Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen

Assistant Curator: Linda Franken

KW Studio about the exhibition: in the coherence, we weep with Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Sofie Krogh Christensen and Christina Landbrecht. Production: LOCOLOR, Realisation & Producer: Gregor Kuhlmann, Camera & Sound: Gregor Kuhlmann, Adrian Nehm, Editing & Color Grading: Lia Valero. A production by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 2023.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, US) is the 2022 recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research, which is jointly awarded with the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Community.

Rasheed focuses her work on the materiality and legibility of text, writing, and language, as well as the potential of intermedial translation. Her practice is informed by a multitude of ideas and theories from science, literature, philosophy, religion, and critical theory, between which no epistemological hierarchies exist. The questioning of these and her own embodied knowledge becomes the force that drives Rasheed and her work. It also makes her stumble and pause as well as rethink and reconsider the ontology of the studied subject matter and the pursuit of continuous enquiry. She interweaves certainty with uncertainty and breathes the space in-between, following the oblique path of a learner. In her practice, the Brooklyn-based artist collects references and maps them out like in the layout of a book. She regards letters as characters with histories, desires, and interiority, and integrates these into her writings, annotates them, montages them, and attaches them to walls. By doing so, Rasheed bridges the gap between politics and poetry, trying to find connections and points of disintegration.

in the coherence, we weep is about the critical potential of incoherencies. It is an attempt to map methodology across media, while welcoming glitches that allow for moments of critical self-reflection and knowledge production.

Obtaining her MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University in 2008, the pursuit of learning has long been an integral part of Rasheed’s artistic identity and research. Her strategies are rooted in Black studies and the Black radical tradition, counting poets Lucille Clifton and Octavia Butler as well as scholars Ashon Crawley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Fred Moten, Tina Post, and Kevin Quashie, among many others, as sources to engage in conversation with. Like in her approach to artistic research, Rasheed’s works are also in constant conversation with each other, across timespans, across (exhibition) spaces, and across the pages of books. Her practice creates opportunities for improvisation—not only in the conversations with peers, which she cultivates extensively in her writings, interviews, lectures, and teachings, but also in the conversation between text fragments that she strings together in her work.

in the coherence, we weep is both an artist book and an exhibition. While the publication centers on conversation as its theme and method—through exchanges with curator and architect Ladi’Sasha Jones and with artist Chang Yuchen, among others—it is also in conversation with the exhibition: The publication should be seen as a score, and the exhibition as a performance of that score. Developed in parallel, the book and exhibition critically reflect on each other’s approaches, letting their genesis and form fold into and blur one another. Weaving together Rasheed’s existing work and major new commissions, the exhibition further probes histories of Black improvisation, play, and experimental poetics; strategies of how text can be alive and vibrant across various architectural contexts as well as those used in the artist’s family archive, particularly looking at annotation, redaction, indexing, blurring, and learning through reading and writing.

Rasheed comes from a home of readers. Growing up in East Palo Alto, a small city in the Silicon Valley, the artist was surrounded by all types of printed matter and parents who, each in their own way, enjoyed working through it. Particularly her father and his montage technique had a lasting influence on her way of considering texts as something malleable, which is why in the coherence, we weep begins and ends, implicitly and explicitly, with the archive of Kamal Saleem Rasheed, the artist’s father. Not only is a selection of his personal notes That Which Sprouts Another (c. 1984–2023) on view for the first time, but Kameelah Janan Rasheed also works with “ancestral co-writing” (after Alexis Pauline Gumbs), an intergenerational language of collaboration. This occurs in several of the displayed works, e.g., in a series of newly commissioned archival inkjet prints This indicates whether desire opens a sentence and This form is not aware of its form (both 2023).

Spanning the first and second floor of KW, the exhibition unfolds as “primitive hypertext”—a concept, coined by Octavia Butler, of reading as an interactive process shuffling between multiple sources at once—or, in the words of semiotician Umberto Eco, as “an interreferential walk between semantic gaps” with the viewer becoming the adhesive between them. Centered in the open atrium, the overlapping text of the newly commissioned monumental banner series, Air Shaft Study I–III (2023), blurs in and out of focus, challenging legibility and the viewer’s bodily relation to reading. Rasheed perceives the KW atrium as an air shaft, as discussed by Tina Post; a space of “contrast” and blurred voices in which bodies, architecture, and subjectivity calibrate, both literally and figuratively.

