Baseera Khan just had her first solo show in New York City, iamuslima. Khan presented work

that packages her social and personal identities with familiar spiritual objects and family

archives. Her anxiety of deep rooted historical trauma matches her concerns with the politics

of immigration in America. Khan’s method to create sculptural endurance performance

works, all in relation to her body, attempt to manage and think through, “what’s next?”

*iamuslima NikeID sneaker by Baseera Khan. Image Courtesy of the artist.*

The first piece seen at the forefront of the exhibition was a pair of Nike Air Force One Mid-

Top sneakers designed by Khan through the NIKEiD project. After hearing of a lawsuit

against Nike for not allowing the word “Muslim” to be embroidered on these customized

shoes, Khan sidestepped the blockade by altering the word. She calls this strategy

“misspelling on purpose”, and had iamuslima inscribed onto the shoes instead, this

manipulated word directly referencing Khan’s identity as both a Muslim and a woman. These

shoes were also a document from her performance during the opening night of the exhibition

where she walked around the space in the shoes, and then placed them atop the stack of

acrylic boxes also seen at the forefront. These boxes were meant to function as an invitation

for others to take their shoes off too.

She then proceeded to perform ablution with a bowl of black chalk nearby, readying herself

to climb a synthetic rock wall installed at the opposite end of the gallery entitled Braidrage,

leaving chalk dust footsteps behind. The rocks were made from resin molds of the corners of

her body with chains and locks of hair embedded into them like DNA. Traversing vertically a

white wall, via the corners, Khan climbed as high as she could until utter fatigue, leaving yet

another residue of black chalk against the wall. Traces of her presence remained throughout

the entire run of the installation.

The Acoustic Sound Blankets placed in the exhibition were worn by Khan in several prior

performances that speak about safe spaces and intimacy. Individuals were invited to come

under the blankets with her, offering protection against assaulting sounds. There are

Psychedelic Prayer Rugs — created collaboratively — colorfully designed by Khan and

fabricated by people residing in Kashmir, India. After visiting the exhibition for an artist talk, I

wanted to probe the artist further about the context of her practice.

Khan expresses the importance of community when making her work. I asked, with

her work primarily exploring themes her own identity, being a Muslim queer woman of

color, how then does she engage or build a community in the process of making

work? How does this community then support the practice of understanding one’s

own identity?

“There was a large group of people that came together to help me with this exhibition.” As a

teacher at Parsons, many former students came together to help Khan with her exhibition. In

return she would plug them into jobs or they were given school credit for their assistance. All

of these students were also queer people of color, which was important for Khan. “It gave

me an opportunity to create an environment of people where, while we were making the

work, we could have an ongoing conversation about our feelings and topics that extended

beyond the classroom discourse.”

*Psychedelic Prayer Rugs by Baseera Khan. Image Courtesy of the artist.*

A longer arc of conversation took place when producing the Psychedelic Prayer Rugs. This

idea, to travel to India and collaborate there, conjured when Khan’s father passed away and

her mother came to live with her for some time. “I was trying to find a way for her to enter into

my world,” continuing to practice engaging the community with her work. She took her

mother to Parsons, toured the design classrooms together, and while Khan taught class her

mother actually helped embroider designs for the Acoustic Sound Blankets. At some point

they came to realize this task was not something they could do alone by hand. Thus, they

traveled to India and were able to connect with artisans to help produce some of the

embroidery in Khan’s show. This is when they discovered the ideas behind the Psychedelic

Prayer Rugs.

Khan comes from a lineage of people that have always worked in pedagogy and textile

construction. Teaching is what she wants to sustain her livelihood along side her studio

practice. Her engagement in this way is most important, and if the work she continues to

make sells, then she would be even more able to provide resources for the community she is

surrounding herself with. “You start to learn about how to be a leader or how to truly be in a

community, and how to form your own family.” Khan, as a teacher and a leader, is a strong

example for students and artists to form more empathetic environments for people with

religious differences, or differences at all, as she builds and engages her own community.

