A new commission by London-based artist Rehana Zaman, the artist's first solo presentation of work and the first exhibition produced through Studio Voltaire’s new education programme Not Our Class.

I, I, I, I, and I is a video work and installation that presents an abstracted account of the collaborative attempts of a group of people alongside a bizarre and twisted narrative featuring a pig, a dog and Adolf Hitler.

Over the course of 2012, Rehana Zaman has been examining the workshop as a site of ‘the social’ with a group of young people from Body & Soul, a UK charity dedicated to transforming the lives of people affected by HIV. Improvisation games, collaborative techniques and performance strategies drawn from political theatre and actor’s workshops have been integrated into sessions leading towards the production of a video work to be shown within the exhibition at Studio Voltaire.

The work emerges from an ongoing interest in the impact of social structures on the self from familial relations to broader constructs around community and identity as explored in previous works such as Like an Iron Maiden Trapped Between a Rock and a Hard Place (2010) and Pig (2012). Constructing the workshops as a site of research, central to the process of I, I, I, I and I have been the questions, how might a group of people collectively create a work? And to what extent is this at odds with the desires and impulses of the individual?

Initiated in 2011 Not Our Class began a new programme of education and participatory projects that through research and practice take the work of Jo Spence as a starting point for investigating the legacy and potential of her work in relation to contemporary culture and life. Through a series of commissions, offsite projects, workshops, public events and reading groups situated both within Studio Voltaire’s neighbourhood and contemporary art discourse the programme explores the new turn towards education and participation within contemporary art practice.