Like Oil and Water: Interview with Baseera Khan

Could you tell me about your work iamuslima (2017), which comprises a pair of customized Nike Air Force One mid-top shoes?

In early 2017, Nike launched its new female performance wear targeting athletes who are interested in modest gear. The sweat-wicking hijab, designed to cover one’s hair, was savvy marketing by Nike for its female consumers. Female sports icons from all over the world photographed in these hijabs made the company appear to advocate for Muslim-Americanism while the United States government had just imposed travel bans against Muslim Americans and countries with large Muslim populations. One year before, Nike was rejecting the embroidering of “Muslim” or “Islam” on their ID customization platform, so the hijab could have been an attempt for them to bring back “diverse” clientele after enduring a widespread boycott and lawsuit. Nike also began to restrict the degree of customization with their Air Force One shoes. Now, customers are only allowed to embroider their first, middle, or last names on their tailor-made sneakers. In my project, I work against the new customizable platform that limits the chances of the brand being associated with “offensive” or polarizing messages.

I managed to customize a pair of Nikes for the project, iamuslima, through a strategy in my practice called, “misspelled, on purpose.” The shoes, embroidered with the statement, “iamuslima,” visualize how our corporate environment, like our nation, is inherently Islamophobic with its historical anti-black policies. Corporations are known to work solely in service of their bottom line. Their net profit is affected by shareholders and the politics that surround these individuals. I was looking at a matryoshka doll of complex people politics through the sneakers.

My art is not activism—that’s not my job—but this particular work documents the steps a company like Nike is taking to cover up larger systemic problems, and this is exciting to me. It reminds me that it is not about good or evil, but that there is capitalism. And individuals can be quite powerful when we come together. Boycotts change the directions of bottom lines and affect policy. Ultimately, let’s face it y’all, black and brown bodies all over this world have a lot of money. Duh, Nike!

Could you tell me about your performance Braidrage (2017)?

Braidrage is an endurance performance that involves me making my way up an indoor rock climbing wall. The performance comprises 99 Holds—unique dyed resin casts of different corners of my body that are embedded with traditional gold wearable chains, braided strands of hair and gold hypothermia blankets commonly given to refugees. The work came together after several infuriating situations in my life. I was left with nothing more than instinct to move past the hard times, and rage. Rage protects my softness when softness is not an option. Rage is also a strategy in my practice. It allows me to swing towards madness as a form of resistance and to tackle historical pain and displacement.

Braidrage gave me a chance to grapple with tracing the movements of my body while climbing the synthetic corners of it, with the resin casts, dispersed on the wall, symbolizing the different fragments that form my collective self. There’s a sense of intimacy but the work is also very much about the way I understand the female body in painting and the structures of inclusion, which I imagine as being vertical. I wanted to see how high I could climb on this metaphorical ladder. There is also a connection to jewelry, heritage and ownership. The gold and silver chains represent the materials with which women’s bodies are traded, bought and sold. The hair and refugee blankets are similarly symbolic of a contemporary system of trading and the totemization of “the marginalized” in Western media.

These components form the DNA of the installation. The Holds, or corners of my body, can be collected individually, but later, a curator could bring them all back together again. The paperwork accumulated from this would become a part of the work. It would show a diaspora of how the pieces lived, where they’ve been installed, and who has been grabbing on them. I like to visualize the lives of my artworks in both long and short terms. That’s a major part of how I build my practice.

Could you tell me more about being a Muslim femme and how it informs your practice?

I grew up hearing stories about how Islam became a religion. One of the stories that stuck with me was about prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) meeting his first wife Khadija. Supposedly, she had short hair and was super hot, and he was like, I want to be with her! And then he goes to the mountains and comes back down with the first chapters of the Quran. The anecdote showed me how powerful women are—I wasn’t thinking of Islam as a religion or anything like that, and the story is a cherry-picked vignette, but because of it, I assumed women ruled the world. Also, when I was growing up, Benazir Bhutto was the president of Pakistan and Ann Richards was the governor of Texas (lowkey, I didn’t understand she wasn’t the president of the United States). I didn’t really understand what feminism was, I didn’t feel that struggle and I didn’t develop any kind of way around gender politics. I was young and confused. But then when I was older my family started to push me to get married and I started to realize that I have no power. I’m going to be handed off to another tribe and given a gold necklace to symbolize that I am owned. My new tribe would continue to control me like with my family. I began to see the patriarchy in my everyday. So all that was like oil and water. While on one hand I thought we (femme) owned the world, I also came to understand that our destinies are predetermined. We have no sovereignty over our own bodies.

