Artists Film International: Rehana Zaman: Sharla, Shabana, Sojourner, Selena

Artists’ Film International is a collaborative project featuring film, video and animation from around the world. Established by the Whitechapel Gallery in 2008, AFI includes 21 global partner organisations. Each organisation selects an exciting recent work by an artist from their region which is shared amongst the network. The programme is adapted to every venue and is shown over the course of a year. Artists Film International 2021 programme responds to the theme of care.

At the Whitechapel Gallery, a selection of works are screened each season in the Zilkha Auditorium as part of the exhibitions programme. For the first time we are bringing these films online to our website, available for a limited time.

In Rehana Zaman’s Sharla Shabana Sojourner Selena sees six female narrators share personal experiences in an audition roll call, some scripted, some spontaneous. Their testimonies describe perverse scenarios where racialisation and gender dynamics inflect the encounters of each protagonist in the workplace, religious spaces or sexual trysts. The script for the film references group dynamics (Experiences in Groups by W.R Bion) and experimental feminist films (Soft Fiction, by Chick Strand and What You Take for Granted by Michelle Citron). Stories are intercut with moments of physical contact in a beauty salon, a space where inter-corporeality and pleasure is offered as an alternative to the anxieties of collective experience.