Artist Reception Kameelah Janan Rasheed

Emerson Contemporary presents: “Kameelah Janan Rasheed: all velvet sentences as manifesto, Like a lesson against smooth language or an invitation to be feral hypertext” on view January 23 – March 23, 2024. Exhibition explores language, spirituality, and learning through poetic and experimental writing across a range of substrates and contexts. 

Exhibition hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 12-6pm. 

The multimedia site-specific installation combines new video drafts and existing video works from the last three years. All created using some form of a writing and video editing constraint, these works live alongside several 2D works also created using constraints to explore the agility and limitations of language. With an investment in Black experimental poetics, non-linear cosmologies, and fugivity, Rasheed asks, “What can be captured through writing? What is lost? And how can this inevitable loss be an invitation to consider other modes of communication?” Rasheed incorporates abstract shapes, gestures, and markings that border visual glossolalia and asemics. She presents these works alongside diagrammatic compositions of letters (Latin and Arabic) diacritics, and fragments of annotation.