in 2020-1 as part of the Hospitalfield’s Studio Time Commissions, supporting artists with funded time to develop ideas and research for new art works to be presented at Hospitalfield. Zaman has extensively researched with cultivators local to Hospitalfield in Arbroath to examine the enduring legacies of colonial capitalist land use and ownership in the UK from multinational monopolies on farming practices and plant patents, to the relationship between the Scottish clearances and plantations in South Asia.
Rehana Zaman (b. Heckmondwike) is an artist based in London. She works predominantly with moving image to examine how social dynamics are produced and performed. Her work speaks to the entanglement of personal experience and social life, where intimacy is framed against structures of authority. Conversation and cooperative methods sit at the heart of her practice. Recent exhibitions include British Art Show 9 (UK touring), Trinity Square Video, Toronto, Boros International Sculpture Biennial, Sweden and Serpentine Projects, London, UK (forthcoming). Her films have been shown at Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh, Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Liverpool Biennial 2018, Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2018; Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival; Sheffield Doc/Fest; SAVAC, Canada; Oberhausen Film Festival, Germany; Whitechapel, London and Bétonsalon Paris. In 2019 she co-edited Tongues with Taylor Le Melle published by PSS and curated The Range, Eastside Projects, Birmingham. She was shortlisted for the Film London Jarman Award in 2019 and her films are distributed by LUX Artist Moving Image.
Image credit: Giants, Rehana Zaman, 2022
Part of the annual Beer & Berries Festival on 6 August. Find out more
Project Partners and Collaborators
Dr Nat Raha is a poet, and queer / trans* activist-scholar, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her research addresses sexuality and gender, critical theory and Marxism, contemporary poetry and poetics, through creative and critical methods.