Whether taking the form of printmaking, photography, video, or installations, her work stems from extensive and wide-ranging research and often incorporates annotated fragments of photocopied texts from the various writers and thinkers who influence her practice.
i am not done yet, 2022, shown at a solo exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover
Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Courtesy the artist and NOME, Berlin. © Kameelah Janan Rasheed
While text has long featured prominently in Rasheed’s work, for her latest installation, Unsewn Time, commissioned for the Art Institute, Rasheed reconsiders the prioritization of the written word. Embracing alternative forms of mark-making, she invites new possibilities for communicating and understanding and simultaneously challenges the notion that clarity and comprehension should be the only goals of language.
A writer and author as well as a visual artist, Rasheed shared her thinking, questioning, and experiences that have grown into this new installation. Edited excerpts of her ideas follow.
On the Coherency of Language
While fighting to finish an essay several years ago, I took to the wall—literally writing and printing on the walls; rubbing myself against the walls as a way of releasing language; projecting images and texts onto the wall; layering into oblivion. I am taking up this challenge of freeing myself from the page and the 2-D as the sole interface or compositional field for any writing. Breaking from the notion of writing as the production of legible and coherent language, I worked with interrelated modes of producing language throughout Unsewn Time—annotating video with sound and drawing, working with improvisational and chance processes to reveal the varied qualities of surfaces and materials, and subtly using existing and constructed architecture to reframe my work. These approaches ultimately expand my practice and invite the audience to think of reading as something done with the full body and full spirit.
Spirit, 2021, shown in an installation view of Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22
Kameelah Janan Rasheed. New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo by Jose Cotto. © Kameelah Janan Rasheed
On Abandoning the Written Word
As a text-based artist, it was hard to articulate a break with the affordances of the Latin alphabet to explore the language that erupts in other forms—shapes in lucid dreams, skin marks, shadows, the shape of my late granny’s arthritic hands, sidewalk patterns, and the like. This was not an abandonment of text in my practice; instead, it was a very spiritual break with the idea that written text is the highest form of communication; a gradual abandonment of language’s only objective to be clarity; an even more accelerated abandonment of considering humans as the sole authors and users of language; and a more startling acceptance that all language is not produced consciously—that in fact our skin and throat and feet erupt with a kind of language that emerges via something other than a conscious choice.
Still from Keeping Count, 2021–23
Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Original score by Th&o, Johannesburg, South Africa. Courtesy the artist and NOME, Berlin. © Kameelah Janan Rasheed
On the Body as Writing Instrument and Document
It was when I had COVID in May 2023, covered in full-body hives and unable to breathe comfortably without an inhaler nearby, that I began to think about the body as a substrate that allows, without warning, for the eruptions of language, the body as a pattern maker and as that which can be patterned: body imprints left behind on memory foam; hair grease residue left on fabric; beads of sweat; Islamic prayer calluses (zabiba or zebiba); scars and lesions; skin patterning from skin conditions such as my own; and indentations left on the ground as a result of rituals like the tawaf (the Islamic practice of walking seven times around the Kaaba) or ring shouts danced in the tradition of enslaved African people. I am thinking a lot about what Amelia Groom calls “material vulnerability” in her writing about artist Beverly Buchanan’s Marsh Ruins—the ongoingness of material interaction long after the intentions or even presence of the human author. The modes of writing and mark-making in this exhibit are vulnerable, if not only for their impermanence, then also for their refusal to give themselves over to easy legibility.
As I make art objects, I often think about my own weight and body composition in relation to the substrate—how only my body and my weight can yield specific effects that another body cannot.
On Islam, Art, and Surrender
In Islam, we speak often about surrender. In fact, the first time I encountered the poetics of surrender was through learning as a child that to be a Muslim means to be a submitter, in submission. We surrender to the will of Allah. We accept that things are both beyond our control and our comprehension. We acknowledge the mystery or opacity of the things happening because we honor the potency of that veil. We consider what it means to trust in Allah fully. I am thinking about the pleasure of giving oneself over; of not resisting; of allowing oneself to be taken over; to reject lordship. When I make art, I do not imagine myself as lording over the materials to make them bend to my will. I want to listen to what the letter desires; I want to be guided by the direction the pigment wants to run across the substrate. To surrender to not knowing means to encounter an evolving self that chooses to interface with the world as a learner, not a knower.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Unsewn Time runs through January 8, 2024. Hear more from the artist when she talks with Grace Deveney, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator, Photography and Media, on December 9, 2023.
Sponsors
The Ruttenberg Contemporary Photography Series is generously supported by the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation.
