Kameelah Janan Rasheed

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Rasheed’s multidisciplinary practice explores the speculative relationships between written language, surrogacy, and desire. Rasheed creates immersive multimedia installations, public art projects, publications, performances, scores, and video works with attention to the language as material and immaterial. Her current work looks at the reading and writing process as transgressive and erotic acts of ingestion, immersion, enmeshment, and estrangement. Reading and writing is to desire an intractable intimacy with language. As we attempt to draw closer to language through the ruse of total comprehension, so does language desire proximity to us. These bidirectional gestures of intimacy are what animate the reading and writing process.

A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores communication practices and poetics across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. Most recently, she is a recipient of a 2023 Working Artist Fellowship; a 2022 Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research; a 2022 Creative Capital Award; a 2022 Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants – Experiments with Google; and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship in Fine Arts. Her recent solo exhibitions include REDCAT (2024), KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books: in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). She is on faculty at the Yale School of Art, MFA Sculpture Department, and an instructor at the School for Poetic Computation. Rasheed founded Orange Tangent Study, a consulting business that provides artist microgrants and supports individuals and institutions in designing expansive and liberatory learning experiences.