Join us for the In the Studio artist talk series, spotlighting artists and bringing them into dialogue with our audiences.This special talk features New York-based artist Baseera Khan and marks the first time they will be in conversation about their work in London. Working across painting, sculpture, installation and performance, Khan poetically navigates issues around cultural identities, gender and desire. They will be in conversation with Martha Joseph, curator in contemporary art, sound and performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Khan is interested in exploring how the economies of materials and colour intersect with labour, family structures, religion and spiritual well-being. Their work features recurring shapes and symbols, included in their sculptures, Chandeliers, and the ongoing performance pieces Acoustic Sound Blanket. Khan is the custodian of their father's fragmented archive of newspaper clippings, diplomas, political cartoons, currency transfers, gold rates and prayer times. His stories, full of Kashmiri gardens, geometric patterns, and the effects of The Partition, become unreliable truths, influencing Khan's concepts of culture, religion and family. These unreliable memories largely form the basis of Khan's artistic practice.
Khan will discuss a new body of work called Red Paintings that abstract hand written notes, patterns, and story telling extracted from a small pocket book in their father’s archive. The colour red, central to this work, is the first colour a baby sees, and its use also draws inspiration from both historical and personal photographic exposure. They will also discuss recent sculptural works highlighting Khan's inspiration from photography and installation. These include works from the Bust of Canons series, merging 18th-century sculptures of Tibetan and Buddhist deities housed in the Brooklyn Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art collections with their own body, or re-imaginations of chandeliers and wall-mounted sculptures called Backdrops depicting Khan's home in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Throughout Khan's practice, identity and the cultural and economic value of materials seem to take precedence over art historical genres. Khan is currently exhibiting works in a solo show called Pocket Diary on view at Niru Ratnam Gallery, London (7 March – 17 April).
'The pressure of identity is too much and too constructed, so I try not to reinstate these colonial labels in my work; instead, I try to emancipate them through my use of form, colour and performance – I abstract identity through multiple ways of working. My life's work is dedicated to the development of my own legacy, on my own terms. With the use of architecture, fashion, painting, photography, textiles, music, parody, sculpture and performance, I manifest my femme native-born Muslim American experience.' – Baseera Khan
The evening will include an artist presentation, talk and Q+A.
