_____ With Letters: A Conversation with Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Abstract

_____ With Letters: A Conversation with Kameelah Janan Rasheed Paul Benzon (bio) and Kameelah Janan Rasheed (bio) Kameelah janan rasheed’s work grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. Engaging primarily with text, rasheed works on the page, within digital interfaces, on walls, and in public spaces. Her work has been exhibited nationally at the Brooklyn Museum; the New Museum; MASS MoCA; the Queens Museum; the Bronx Museum; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; the Brooklyn Public Library; and the Brooklyn Historical Society, among others. Her work has been exhibited internationally at NOME; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; Kunsthalle Wien; Bétonsalon Centre d’art et de recherche, Paris; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Artspace Peterborough, ON; the 57th Venice Biennial; and the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, among others. Her public installations have appeared at Ballroom Marfa; the Brooklyn Museum; For Freedoms x Times Square Art, New York; Public Art Fund, New York; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; the California Air Resources Board; and several others. When I reached out to her to arrange this conversation, I had studied her work online but never seen it live in person—pandemic conditions kept me in upstate New York, away from her 2020 and 2021 shows in Brooklyn. Scratch that. No need to explain, because in some sense, nobody has seen a work by Kameelah Janan Rasheed—not really seen it. This is true at every level [End Page 241] of scale. In macroscopic terms, each piece within Rasheed’s prolific œuvre is itself constantly changing, perpetually subject to what she describes as “the right to revision”—the right to reconceptualize a text, image, object, or idea over time; to rethink and rewrite; literally to see, and to know, again and again in ongoing cycles of reformulation. Her 2019 artist’s book, No New Theories, signals this from the outset, opening with an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges’s The Book of Imaginary Beings: “A book of this nature is necessarily incomplete. . . . Our wish would be that the curious dip into it from time to time in much the way one visits the changing forms revealed by a kaleidoscope.”1 And indeed, as she discusses in our conversation below, this project is currently in its third iteration, continually incomplete, reshaped through error, annotation, and accumulation. As with No New Theories, much of Rasheed’s work continually turns the kaleidoscope, iterating words, phrases, and marks across a range of surfaces. At a microscopic level, these works are designed to frustrate legibility: their dense textual spaces simultaneously invite us to read and place a check on the impulse toward reading as an impulse toward stability, blocking it with opacity, iteration, and schematic fragmentation. Her 2020 installation, Are We Reading Closely?, adorned the façade of the Brooklyn Museum with black and white banners, each one covered with reproduced texts and images: annotated excerpts from book indexes, photographs, an x-ray of a hand touching words. The answer these architectural text-objects pose to the show’s titular question seems to be at once both yes and no. For Rasheed, this destabilization of legibility is deeply political, a resistance against the surveillance of Black bodies, texts, and communities across history; indeed, the conceptions of reading and revision she imagines in her work insist on constant mobility as a means of escape from legibility and transparency as colonialized states of being. Across Rasheed’s projects, words serve as moving sculptures. Deeply collagic and archival, her work invokes print objects ranging from the book (the Bible, the Qur’ān, the notepad, the catalog) to the telephone poll handbill to the chalkboard alongside scraps of digital and televisual culture. Over the pages of No New Theories, handwritten chapter-and-verse citations and low-res images of Rasheed taken by U.S. Customs and Border Protection resonate against cryptic textual collages (“drinking her milk: respective scriptures,” reads one snippet) and photos of Steve Urkel. One representative page holds black computer-set [End Page 242] text on a white background, clearly cut from a printed document (perhaps more than one) and ever so...