*Acoustic Sound Blankets by Baseera Khan. Image by Maxim Ryazansky and courtesy of the artist.*

Many of the materials used reference the body, and are re-used and employed in

different ways. The Acoustic Sound Blankets, for example, have many iterations,

engaging a community and creating safe spaces. I asked Khan, how do the materials

evolve and continue to reference your body and other bodies?

Khan feels very assaulted by sound, admitting to having an astute sense of hearing which

makes her sensitive to it. The acoustic blankets are a soft space that minimize the sound

coming at you. They were “A micro geography you could slip underneath, to have reprieve

from sound violations, from sound terror you hear everyday– you know, the city is crying and

vibrating constantly.” Her interest in understanding military architecture led her away from the

exploration of physical architecture of a space and instead brought her focus to how sound

controls populations of people, like the call to prayer. “Sound is a way we are controlled; it is

a cue to do certain things; it is very pavlovian. I wanted to repool myself and find my own

affinity groups. Instinctually, the way to do that was to create a vacuum” for these sounds.

She would invite people underneath an Acoustic Sound Blanket in these performances,

activating a space of intimacy. She would gauge interactions based on their comfortability,

offering to sing to them, mostly. The acts would continue as well as the two people engage

by looking at each other and hugging, turning the micro geography into an intimate

environment. She even wore one of these during the women’s marches that occurred in New

York around the time of the inauguration.

*Images of Khan wearing an Acoustic Sound Blanket at the Women’s March in NYC. Images courtesy of the artist.*

Along with these performances is an aspect of a “social construction of how we have

expectations of each other, in regards to all the chaos happening in response to class and

race.” Khan told me, “I wanted to do something and be present, but I didn’t want my body to

be present. To mask myself in this kind of acoustic geography was a way for me to be

present, you can hear my voice, but you cannot see my body.”

*Braidrage by Baseera Khan. Image by Maxim Ryazansky and courtesy of the artist.*

In regards to the rockwall, Braidrage, there was an idea formulated here about

performance and endurance with exercise wielding a way to combat the anxiety from

deep rooted historical trauma. I asked Khan, how is exercise a part of the your daily

practice and your artistic practice?

Khan asked herself “How can I sustain myself making work that gives me something in

return? I want to have fun, I want to be social, I want to be healthy.” This spawned from an

unhealthy relationship she was having with her art practice. She was interviewed for the

2010 Whitney biennial, but she realized the work did not build a community and that the

paintings she was making at the time left her hands, were misinterpreted and she felt had

become instruments for neo-liberalism. She decided to go to graduate school at Cornell to

study, and while she still made a lot of work, she did not engage like before, leaving the

fourth wall up. “Exercise became the thing I learned was what I needed 2014 as I watched

my father and brother and mother’s health devolve. Toxicity is not a normative narrative, I

think it is linked to colonization and displacement and the patriarchy and I wanted to do

something about that and control that narrative in my work. And if I wasn’t doing that I didn’t

want to make work.” In this way, she explains in her bio, strategies for decolonial practices.

Khan attended the Skowhegan residency soon after this realization which played a large role

in pushing this idea. The residency facilities had a sound booth which led her to the creating

of the Acoustic Sound Blankets as well as other performances during the residency. The

environment of the school in general promoted exercise. “I was so healthy…I started to

employ exercise in artistic ways as a way to manage trauma…and I do projects based on

exercise as a medium.” The gym became the studio, where Baseera could use running as a

medium and then used climbing in Braidrage; the performances becoming about endurance.

Presenting the artist’s body in two forms in Braidrage exemplifies a colored body traversing a

vertical plane, pressed up against a white background. “I wanted to see what a woman of

color looked like pushed up against a white wall, and see how far she could go.”

Inside iamuslima: An Interview with Baseera Khan