Across Spring 2024, Duchamp & Sons collaborated with visual artist and writer Mohammed Z. Rahman, whose work is often informed by personal stories histories and domestic environments.
The collaboration kicked off with a series of workshops delving into Mohammed’s practice, focusing in on sequential storytelling techniques behind his zine making and writing work, and approaches to narrative painting. Through time spent drawing, collaging, and chatting, the group identified the themes they wanted to explore through the collaboration: collective experience and memories, meaningful spaces for us, and how you create a sense of home and sanctuary.
Partly inspired by Mohammed’s own paintings of domestic scenes and some of the works on display in Zineb Sedira: Dreams have no titles, the collective brought their ideas into 3D by creating dioramas of rooms (both real and imagined) which spoke to the themes of memory, temporary homes, and sanctuary.
From this they built a cardboard-box commune and at a sharing event in April 2024, the collective invited members of the public to contribute to by adding their own rooms and stories. Visitors to the event were welcome to chat with and create alongside D&S members, to take part in the conversation about home and the housing crisis, and be part of the free-to-access, creative, community commune for the evening.
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Mohammed Z Rahman (he/they) is a British-Bengali visual artist and writer based in London. His work puts socio-political and personal histories in conversation through the lens of the domestic. Mohammed’s visual output includes illustration, painting and zines. His literary output includes short stories, poetry and essays.
With a background in social anthropology (BA, SOAS), Mohammed approaches art as an intimate and political force probing and mutating the ordinary. Drawing on dreamscapes, globality, queerness, biography and socio-historical perspectives, he creates work that celebrates his communities’ internationalist dreams, disrupts violent power structures and makes peace with unspeakable chaos.
