Attiyyah Rahman

EDUCATION
2023/24 MA Contemporary Art Practice @ Royal College of Art (London, UK) 
2020/23 BA (Hons) Fine Art @ Leeds Arts University (Leeds, UK)


DUO EXHIBITIONS
2026 WE HAVEN’T LOCATED US YET, collaborative residency with Mathijs Hunfeld Art’otel Hoxton, London
2026 //NOTHING UNWANTED, ANNEX by The Koppel Project 

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2025 SUMMER WARS group show, Notforsale gallery, E3 2NR
2025 Tongue group show with PINGZE, 56 Dawes Road, London
2025 EIAG x APEX: ALTEREGOISMS film screening, Bread & Butter Lounge, London 2025 Behind The Closed Doors, Safehouse 1, London
2025 EXI: An Existential Art Exhibition, Crypt Gallery, London
2024 Uncanny Playgrounds: Sculpting Nostalgia & Unease, Sugarhouse x HYPHA, London 
2024 Honeyed Violence, Filet Space, London
2024 [Game = Role-playing = Rule-setting] with Small-Time-Project, London
2024 APEX zine launch: Blending Digital & Natural Realms, Reference Point, London
2024 RCA Contemporary Art Practice MA degree show, Royal College of Art
2024 RCA Contemporary Art Practice film screening, Royal College of Art
2024 Listen Closely to the Story I’m About to Tell You... Feelium Gallery, London
2024 Future Archeologies, Camden Art Centre, London
2024 Travelling Memories, Shoreditch, London
2024 Sonic Disruption: CAP X TATE LATES, Tate Modern, London
2024 CAP.FM On Tour X Montez Press Radio, RCA, London
2024 CAPiverse: Towards Levitation screening, Genesis Cinema, London
2024 Everything Must Go! RCA X UAL, The Cookhouse, London
2024 Desire? Desire! CAP studios, RCA, London
2023 Xtra Hot: Limp-Exhibit, Wharf Chambers, Leeds
2023 LAU Degree Show, Free Range, London
2023 LAU Degree Show, Leeds Arts University
2023 Leeds Artists Show, Leeds Art Gallery
2022 Wayzgoose, Assembly House, Leeds
2022 Thoughtbubble Comic Festival, Harrogate
2022 Student World Impact Festival 2022, New York
2022 (DIS)CLOSURE, Leeds Arts University

PUBLICATIONS
2024 CAPiverse: Towards Levitation
2024 Kensington + Chelsea Art Week
2024 FAD Magazine, Travelling Memories

Gleb: Your work seems to locate figures - and the viewer - somewhere between belonging and exposure, where things that once existed at the margins feel suddenly, uncomfortably visible. Is that a tension you’re consciously working with, or does it emerge more intuitively as you build an image?

Attiyyah: It is definitely a tension I'm working with, and I try to control how much of it is seen through hinting toward specific elements—suggesting things without directly showing them. I enjoy controlling how much of the unseen my audience engages with, especially when they question the extent of what is visible. It's the ambiguity within most of my work that makes the viewer hyper-aware of the double-meanings within the imagery, pop-cultural media, or appropriated objects that I try to subvert and reestablish. The process of beginning the work is very intuitive; I'll use reference images that I find purely alluring but not entirely sure of why, or I'll use one knowing I can project something more onto it later, where the context of the image directly feeds into the final work itself. I'm very interested in imbalanced relationships, where a power dynamic is always present and constantly oscillating—between comfort and unease, attraction and shame. Belonging and exposure is another example. I feel this relationship also applies to the viewer and the subject, where it's not entirely clear of who is gazing at who. Embedded within this (perhaps more for myself than anyone else) is an underlying desire to make the unsafe safe, to cope or survive in a particular situation, often a physically emotional one. I like to make some situations a little tongue-in-cheek at the same time, where the figures are very much aware of the role they're playing, and revel in the overarching theme of voyeurism that can be felt in most of the work. 

Gleb: A recurring figure appears across your work - androgynous, malleable, never quite fixed. What is your relationship to this character? Is he a surrogate, a projection, or something you’re still trying to name?

Attiyyah: I love that you use the term surrogate, because male bodies don't historically carry weight within them. It's a woman's body that is the container. In the world of where my character exists, gender dynamics are fuzzy to decipher. This character has been with me since I was twelve years old, which was around the time when I became properly invested in anime and manga. He has evolved a lot since then, and I think he's approaching his final form soon. He doesn't have a name. Some of the first anime I encountered were from the Ecchi genre—I quickly noticed how the male protagonists in this genre are often quite generic-looking. I guess as viewers we must be able to project ourselves onto a blank canvas of sorts to feel engaged with what we're watching, so they're a perfect host for this. Their physical traits were typically dark hair, warm eyes, light skin, young. As a result of this early exposure, my own character embodies these elements. At the same time, he is a manifestation of quite a few different things—an amalgamation of my past anime crushes, a vessel to play out fantasies of desire and annihilation, a container for my gender envy, an extension of myself, or just a girl pretending to be a boy. For the most part, I like to refer to him as a kind of test-dummy to play out the narratives within my work. Instead of getting dressed up as him to cosplay in the fantasies I draw and create, he is a totally separate entity—I like to think I articulate him, but not in the rigid way you would pose a doll, because my intuition is what gives him some autonomy when I'm creating the situations he's found in.

Gleb: Can you talk about your relationship to anime and online pop culture - when it started, what it meant to you? And when you bring that into a contemporary art context, is there any residue of shame, or has that shifted?

Attiyyah: I discovered anime when I was quite young. It defined most of my teenage years. For context, I went to an all-girls school for all my secondary education, and at home I had always been surrounded by women—men were never really present. I can't quite remember how I encountered it, but I very quickly developed this intense obsession with the BL (Boys Love) genre, and I became a prolific fan-fiction writer until I was about seventeen. I saw parts of myself in the boys or young men that were portrayed in the content I was absorbing. I was attracted to how effeminate and languid they were. I felt a kind of safety in aligning myself with them as opposed to identifying with a female character. As an adult I only now realise how much romanticised non-con happens in the genre. It's all very glamourised and feels very embedded within the early years of the culture. When you're young you don't really register the nuances of that, or at least I didn't. While I was growing up, I had this deep discomfort with my femininity as a teen and found myself thinking it was a problem I had to quickly come to terms with. I think the queer side of anime/manga gave me a sort of stability within my identity at the time. I didn't have anything else that spoke to my creativity as much as anime/manga did back then. The many pockets of online communities that surrounded the genre I think did the same. It also helped me realise the core parts of my practice. I had never felt any shame in bringing the genre into a contemporary art context, I was quite eager to incorporate it into my undergraduate studies, and for a few months it was difficult to make sense of. I focused a lot of my attention on experimental animation for my studies instead of the still-image work I mostly make now. I think up until recently, anime as a medium can be quite difficult to maintain in a critical sense, if you consider how mainstream and widespread the genre is now in an art context. At the same time, I think it's great that so many of us are interested in it this way now, as there's a lot more spaces to share our ideas, and it feels more recognised and validated than it used to be a few years ago.