Baseera Khan
Join us on July 14th
There’s not many South Asians in the New York Art World, and frankly, I think I avoided getting to know the ones that were around me when I was younger because I was afraid that it would pigeon hole me. In a context where you can so easily be exoticized, it can be scary to become a curiosity for others. I know Baseera can relate to this. I don’t think she likes to be pigeon-holed, boxed in, or reduced in any way. She wants to steer her own ship, and she’s fought to do so.
She’s had an unorthodox career. First exhibiting at the legendary non profit exhibition space, Participant Inc, then beginning to show more widely, and eventually working with Simone Subal Gallery, she landed on the Television show The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, where she competed against seven other artists with a rotating cast of judges like Adam Pendleton and Sarah Thornton, for a cash price of $100,000, and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. She won.
I’ve never really gotten the chance to ask her about that experience, but I do know that Baseera took that opportunity and continued to build her visual legacy one exhibition, one body of work, one performance, one talk at a time. The profound intersection of identities she finds herself within offered her a way to unravel histories, visual forms, and power, while really just speaking to what it means to be alive in her body. Identity for her is meant to be ruptured, deconstructed, challenged, and sloughed off. She’s interested in using all the avenues at her disposal to develop complex visual systems that nod to craft, pop culture, karaoke, museological orthodoxy, minimalism, ritual, and more.
Join us on July 14th where we'll talk about what it means to misbehave with materials, what Islam gave them as a formal education before art school did, and what she hopes to leave behind.
About the Artist
Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, painting, photography, performance, music, and public installation, held together by a sustained inquiry into materials, color, and the economies that shape both.
In Khan's own words: “In my opinion, material creates identity, not the other way around. The pressure of identity is too much and too constructed, so I try to unmap gender, economies, and colonial ideologies in my work. By my use of form and color, I try to emancipate objects, images, and performance from their inherited representational responsibilities - I abstract identity with multiple ways of working, keeping you guessing. 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, and sculpture, I manifest a femme native born-Muslim-American experience from the edges of visual histories.”
Khan's work has been the subject of solo institutional exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, and Mass Art Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. Khan received an MFA from Cornell University and a BFA from the University of North Texas.
She’s had an unorthodox career. First exhibiting at the legendary non profit exhibition space, Participant Inc, then beginning to show more widely, and eventually working with Simone Subal Gallery, she landed on the Television show The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist, where she competed against seven other artists with a rotating cast of judges like Adam Pendleton and Sarah Thornton, for a cash price of $100,000, and a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum. She won.
I’ve never really gotten the chance to ask her about that experience, but I do know that Baseera took that opportunity and continued to build her visual legacy one exhibition, one body of work, one performance, one talk at a time. The profound intersection of identities she finds herself within offered her a way to unravel histories, visual forms, and power, while really just speaking to what it means to be alive in her body. Identity for her is meant to be ruptured, deconstructed, challenged, and sloughed off. She’s interested in using all the avenues at her disposal to develop complex visual systems that nod to craft, pop culture, karaoke, museological orthodoxy, minimalism, ritual, and more.
Join us on July 14th where we'll talk about what it means to misbehave with materials, what Islam gave them as a formal education before art school did, and what she hopes to leave behind.
About the Artist
Baseera Khan is a New York-based visual artist whose practice spans sculpture, painting, photography, performance, music, and public installation, held together by a sustained inquiry into materials, color, and the economies that shape both.
In Khan's own words: “In my opinion, material creates identity, not the other way around. The pressure of identity is too much and too constructed, so I try to unmap gender, economies, and colonial ideologies in my work. By my use of form and color, I try to emancipate objects, images, and performance from their inherited representational responsibilities - I abstract identity with multiple ways of working, keeping you guessing. 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, and sculpture, I manifest a femme native born-Muslim-American experience from the edges of visual histories.”
Khan's work has been the subject of solo institutional exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Brooklyn Museum, and Mass Art Museum, and is held in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Walker Art Center. Khan received an MFA from Cornell University and a BFA from the University of North Texas.