Performance-in-Place:
Waste of a Nation
by Baseera Khan
Thursday, November 5, 2020
6 to 7:30pm EST
This event was held on Zoom
Baseera Khan, Privacy Control at BRIC Arts Media Brooklyn, live performance and climb, October 9, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist. [Image Description: Artist Baseera Khan sits on the floor of a gallery space and wears black headphones, a black long-sleeved shirt, black pants, and gray and lime green socks. She is surrounded by objects including platform boots, tennis shoes, sandals, and an iphone.]
Reflecting on months spent in the confines of her own home and studio, which morphed into a classroom, disco, and café, Baseera Khan's Waste of a Nation featured multiple performance personae, code switching between personalities to deconstruct contemporary notions of cancel culture, the appropriation (and re-appropriation) of language, recently heightened awareness of race’s intersections with class and the environment, and how cultural capital can be mined from both source and colonizer. Khan’s performance was followed by a discussion prompted by Rubin Foundation Director Sara Reisman.
Access Information: This event included live ASL interpretation and captioning.
To read a transcript of the event, please click here.
Bio
Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist who sublimates colonial histories through performance and sculpture in order to map geographies of the future. Khan opened their first solo exhibition at Simone Subal, New York and a two-person show at Jenkins Johnson Projects (2019). They have exhibited in numerous locations such as Sculpture Center (2018), Aspen Museum (2017), Participant Inc. (2017), Moudy Gallery at Texas Christian University (2017), Fine Arts Center of Colorado College (2018), and has performed at several locations including Whitney Museum of American Art and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan was an Artist-in-Residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19) and Abrons Art Center (2016-17), was an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Khan was a recipient of the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant in 2019, was granted by both NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters in 2018. Their works are part of several public permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim, Kadist, San Francisco, and the Walker Art Center, MN. Khan is published in 4Columns, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Art in America, BOMB, Brooklyn Rail, and TDR Drama Review. She received an M.F.A. from Cornell University (2012) and a B.F.A. from the University of North Texas (2005).
I am a New York-based artist who combines distinct and often mutually exclusive cultural references to explore the conditions of alienation, displacement, assimilation, and fluidity. I see bodies as collaged identities constantly subject to volatile social environments, especially within capitalist-driven societies such as the United States. I see bodies as living between the realms of surveillance and otherness which results in a suspension between exile and kinship central to my practice. To balance this subjectivity, I began to self-censor and develop secretive environments of sanctuary in my life and work. These life lessons transform into motives of obscurity that lead me to a careful deployment of material and linguistic shifts. The use of fashion, photography, textiles and music, sculpture and performance manifest my native-born femme Muslim American experience, a legacy for my aesthetic concealment.