I recently wrote a grant, which asked me to explain why it is important in this moment for me to receive the funding. I decided to say it’s because I would not be here without the sacrifice of many Muslim women and undocumented, or marginalized peoples who have gone without voices. I don’t know them but I know that their struggle is why I am here.

Could you tell me about your installation Karaoke Spiritual Center of Love (2018)?

The Karaoke Spiritual Center of Love incorporates elements from karaoke lounges, like chandeliers, LED lighting, padded seats, a disco ball and televisions. I also lowered the ceiling of the room where the work was installed because it was important that people know the space is not neutral. I wanted to bring people into my world, and I wanted to bring attention to the space so people feel the architecture around them. The lowered ceiling hopefully gives one pause to think through all the layered structures one does not necessarily see when they move through space.

The materials covering the seats, on the other hand, are prayer rugs, underwear and fabrics from my mom, who is a hoarder. When she finds these things, she gives them to my sisters, nieces, or me.

Playing on the television screens are homemade Karaoke music videos. The visuals in karaoke videos are typically completely disjointed from the lyrics—sometimes in offensive, or beautiful, or confusing ways—so I used the same strategy to convey my sense of displacement, alienation and disorientation.

The work was very popular and I was able to show it in different capacities, for example, at the Sculpture Center’s 2018 show, “Another Echo,” curated by Allie Tepper, presented as part of the In Practice program. For that iteration of the work, I pulled the tops off the seats and put them on the walls, and created cabinets for people to sit and listen to the music coming from the seat itself. When you sit down your butt vibrates from the base, which may also cause a sense of discomfort.

What is your relationship to sound?

My relationship with sound began with my mother teaching me to recite the Quran as a child. I grew up trying to understand the text as poetry and music, not a theology. I was good, but never became great at reciting the scripture. Eventually I did understand the spiritual aspects of the text, but at that point I was also moving on in terms of musical taste and was more interested in American music. I saw a lot of similarities in the tonality of the Quran with rap, R&B, and indie rock. This all feeds into a branch of my practice that investigates music, pop culture and representation. I’m curious: Bollywood movie soundtracks are the single most popular kind of music in the world, but why aren’t there Asian-American pop stars? We have MIA, but MIA won’t have us—America didn’t treat her very well either.

The art world and the art market may find your work illegible because you do not neatly fit into a prescribed category. Could you tell me about how you have moved forward in making your work regardless of this and how you have responded to limitations via lack of or projected context?

My works were illegible for a long time. When I did my show “iamuslima” at Participant Inc with Lia Gangitano, in early 2017, I took it as an opportunity to think through all of my previous material.

I am primarily an installation artist—that means I use the materials that I can in a given space. Installations artists are taught that nothing in the room is neutral and I see this kind of artmaking as a political tool and a transformative one at that. There was a long period of time when I didn’t have a studio. I made works in my bedroom, which is why sleep became an important component in my work. I feel that sleep can provide a space for imagination, for ideas to grow, evolve, and sometimes even be resolved. So I consider myself to also be making art while sleeping. I’m very responsive to space, and shows help me articulate certain concepts not because of the audience but because of the context of the space.

I wonder if being an Afghani-Indian-Muslim woman allows for creative privilege in some way, because no one can fully “claim” you. Do you feel privileged, or that maybe the “failure” to belong can be a good thing?

The main culture that we dealt with in my family was Islamic culture. Or, at least, the kind of Islamic culture instilled by my parents, which was Arabic, but a South Asian version. There would be total disconnect when I met with someone from India because, first of all, it’s a huge country that has been cut up into territories, each with their own dialects and cultures. But also, the Khans are hybridized peoples who came from different spaces of war and conflict, such as Iran, Afghanistan and Africa. We are like the other among the others.

