Kameelah Janan Rasheed: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations and How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette)

×

Expand

Kameelah Janan Rasheed, "How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette)," 2014 - present

Image courtesy Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, UK, 2016

Artist Talk | Kameelah Janan RasheedSaturday, October 27, 3pmJoin Brooklyn-based artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed for a walking tour discussing her works on view at CAG and off-site at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Canada Line Station.

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed. The exhibition comprises two large-scale, text-based public installations: An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations on CAG’s façade and How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) presented off-site at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Canada Line Station.

Rasheed’s artistic practice employs the use of language across publications, performative lectures, gallery installations and large-scale outdoor works. Within these modes, she uses vernacular expressions to consider Black subjectivity and the disputed pasts, present conditions and futures of these communities. Through these expressions, her work directly addresses her audiences, encouraging passers by to actively make meaning with the installations.

How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) at the Yaletown-Roundhouse Canada Line Station is a series of safety-yellow vinyl prints that satirize well known sayings of etiquette. The work responds to the increasing visibility of violence against Black people across the United States, and examines the expectations that others place on these communities to find ways to police their suffering to ensure that others are not made to feel uncomfortable.

Previously exhibited across the USA, in the UK and in Zimbabwe, each time it is presented the project highlights the conditions of Black communities in its exhibited locations. In Vancouver, How To Suffer Politely … asks viewers to scrutinize this city’s history of violence towards Black communities and the erasures of Black visibility.

Extending across CAG’s window spaces, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations is a collection of alliterate word pairings which Rasheed has developed over a number of years. The work highlights Rasheed’s consideration that despite the visibility of the many social and racial issues going on in contemporary culture, our society pertains an apathetic and care-free attitude towards making change. These pairings of words such as lethargic / legislations, delicate / drone and uppity / uterus, are intentionally contradictive, mimicking how such issues are frequently acknowledged yet seemingly ignored.

Behind the presentation on CAG’s façade is a glow of ‘Baker-Miller Pink’, a paint colour used in numerous penitentiaries, asylums and public schools in the 1970s claimed by researchers to reduce hostile or aggressive behaviour. In this context, the colour presents an ironic environment in which to acknowledge these issues. In consideration of the thousands of pedestrians who pass by CAG’s façade day after day, Rasheed has designed these short statements as an intervention to be read on repeated occasions. With each new engagement, she offers viewers the chance to make new connections and associations with the work.

At Yaletown-Roundhouse Station work is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program, InTransit BC

Bio Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b.1985) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and former public high school teacher from East Palo Alto, CA. Rasheed’s work has been presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art - Philadelphia, Printed Matter, Jack Shainman Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Pinchuk Art Centre, and others. Shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2017, she is the recipient of several other awards and honors including the Denniston Hill Artist Residency (2017), The Laundromat Project Alumni Award for Art in Community (2017), Harpo Foundation Grant (2016), Magnum Foundation Grant (2016) and the Creative Exchange Lab at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art Residency (2016), among others. Rasheed is the founder of Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive that documents the textures and nuance of Black religious experience in the United States through longform interviews, photography, video, and ephemera. She is the author of a forthcoming artist book published by Printed Matter as well as An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observationsforthcoming from Endless Editions. Rasheed’s other writing has been published in Triple Canopy, Creative Time Reports, The New Inquiry and Frieze, among others. Rasheed is on the faculty of the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts and also works full-time as a social studies curriculum developer for New York public schools.In 2018 and 2019 she will be an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works as well as Triangle Arts. A 2006 Amy Biehl Fulbright Scholar to South Africa, she holds a BA in Public Policy and Africana Studies from Pomona College (2006) and an EdM in Secondary Education from Stanford University (2008).

CAG façade and off-site at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station