Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, US) is the recipient of the Schering Stiftung Award for Artistic Research 2022, 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. In her practice, the Brooklyn-based artist and learner 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 both an artist book and an exhibition. The project 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. 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. The book should be seen as a score and the exhibition as its performance. Weaving together Rasheed’s existing work and major new commissions, the exhibition further probes histories of Black improvisation, play, and experimental poetics. It looks at strategies for how text can be alive and vibrant across various architectural contexts as well as those used in the artist’s family archive, particularly annotation, redaction, indexing, blurring, and learning through reading and writing.

Additionally, Rasheed engaged with the surroundings of KW, e.g., in Selling My Black Rage to the Highest Bidder (2019) in the KW passageway and through a redesign of the flags adorning the institution’s façade, showing the work How to Suffer Politely (and Other Etiquette) (2014–).

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.