Kameelah Janan Rasheed's exhibition titled "beneath this sentence is a hole* and your words are leaking. i place my mouth at the puncture site, waiting to be engorged by your lactating punctuation" transforms anonymous gallery into an immersive landscape where language seeps, spills, and saturates the senses. Presented in collaboration with NOME, the exhibition pushes the boundaries of how we engage with language, suggesting that words are not just seen, but felt — consumed like a physical substance.
Through immersive installation, Rasheed transforms the gallery space into an environment where the mouth — rather than the eye — becomes the central site for interpretation. The exhibition features a variety of media, including sculptures, video works, photographs, wall paintings, and architectural interventions that respond directly to the space. Rasheed's work engages with the physicality of language, using the metaphor of the mouth to become the vessel through which language is consumed — a sacred act of communion where meaning is not simply understood but absorbed into the body, consumed, digested, and even corrupted. The mouth becomes the primary tool of interpretation, an organ of both consumption and expression.
The concept of saliva as a "highly viscous grammar" suggests that the act of communication is not merely about clarity or transparency, but about the messy, sticky processes that underlie the exchange of meaning. Rasheed challenges traditional notions of reading and interpretation, proposing instead a more embodied, sensory experience.
This exhibition exemplifies Rasheed's ability to blur the boundaries between different mediums and to create work that is as much about the physical experience of the viewer as it is about intellectual engagement. The installation invites visitors to consider how language interacts with the body, how it can be both nourishing and contaminating, and how it shapes our perceptions of the world.
*From Pope L., Hole Theory (2002)
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her practice is invested in the shifting ecosystems of Black epistemologies and the agile relationships between the varied modes of reading, writing, archiving, editing, translating, publishing, reflecting upon, and arranging narratives about lived Black experiences. For Rasheed, the acts of reading and writing are not passive experiences and therefore her works engage an understanding of text as an unfixed, living organism that desires iteration and intervention.
Rasheed’s practice takes form across an ecosystem of provisional projects and experiments: large-scale text-banner installations, lecture performances, publications, sound works, library interventions, and xeroxed “architecturally-scaled collages” (Frieze, 2018), and other forms yet to be determined.
Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s recent solo exhibitions include in the coherence , we weep at KW Institute for Contemporary Art and Unsewn Time at the Art Institute of Chicago. Rasheed has recently participated in the Autostrada Biennale, Prizren; Urbane Künste Ruhr, Bochum; Front Triennale, Cleveland; Athens Biennale; and Prospect New Orleans. She has previously exhibited her work at Kunstverein Hannover; the Glasgow International; Kunsthalle Wien; Future Generation Exhibition at the 2017 Venice Biennale; the Brooklyn Museum; The New Museum, New York; MASS MoCA, North Adams; Studio Museum in Harlem; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; Brooklyn Public Library, among others. Her public installations include Ballroom Marfa; Brooklyn Museum; For Freedoms x Times Square Art; Public Art Fund; and several others. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Artreview, Frieze, Hyperallergic, Guernica, The New York Times, Triple Canopy, and others. She received a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts and was recently awarded the 2022 Creative Capital Award and Schering Stiftung Prize for Artistic Research.