Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist deeply interested in the economies of materials and colour. Khan's artistic practice examines the intersection of these elements with labour, family structures, religion, and spiritual well-being, prompting them to work across a variety of mediums. These include public art installations, photography, sculpture, painting, performance, and music.
For Pocket Diary, Baseera Khan presents two newly developed series of oil paintings, emphasizing the properties of colour through a decelerated image-making process. Inspired by the colour red, the first colour a newborn baby sees, Khan recalls a childhood memory, developing negatives under a red light bulb with their father. Khan creates "Red Paintings", selected from pages of their father's pocketbook-filled with inked images, birth and death dates, events, and desires. In these works, calendars and personal archives transform into emotive colour fields where intensely personal and identity-forming content dissipate into tangible forms, volumes, chroma and material.
Khan is the custodian of their father's fragmented archive which comprises newspaper clippings, diplomas, political cartoons, currency transfers, gold rates, and prayer times. His stories, full of Kashmiri gardens and the effects of The Partition, become unreliable truths, profoundly influencing Khan's concepts of culture, religion, and family. These unreliable memories form the basis of Khan's artistic practice.
A key work in the exhibition, "The Liberator" from the "Bust of Canons" series, merges an 18th-century sculpture of Naro Dakini, a Tibetan Buddhist deity housed in the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, with Khan's own body. Naro Dakini, a known symbol of spiritual liberation, severs humanity's deluded consciousness. On the basis of its recorded history and symbolic provenance the original deity is disrupted and retranslated into a new body that is deliberately misaligned with Khan's own. It highlights the ideas of communal experiences through institutional ownership, but also points to the challenges of private claims to antiquities, which form illegal economies and silences histories. In this way, Khan inscribes themselves into history as an agent of disruption.
Khan engages with the identity, cultural and economic value of materials, prioritizing this over art historical genres. At their recent solo exhibition, 'Floral Fix' in New York City, Khan composed floral paintings using the chemical foundations of acrylics, crude oil, alcohol, and oil paint. Several small works on paper from this series will also be included in Pocket Diary. Khan continues their exploration of slow processes, meditating on the emotional states linked to colour.
The "Grand Trine" series features geometries of light overlaying floral ornamentation. These geometries are based on Khan's astrological birth charts and draw the viewer's attention away from the painted walnut foundation. The use of walnut panels honor historical Kashmiri wood carving traditions, crafted by unknown artisans and relegated to decorative arts. By carving into the panels and employing shallow picture planes, pigment and geometry, Khan redirects the viewer's gaze and obscures the culturally significant material beneath.
Gallery 2 showcases wall-mounted draped sculptures called "Backdrops," depicting scenes from Khan's former apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Initially created as sets for a pilot television program at The Kitchen, New York, these objects suggest the artist's gaze while the body is absent. "Acoustic Sound Blanket," part of Khan's ongoing performance work, further emphasizes this absence. These objects shelter and offer safe space. Selfie-lights illuminate the "Backdrops" from within, hinting at the artist's presence. The viewer is invited into the artist's living space, but the artist remains just beyond reach, a paradox of invitation and distance. Two slowly rotating chandeliers, resembling cosmic disco balls, also hang with the "Backdrops." Their vibrant colours and intricate patterns, which are similar to those in Khan's paintings and "The Liberator" sculpture, reflect their family's artistic legacy of sketching and textile design. The chandeliers' rotation animates the room, casting light and creating a dynamic space for movement and dance.
Khan (b.1980, Denton, Texas) is a New York-based artist whose wide-ranging conceptual practice encompasses painting, sculpture, installation and performance. Their work draws on their South Asian cultural heritage in order to explore the convoluted economies of materials, and the often hidden links to invisible labour, family structures, power and surveillance. Khan's work poetically navigates issues around cultural identities, gender and desire. Khan has had one-person shows at Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2023), High Line, New York (2023), Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2022) and Brooklyn Museum, New York (2021). This will be Khan's first solo exhibition in the UK.
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