Te Tuhi supports the AAF Visual Arts Residency 2025 as part of the newly announced Asian Artists’ Fund (AAF), administered this year by Satellites.
The AAF Visual Arts Residency is a residency for a visual artist or collective to experiment, explore, and develop new work. The artist receives $10,000 and 12 weeks shared studio space at Te Tuhi.
The AAF Visual Arts Residency is one of several exciting new streams designed to support Asian artists in Aotearoa. For more information, visit Satellites' website here.
Sahana Rahman is the recipient of the AAF Visual Arts Residency 2025
Sahana Rahman (she/they) is a painter, textile and community artist of Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan Tamil heritage. Their work explores queerness and religion, decolonisation, memory and healing, expressed through their unique blending of South Asian-style embroidery and Mughal miniature painting.
During their residency, Sahana will be focusing on traditional art and textile practices from South Asia that require slowness, repetition and communal collaboration. In particular, they are interested in how motifs common in South Asian art might be used in a contemporary, queer, diasporic practice, and how the blending of matte acrylics, embroidery, crochet and textiles may be integrated to express personal narratives in a new format.