In the curatorial and artistic process, the act of revisiting work is particularly important. On the pages of the publication, readers encounter an approach to layering and annotating works and texts akin to what the visitors encounter in the exhibition space. On the first-floor walls, between annotated columns and among a selection of known works, e.g., Punctuated Blackness (2013) and And Black? (2017), the prints Each Sentence is a Sponge and The Page Held (Vibrating Structures) (both 2020) are presented with written notes that join and disrupt the works and their mutual relations, creating a sort of spatial palimpsest.

A similar palimpsest aesthetic is attempted at in the wall work Primitive Hypertext (After Octavia Butler) (2022–) on the second floor, interlacing statements like “I can’t be a comprehensive sentence” with the title of Lucille Clifton’s famous poem “I’m not done yet” (1974) as well as in the wall carving Are We There Yet? (and other questions of proximity, destination, and relative comfort) (2017). Alongside the table drawing Futile Efforts to Capture a Blur (2023) and the video Smooth Operetta (2022), a series of new screen prints and new archival inkjet prints are spread out across bespoke plinths and the surrounding walls, interconnecting the exhibition’s web of references to textual glitches, lucid dreaming, diagrammatic poetry, and the notion of the open text.

In in the coherence, we weep, work and methodology amplify each other. They point to the act of composing, exploring new lines of enquiry, and unsettling normative ways of comprehension.

The book and exhibition are not so much physical and material architectures as they are a resonance space for Black subjectivity: In both score and performance, Rasheed creates layers that go between text and meaning, blurring their relationship, at once indexing and constructing Black spaces.

To expand the exhibition’s resonance space as well as to further the conversation between media, the show’s public program will commission a sonic response to be released during the exhibition, while unpublished excerpts of the interviews between Rasheed and Jones will be made available monthly on the KW blog.

In addition to the exhibition, Rasheed also engaged with the surroundings of KW, drawing on her longtime study of printed matter and political statements in public spaces. Viewers will encounter one of Rasheed’s early works upon entering the KW courtyard: Selling My Black Rage to the Highest Bidder (2019), 2000 xeroxes in the form of phone tear-offs that are pasted to the walls in the passageway. The artist also redesigned the flags adorning the façade of KW, showing the work How to Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) (2014–). 

Installed with two flags in front of KW and with five safety-yellow posters in the streets of Berlin, How to Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) simultaneously evokes and satirizes conventional etiquette manuals. Conceived by Rasheed as a direct response to the growing visibility of violence against Black individuals in the United States, this project delves into the resulting pressures placed upon these communities to control their anger and suffering, maintain composure, and ensure the comfort of others. On a broader scale, the project encourages viewers to contemplate how this kind of self-regulation, encompassing everything from emotional expression to physical comportment, serves as a tool to sustain the social hierarchy within oppressive systems. During the exhibition, this work will likewise be on view throughout Berlin as a series of posters prompting viewers to critically reflect on the public discourse of compassion and suffering.

Artist bio

Kameelah Janan Rasheed was born in East Palo Alto, CA. Rasheed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MA in Secondary Social Studies Education from Stanford University (2008) and a BA in Public Policy from Pomona College (2006). She was an Amy Biehl US Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa (2006–7). As a learner, she grapples with the poetics-pleasures-politics of Black knowledge production, information technologies, [un]learning, and belief formation. Most recently, she is a recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research (2022); Creative Capital Award (2022); Betty Parsons Fellow—Artists2Artists Art Matters Award (2022); Artists + Machine Intelligence Grants—Experiments with Google (2022); and Guggenheim Fellowship in FineArts (2021). Rasheed is the author of four artist’s books: i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, the New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and the Believer. Rasheed founded Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive documenting how Black faith lives, shifts, and self-revises.

Colophon

Curator: Sofie Krogh Christensen
Assistant Curator: Linda Franken
Head of Production: Mathias Wölfing
Technical Management: Wilken Schade
Head of Installation, Media Technology: Markus Krieger
Installation Team: KW Installation Team
Registrar: Carlotta Gonindard Liebe, Monika Grzymislawska
Education and Art Mediation: Laura Hummernbrum, Alexia Manzano
Public Program and Outreach: Nikolas Brummer
Press and Communication: Anna Falck-Ytter, Marie Kube
Text and Editing: Sofie Krogh Christensen, Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Translation and Copy-Edit: Simon Wolff, Sylvia Zirden
Academic Traineeship: Lara Scherrieble
Interns: Hanar Hupka, Alexandre Kurek, Teresa Millich, Hibatolah Nassiri-Vural