The Glasgow School of Art creates exhibition for Glasgow International with New York-based artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed
Image: Are We Reading Closely? (II) installation View. Photo” Joe O’Brien
Are We Reading Closely? (II)
Kameelah Janan Rasheed
11 – 27 June 2021
5 Florence Street, Glasgow G5 0YX
Opening hours Thurs to Sun, weekdays 2-6pm; weekends 10am-6pm
Booking essential via Art Tickets
Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a learner grappling with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished. With the page, the wall, the computer screen, and public space as her compositional fields, she creates associative arrangements of letters, words, and shapes that invite an embodied and iterative reading process. Rasheed is invested in Black storytelling technologies that ask us to consider ways of [un]learning that are interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interstellar. Rasheed’s work has been exhibited internationally and nationally. She is the author of two artist’s books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019). She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the founder of Mapping the Spirit as well as the owner and founder of Orange Tangent Study.
Rasheed, a former public school teacher, has created banners for a classroom in a former Public School Board of Glasgow building, 5 Florence Street, for this Across the City project for Glasgow International.
The venue is the former Adelphi Terrace Public School, designed by Thomas Lennox Watson (1850-1920), located on the south bank of the Clyde, opposite Glasgow Green. Latterly, 5 Florence Street was an annex for the Glasgow College of Printing Annexe (until 2010). The building is now owned and being restored by Urban Office, who will hire rooms out as workspaces and studios. Urban Office is an architect led development company who transform forgotten buildings, reinventing space and repurposing old materials for new uses.
Rasheed’s work for Are We Reading Closely? (II) is the second iteration of ‘Are we reading closely?’, originally made in 2020 for the Brooklyn Museum. This second iteration continues previous conversation concerning close reading as a socio-political, cognitive, somatic, and spiritual process. In a traditional schooling context, close reading is a strategy a learner uses to analyze a text, however, the ethos of close reading can be applied to how we read and make sense of the world at large. Close reading invites us to not only read, but to reread, build ecosystems of thought, unlearn, write new texts, and imagine new worlds.
Glasgow International 2021 is due to take place from the 11th – 27th of June.
5 Florence Street is also the venue for a second independent exhibition Too Much (too little, too late), curated by Giulia Gregnanin and Understate Projects Ltd, featuring works by Adam Christensen, SAGG Napoli, Jeanne Tullen and Nora Turato.
Urban Office: Urban Office, the venue partner, is an architect led development company who transform forgotten buildings, reinventing space and repurposing old materials for new uses. Focusing on creating healthy, environmentally friendly spaces they also have a property technology team that is designing and innovating new systems for the future of old and new buildings.
The banners have been printed by GSA Centre for Advanced Textiles and sewn by West End Fabrics.
Image: Are We Reading Closely?, 2020 , Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY)
Photo Credit: Jonathan Dorado
Venue Partner: Urban Office
Curated by Glasgow School of Art Exhibitions
Supported by Glasgow International
Notes for Editors
Artist’s bio: Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985, East Palo Alto, CA) explores Black textual production and interdisciplinary storytelling. Within this work, she considers privacy, or the poetics, politics, and pleasures of approximation, [mis]recognition/translation and dirty data. Her work considers how we tell stories that consider interiority, lenticularity (or varying modes of visibility and legibility), revision, and syncretism. With the page, the wall, the computer screen, and public space as her compositional fields, she experiments with ecosystemic arrangements of letters, words, sentences, shapes, textures, and tonalities. A believer in the generative qualities of unfinishedness, Rasheed creates iterative and provisional projects. These projects include sprawling, “architecturally-scaled” xerox-based collages; large-scale public installations; publications; prints; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; performance scores; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined.
Rasheed has had national and international solo exhibitions and projects at the New Museum, NY (two-person); Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow, UK; Rice University, Houston, TX; Brooklyn Public Library, NY; Brooklyn Historical Society, NY; and Brooklyn Museum, in addition to public installations with Public Art Fund and For Freedoms / Times Square Arts. Her work has also been exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale; Institute for Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA; Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev, Ukraine; Mass MoCA, Williamstown, MA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Bronx Museum, NY; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NY, and The Kitchen, NY, and will be included in the Glasgow International, UK (2021) and Prospect.5 (2021). Her awards and residencies include the Vision Residency, International Studio & Curatorial Program, NY; The California Air Resources Board Commissioned Artist; Pioneer Works Residency, NY; On Religion Photography Grant, Magnum Foundation; Art Matters Foundation Grant; and Triple Canopy at NYPL Labs. She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019). She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts. Rasheed is the founder of Mapping the Spirit as well as the owner and founder of Orange Tangent Study.
Links:
https://glasgowinternational.org/events/kameelah-janan-rasheed-2/
Listing:
11 – 27 June 2021
Are We Reading Closely?, Kameelah Janan Rasheed
5 Florence Street, Glasgow G5 0YX
Opening hours Thurs to Sun, weekdays 2-6pm; weekends 10am-6pm
Booking essential via Art Tickets INSERT Link
A solo exhibition by USA artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed, in a former Public Board of Glasgow School, as part of Glasgow International’s Across the City programme, curated by GSA Exhibitions