With
an interest in the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the
reading and writing process, Kameelah Janan Rasheed is interested in Black
knowledge production and fugitivity. Drawing on her regional East Palo Alto
(Northern California) Black vernacular upbringing, Islamic mysticism,
neo-animism, and quantum physics, she grapples with the poetics, politics, and
pleasures of the unfinished and uncontained. Her works—which have taken the
form of Xerox-based collages, videos, large-scale text banner installations,
lecture-performances, and public interventions—engage an understanding of text
as an unfixed, living organism that desires iteration and intervention.
"that
is complete. and knowledge is another" marks Janan Rasheed’s return to Berlin after her 2023 solo
exhibition at KW Institute for Contemporary Art. With a mainly autobiographical
focus on her middle name Janan, from the Semitic root JNN, meaning to hide or
conceal, this exhibition explores Rasheed’s emerging relationship to Sufi
cosmology and the poetics of both spiritual and political [un]veiling. The
veil—a popular and overused trope concerning Muslim women is not the focus of
the show. In an expansive work comprising a constellation of video, prints, and
annotations, Rasheed, who veils or wears the traditional hijab, considers not
the fabric of veiling but rather our relationship to concealment through the
trickster archetype who challenges us to consider questions of intimacy,
proximity, and certainty. What truth is available to us? What truth is
concealed?
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her most recent solo exhibitions
include Redcat, Los Angeles (2024); KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin
(2023); Art Institute of Chicago (2023); and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Janan
Rasheed has additionally exhibited her work at the Athens Biennial, Glasgow
International, Front Triennial, and Prospect New Orleans and has participated
in group exhibitions at renowned institutions internationally. She is a
recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; the 2022 Schering Stiftung Award
for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; and a 2021 Guggenheim
Fellowship in Fine Arts.
Gallery Opening Hours: Tue-Sat from 1-6 PM
Runtime: Thu, 25/04/2024 to Sat, 27/07/2024