KAMEELAH JANAN RASHEED
Artist Statement
Through immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, sound projects, and discursive programming, my work engages with both figurative and literal language to explore how we narrate the connections between the past, present, and future.
In my interdisciplinary and research intensive practice, I consider ideas of selective legibility and opaqueness as a political strategy; the tension between narrative contingencies and narrative resolutions; as well as black traditions of covert literacies and self-publishing.
As an artist-archivist, I create work with found objects, textual fragments, orphaned audio, and other historical residue excavated from sources ranging from flea markets to institutional archives to dumpsters. These excavated objects operate as ghosts—the past showing up in the present refusing to leave and begging for another temporal stage on which to perform. Haunted by these displaced fragments, I create work that maps conversations between seemingly discrete fragments. I am interested in juxtaposition and appropriation of existing material culture as means by which to choreograph new narrative possibilities, to reveal temporal glitches, and to explore new ways of reading, writing, and troubling histories.