CHICAGO — Spoken language begins with a tone, a grunt, an utterance. Written language originates from marks that are sewn into symbols. These are combined to create characters and words, forming sentences, paragraphs, and complete texts. Artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed deconstructs written language, unraveling blocks of text. Over the years, she has mastered the art of distilling text down to its essence — symbols and marks — visual utterances expressing something that words cannot.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Unsewn Time at the Art Institute of Chicago explores uncertainty, embracing all that is uncontrollable and unknowable. Departing from her earlier text-based works, but continuing her process-oriented practice, her new experimental photography and video works incorporate light-sensitive paper and materials that can be hard to control or contain, or can yield unexpected results, such as rubbing alcohol and vaseline.
A series entitled Surrender reflects upon the uncontrollable as the artist lets light-sensitive paper and photochemistry “do their thing” — submitting to something greater: the medium, the universe, the will of Allah. The list of materials takes into account all the variables that contributed to the outcome: “luggage compression as the paper traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, humidity in a third-floor apartment in Oakdene, Johannesburg (elevation: 5617 feet) on December 31, 2022, fluctuating body weight, skin oil, kosher rock salt, and time.” Rasheed’s Study series describes the process that went into creating the Surrender series through actions cited in the titles: crumbling, folding, dripping.
I, like many visitors, watched the looped video “Keeping Count (Annotated)” multiple times, captivated by the rhythmic progression of animated text, printmaking, mark-making, symbols, and film clips, set to a hypnotic score. I tried to find the beginning and the end and to extrapolate meaning by applying my own schema before I surrendered to the beguiling work.
Rasheed reproduced the glyphs and marks from pages of Etel Adnan’s poem “The Arab Apocalypse” (1989), punctuating animations of text, the artist’s marks, drawings, and clips from the Prelinger Archives (a collection of educational and amateur films). Adnan began to write a poem about the sun, but it transformed into a response to the atrocities of the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990) — specifically the 1976 siege and massacre of the Palestinian refugee camp Tel al-Za’atar, in which 3,000 Palestinian civilians were killed after the camp was overtaken by Phalangist and Chamounist forces. The sun, the poem’s former subject, became a universal signifier that took many different forms. These suns were represented by various glyphs that disrupted the flow of text.
Adnan used symbols and utterances to convey meaning beyond the limits of written language. Rasheed’s multidisciplinary practices also involve writing and visual art, blurring the boundaries between the two, but her work takes text as a point of departure, stripping away layers of meaning until only the marks remain. This recalls the Hurufiyya movement, a form of abstract art that takes Islamic calligraphy as a starting point, distilling the sacred script down to an aesthetically pure form.
Rasheed’s artistic process emulates her father’s method of studying the Koran and other texts upon his conversion to Islam — collecting, reproducing, combining, and annotating printed text. “Keeping Count,” like her earlier text work, operates as a living document; similar to the Talmud or the US Constitution, it is an extended conversation between the text and various authors and readers over time. Rasheed annotated the 2021 video, doubling the run time from the original work, turning the piece into a dialogue between the artist, the work, and the audience.
Although Rasheed is inspired by calligraphy in traditional Islamic art and modern Islamic abstraction (Hurufiyya), as well as Etel Adnan’s glyphs, her family converted to Islam in the 1980s and she was raised with the religion as practiced by the West African jihads, which carried through to the trade of enslaved Africans (including Muslims) who influenced the Black American culture and vernacular. Interactions with text build a bridge between Islam’s Arabic origins and the call-and-response tradition of the African diaspora, a combining of Arabic and African diasporic traditions to from a Black-Islamic artistic lineage, expressed through annotations and interactions between the author and readers. Rasheed’s work does not attempt to reveal static and absolute truths, but intentionally remains abstract, open-ended, and inconclusive, leaving space for the unseen and the unknown.
The opacity of the work is integral — as the artist reminds us, words or mathematical formulas cannot explain the spiritual.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed: Unsewn Time continues at the Art Institute of Chicago (111 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, Illinois) through January 8. The exhibition was curated by Grace Deveney, David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Associate Curator, Photography and Media at the AIC.