I think if you are working from a space of negative return, you may be the only one in the room who has the chance to imagine a new way of being and becoming. That might be why I, or someone who looks and thinks like me, might be such a threat. And that perceived threat silenced my vocal cords at times. My Acoustic Sound Blankets (2017) installation of silk, felt, industrial sound insulation and gold custom embroidering, allowed me to shout while hiding me at the same time. Art saves me in that way, or at least the way I’m building my long-term practice does. For a while I felt like I wanted to be a part of something. I’m not going to lie about that. I wanted a normal charming Texan life with gritty subcultural themes of art and music; I wanted to be the goth, industrial, indie girl with great politics and fashion sense. Then I realized no one is claiming me, so I’m going to do my own thing and make my own legacy. When I started to build my own sense of self, I understood that the chic goth girl I tried to be in order to fit in was deeply colonized and was scared of being a brown Muslim femme in America. I saw that there is inherent patriarchy, racism and misogyny in even the most progressive subcultures of art, music and film. So it felt natural to call me something of my own design. I’m calling myself “iamuslima.” 

Formal considerations are clearly important for me in my art but setting a standard for my lexicon, and creating a kind of legacy is more important, in a way. If I were to graft myself into art history I’d say there is a link to minimalism, and that links to performance and sculptural ideas set into my mind early on when my family was teaching me about Islam.

Creating your own lexicon is particuarly important because this lexicon—your narratives and ideas—also relate to your performance, curatorial and pedagogical work?

It made sense when I was approached by the assistant curator of Queens Museum, Sophia Marisa Lucas, to co-curate the 2018 Queens International, “Volumes.” I had knowledge that I felt ready to tap into and I knew that putting together the exhibition with Sophia could also be a learning experience. Most importantly it was a way for me to give other people space and time to say what they need to say. The show opened on October 7 and will be on view until February 24, 2019 with many public programs.

How do you relate to Queens as a locale?

I have always seen Queens as a home because I see people that look like me walking around everywhere, and Queens Museum is really the only place predominantly showing people of color. Many museums are trying to radicalize their programs but no one talks about how Queens Museum was always doing this work.

It was really important for Sophia and I to not only make sure we research artworks extensively and think precisely about the thesis of the exhibition—which, very briefly, is about analogue and digital knowledge and information coming together to make a third space—but also that we expand the definition of this survey that happens every two years. Sophia had been given this opportunity well before approaching me, to make relationships with the Queens Public Libraries and a key artist in the show, Milford Graves. Upon meeting we had an immediate kinship, which developed as we worked together over this past nine months to mount the show. We were given extensive floorspace for the exhibition, so along with the open call we included important figures in the Queens area such as Graves, Mary A. Valverde, Jack Whitten and Cullen Washington Jr.

We are in this culture where we spotlight emerging artists and established artists. But what happens to the mid-career artists who are sort of stuck in a space where they are illegible? “Volumes” tried to complicate these categories and set up an ecosystem where all of these artists get to do their best work and can have conversations with each other.

We also conceived the authorless project “Volumes Cyanotype,” which involved everyone—museum staff, curators and artists—getting together to have dinner, and to pay respects to the land we were occupying. We invoked that through having an indigenous caterer who walked us through pre-Columbian foods native to the region. Everyone brought an object and those got put on a light-sensitive surface so the sun exposed the uncovered areas. The fabric was used at the dinner party and hoisted in the exhibition.

Do you see Queens International as your curatorial “debut”? I know you have curated before but this is the first time that you’re in the foreground as the artist-curator.

I don’t see myself as a curator like Sophia. She is very methodical, five steps ahead, and thinks through all the scenarios. She truly is there to care for the work and has little interest in speaking for the artwork—she wants only to give it the best platform and expand its readability. I’m an artist so at times I really had to take a step back from my opinions. However, I tap into a social, emotional geography, and think through connections because I am hyper-imaginative and a risk-taker. Sophia and I are mutually impressed with each other’s abilities.

The hardest part about putting together the exhibition as a co-curator was that I am an artist, but at the same time that was my strength. I gave my show at Participant Inc. everything that I had, and I want to keep and build on the foundation and momentum I made there. Curating is just another way for me to be legible as an artist. It is all in service of maintaining my position as an artist and researcher.

Queens International 2018: Volumes is on view at the Queens Museum, New York, until February 24, 2019. 

“Not for Everybody,” a group show curated by Allie Tepper and featuring Baseera Khan, Hadi Fallahpisheh and Gloria Maximo, will be on view at Simone Subal Gallery, New York, until December 21, 2018.

To read more of ArtAsiaPacific’s articles, visit our Digital Library.