Mohammed Z. Rahman: Life Is Sweet

Mohammed Z. Rahman’s practice is defined by tender representations of the familiar and inviting: food, family, home, community. They are not presented as simple comforts, but as sites of warmth and intimacy entwined with the weighty political structures inscribed within them.

While studying social anthropology at SOAS in London, Rahman came across ethnographic studies of the East End’s Bangladeshi presence. Being born and raised in this community, they were intrigued by these distanced academic attempts to capture their family’s lives. Growing up in London and having access to the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum and the National Gallery, Rahman reflects on the experience of accessing one’s own culture through contested artefacts tucked away behind museum glass; the persistent experience of being other, of having your story told for you. ‘My practice stemmed from wanting to make all this accessible,’ they explain, ‘to tell it from my perspective, bring it out of these spaces.’

From this desire grew a practice, spanning painting, sculpture and illustration, in which depictions of everyday life, ordinary objects and domestic space trace ‘connections between personal and collective histories’. ‘History is made in the home,’ Rahman tells me as we look at their study for At Home (2025), a new permanent public mural commissioned by Peer and produced with the gallery’s Ambassadors, a group of young people aged 17 to 25 living in the east London boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets. ‘Our day-to-day lives are where politics play out.’

Gracing the side of a residential building on the Arden Estate on Hoxton Street, the work takes influence from the history of public murals across east London, such as the 1984 Greater London Council’s Ethnic Minorities Unit campaign ‘London Against Racism’. Described by the artist as an ‘imagined cross-section of the building’, the painting comprises six richly detailed vignettes of domestic interiors. ‘The young people wanted to talk about anti-racism today and reflect on how insidious and embedded it is in their daily lives,’ Rahman explains. The group spoke of home as a place to shelter, seek safety and ‘conjure hope’, but also as a contested and politicized space buckling under the weight of cost-of-living and housing crises.

Sitting also between comfort and crisis, food recurs in Rahman’s work as a motif to map the personal onto the political. A new painting, Crumble, is a mise en scène of a well-attended family dinner party in progress. Food, plates and people flow from kitchen to dining table. The work was included in Rahman’s presentation earlier this year in London at the Whitechapel Gallery, ‘Hearthside’, which they described as a meditation on ‘Islamic hospitality and generosity’, embodied food knowledge and the ‘power of the dinner table to foster solidarities’ amid growing food scarcity and deepening class divides.

Citing Laisul Hoque’s ‘An Ode to All the Flavours’, a day-long exhibition also held at the Whitechapel in 2024, they discuss confectionery as a gateway to exploring childhood and place, echoing Hoque’s early memories of eating snacks with his father and his collaborations with local Bengali sweetshops: food as an expression of love, intimacy and shared cultural memory.

Confection (2025), commissioned for the cover of this issue of Frieze Week for the London 2025 fair, is a culmination of Rahman’s ongoing research and a return to their signature matchbox paintings. Encapsulating their fervour for the ‘elevation of the ordinary’, they are interested in the matchbox as a familiar and ubiquitous object, but one that also holds potential for danger and destruction. Drawing on the rich traditions of miniature painting, the artist seeks to create intimacy with the viewer: ‘People have to come close and listen with their eyes.’

Taken together, the paintings act as a ‘love letter’ to the East End, celebrating food as a medium of ‘inter-diasporic kinship and solidarity’. A sweet handesh evokes the conviviality of the local Bengali diaspora, while baklava pays homage to the long-standing Turkish and MENA communities. An apple slice from Beigel Bake, Mohammed’s favourite, nods to the culinary footprint of the Ashkenazi Jewish community. The rich sweetness of Supermalt signals the area’s Afro-Caribbean presence, while KA Black Grape Soda connotes the corner shop as a site of cultural convergence. The Fab ice lolly recalls summer on the council estate, paying gentle tribute to white working-class neighbourhoods and, from the aisles of Loon Fung Asian supermarket, mochi honours the East Asian population. Finally, a blackberry evokes foraging and Rahman’s interest in village culture in rural Bangladesh, where much of their family still resides. ‘It’s not necessarily something that is associated with inner-city working-class communities,’ they say, ‘but I’m wondering what it would look like to forage and make do with what we’ve got’.

Mohammed Z. Rahman is represented by Phillida Reid, London, at Frieze London (Stand B31). In 2024, their works The Lovers and The Spaghetti House (both 2024) were acquired at Frieze London for the Tate collection through the Frieze Tate Fund. At Home (2025), a permanent public commission by Rahman in collaboration with Peer Ambassadors, is on view at 96 Hoxton Street, London, UK.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week London 2025 under the tile ‘Life Is Sweet’.

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^{Main image: Mohammed Z. Rahman, Mas Satney, 2025. Courtesy: the artist}