Artist Statement:
Raqeebah Zaman is a lens-based and multidisciplinary artist. Her art questions and explores postcolonial environments, geographies, landscapes, and dreamscapes that reflect and influence her identity as a Muslim Indo-Guyanese/Caribbean woman, descendent of the indentured, and first generation immigrant in the United States.
Informed by autoethnographic practices and independent research, Raqeebah’s art confronts, analyzes, and documents her experiences and findings by capturing photographs or video. She may then augment them using digital and/or physical layering techniques. During this process she utilizes varying software, audio, acrylic mediums, recycled materials, and self written poetry and prose. She may also choose to re-confront, revise, and re-transform the same images multiple times as she continues to process and discern alternate truths.
Raqeebah’s work aims to act as an analytical avenue of her identities and self, and as an offering to current and future generations with shared identities. Her objective is to positively affect her communities by sharing her work under the pretense that knowledge and information is empowering.
Artist Bio:
Raqeebah Zaman was born in Guyana, South America. She studied Film and Cinema Studies at the University of Central Florida where she lived from her pre-teen to early adult years. She is currently based in Little Guyana, Queens, New York, where she was raised for the majority of her childhood, and has been living for most of the past decade.
Raqeebah’s work has been displayed locally, nationally, and globally at the critically acclaimed Third Horizon Film Festival in Miami, Florida, the Timehri Film Festival in Georgetown, Guyana, the King Manor Museum, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning in Queens, New York, and the University of Maryland’s Latin American and Caribbean Studies Center online. Raqeebah has also been a grant recipient of Kodak, Panavision, and the Queens Art Fund.