2018: The Year According to Baseera Khan

Baseera Khan is a New York–based performance and visual artist whose work treats decolonial histories, practices, and archives as geographies of the future. Her first US solo show, iamuslima at Participant Inc, New York, sprang from her experiences as a self-described femme Muslim in America, externalizing a lesson she learned  a young age: “self-censorship and secrecies can be aestheticized.” Her art has been featured in group exhibitions at the SculptureCenter, New York; Katonah Museum of Art, New York; MoCA Tucson, Arizona; The Kitchen, New York; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen; and others. Khan has performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Queens Museum, and ArtPop Montreal International Music Festival.

The theme for my picks is “unspeakable.” I’m inspired by so many projects this year, by so many amazing colleagues and friends.

1.
JOHN EDMONDS’S HIGHER

John Edmonds‘s first monograph, Higher by Capricious, encapsulates the artist’s observations, thus far, living in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. “Du-rags is about moving to Crown Heights—a predominantly Afro Caribbean neighborhood, where men walk daily in public with their do-rags flowing behind them,” he told Artforum. “I did not see them as gendered, because often they brought to mind that my mother wore them, too. For me, the do-rags represent this supreme genderless black being in an ephemeral divine state. I’m interested in this softness and ambiguity of gender.” Edmonds’s careful practice and intense formal training elevates bodies who have traditionally been seen as othered, hence Higher.

2.
FOUR STATIONS BY RICO GATSON

My Eyes Have Seen, an exhibition of work by Rico Gatson at Ronald Feldman Gallery, features a new video titled Four Stations, which takes as its subject the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. The film depicts the boy’s known route from Bryant’s store to the barn where he was killed to the river, where his body was dumped, and to the courthouse where the trial was held. Gatson has invented a visual language that discusses the unspeakable and in this case the murder of a child. The case was reopened last summer.

3.
JEN LIU’S PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT

A new project by Jen Liu, funded by a LACMA grant for artists working on innovative, tech-driven projects, the video Pink Slime Caesar Shift integrates live action and animation. Liu’s projects involve proposals to alter the DNA of mass-produced, in-vitro hamburgers to carry secret messages of labor insurrection on behalf of Special Economic Zone factory workers in China. I find that Jen is one of the few artists who voice the unspeakable techno-slave-labor practices around the world, the labor that provides us with comforts such as smart phones, computers, and Netflix-and-chill.

4.
HOUSING

A new gallery project by Kenya Johnson-Freeman, an itinerant program of performances and visual art called HOUSING. This year I went with Kenya to NADA Miami only to find we were the only black-run booth with 100-percent POC artists. “HOUSING started as institutional critique in reaction to the art market, and the current value of black art,” Kenya told Hyperallergic. “I had already worked with several black and brown emerging artists, and the relationships I built seemed to be ideal for a gallery. I wanted to craft a black capitalist hub of art. The name originally was Freeman Gallery, using my surname Freeman (a common last name of freed slaves).” One can follow the work and growing programs of HOUSINg on Instagram @housingny.

5.
BRAIDRAGE AT COLORADO COLLEGE

A newly appointed First Nations curator at Fine Arts Center of Colorado Springs, Polly Nordstrand, invited me to do my Braidrage performance as its first exhibition initiative. During my time with Polly, we discussed influences and people I deeply admired, artists that I might propose to teach in the following years at Colorado College. Senga Nengudi built a practice in Colorado Springs and has weighed heavily on my mind; being there myself to exhibit was magic. This was the highlight of my year by far. The following day I flew back to New York only to see her speak in the Artist on Artists Lecture Series at Dia: Chelsea. It was so good.

6.
HALF MAST

A new billboard project by Derek Fordjour called Half Mast—curated/organized by Allie Tepper (now the Walker’s Mellon Interdisciplinary Fellow) through the Whitney Museum and High Line Art—creates a powerful display of bodies that are being commodified in the Meatpacking District but definitely not protected against institutional violence. The work “reflects on the current national reckoning with mass shootings, and the relentless threat of violence against Black and Brown bodies. A portrait of this divided moment in U.S. history, Half Mast presents law officers, students, and ordinary civilians in one compressed, shared space. Alongside teddy bears and balloons reminiscent of street-side memorials, some figures appear marked with targets while others have been reduced to silhouettes.”

7.
JEFFREY GIBSON: LIKE A HAMMER

Jeffery Gibson‘s exhibition Like a Hammer, curated by John Lukavic, was stunning, and luckily I was at the right place at the right time to see the show at the Denver Art Museum. “Gibson frequently explores colonialism and the post-colonial mindset, reflecting on how American Indian experiences parallel other civil-rights movements. His work also revolves around universal themes of love, community, strength, vulnerability, and survival.” Can I retrofit that statement for my own work?

8.
MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A.

A new documentary film by Steve Loveridge about the musician and activist MIA is called Matangi/Maya/M.I.A. It’s radical in its banal moments and shockingly necessary for everyone to experience in every single frame. I’ll never be able to explain the crushing hopefulness that comes from witnessing greatness, especially from a fellow brown, South Asian woman. So much familiarity on the big screen, I must be dreaming, or is it sea-change?

9.
MUSLIM CEMETERIES

A topic that is under-represented and deeply personal: Muslim cemeteries in Texas. My father died in 2014. Due to the foresight of his community and families whose loved ones needed a place to rest, a plot of land was collaboratively purchased during the reign of George Bush, Jr. as governor of Texas. With the ongoing actions of Islamaphobia, grounds such as these are increasingly difficult to afford, let alone make licensed as local, state, and national “security” is creating an environment of hostility and resistance to Muslim cemeteries all over the country. This topic is not covered. All I can promise is to write something of integrity soon and pitch it to a publisher.

10.
MONA HAYDAR’S “HIJABI (WRAP MY HIJAB)”

A song that didn’t get enough play—and the thing that got me through the high ups and the underground tunnel fears of 2018 —is Mona Haydar‘s “Hijabi (Wrap my Hijab).” OMG!!!! Didn’t get enough play ya’ll—this was my personal strength through 2018, so its significant to blast on this. Shout out.