Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s work looks at knowledge and how it is created, embodied, stored, cataloged, hidden, learned and also unlearned, with particular focus on facets of incompleteness, information (il)legibility and the use of seemingly error-ridden image- and text data. Based on a 1974 poem of the same name by American writer Lucille Clifton, her exhibition “i am not done yet” at Kunstverein Hannover deals with questions of incomplete knowledge and continuous learning through “Black storytelling” and “Islamic mysticism.” At the same time, the titular sentence “i am not done yet” can also be understood as an assertive, declarative statement in its own right. Rasheed works primarily with paper and vinyl that she attaches to walls and public spaces, creating what she describes as “ecosystems of iterative and provisional projects;” individual works include scaled, photocopy-based collages, publications, prints, and films. The artist’s practice draws significantly on her previous work as a trained pedagogue and teacher. She often mines literary and scientific sources for text elements that she then alienates or distorts with an artistic visual vocabulary that directly addresses the viewer with black-and-white typography. Her concern here is less the complete comprehensibility of what is shown than presenting visitors with an opportunity to find their own connections and correlations between works.
On display in the first room of the exhibition is Rasheed’s “Spirit,” a group of small- to medium-format archival inkjet prints created in 2021. The works feature a wide array of abstract motifs ranging from stark black-and-white contrasts to flowing organic imagery, all defying clear iconographic classification. Some of the prints recall analogue photo negatives; others have the character of greatly enlarged photographic aberrations: images that have documented the process of their own creation or supposed defect and now (as the title of this group of works suggests) resemble ghostly apparitions. In the latter interpretation, Rasheed’s cropped or heavily blurred compositions represent a conscious play with seeming arbitrariness, and an aesthetic that suggests error. Other works in her “Spirit” series show elements resembling rough wall surfaces or stitches, calling to mind bodily injuries. Explicit use of black and white, which are considered non-colors, underscores this comparison with the photographic medium and characterizes Rasheed’s entire artistic oeuvre; in it, she pursues questions related to the legibility and representation of signs, historical facts, and phenomena that cannot yet to be put into words, as what they represent (still) eludes categorization and consequently remains illegible. The artist views it as a gesture of refusal, as a “visual language of error” eludes fixed definitions and all-too-easy categorizations.
Rasheed’s 2021 video “Keeping Count” opens with a voice-over commentary by the artist; she speaks the words “We speculate that everyone will be saved through the algebra,” a phrase that appears parallel to her speech in the form of text. What follows are historical excerpts from a 1970s, black-and-white film in which the technology company Hewlett Packard describes the benefits of a computer calculator. Rasheed’s piece explores what it would be like to try to find a solution to a set of problems with multiple unknown “variables.” Mathematical equations appear in the video; they are interspersed with bits of black-and- white footage showing the universe, which are in turn aesthetically counteracted with images from abstract works. The piece finds the artist juxtaposing the human desire for precision and clarity—a promise of mathematical logic—with the inevitability of abstraction and spirituality. Its soundtrack is a spherical sound composition by the South African musician Th&o.
Room 3 of the exhibition shows Rasheed’s interest in the legibility of information at the level of language: The artist has chosen to show text fragments with a grainy aesthetic (presumably the result of photocopying them several times) that heavily distorts or blurs the body of that text. The presentation unites pieces from the past eight years with the earliest work in the exhibition, Rasheed’s “Punctuated Blackness” from 2013. The latter shows the word “BLACK” six times in heavy capital letters on a white background. Printed in a vertical stack one below the other, each iteration of the word is followed by a different punctuation mark. The close grouping recalls lettering in commercial advertising or on political pamphlets, for example: the means by which a product or political message is advertised. Here the subject of “Blackness” appears in an unusually offensive way without (as so often the case when it comes to this topic) falling back on its image equivalent. Instead, slight shifts in punctuation alter various levels of meaning around what it means to be Black. Some punctuation marks give the word the look of a sober statement; others make it seem almost hesitant or dubious; still others have it appear as a self-confident exclamation. Another work, “Selling My Black Rage to the Highest Bidder” (2018) locates a connection between the titular Black rage and economic interests, specifically when the aforementioned emotion is to be auctioned off to a fictitious highest bidder for maximum profit (the text in this case is image and message in one). What at first glance seems like a cynical conflation of capitalism and human emotion is, on closer inspection, a self-conscious re- empowerment of the victim role to which Black people have been relegated, one that has become entrenched in society after centuries of unequal treatment. According to the artist, text is never final. Readers or visitors are always essential to its completion, as it is they who interpret it and place it in new contexts of meaning. This is precisely how Kameelah Janan Rasheed conceived “i am not done yet,” her exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover: as an exhibition space to be physically experienced but also read, just as you would read a text.
The approach is most evident in the 2022 installation “Primitive Hypertext (after Octavia EstelleButler),” on view in Room 4. Inspired by the American science fiction author Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), Rasheed has placed a series of wall texts right and left along the entire length of the space. Supplemented with drawn gestures, visual elements, objects, and symbols, they form a kind of freely accessible, nonlinear web of signs and meanings. Placed on the lower part of the walls are a range of numbers that refer to objects, photographs, and images, rather like footnotes. The artist reinterprets their actual function as explanatory notes, instead juxtaposing text and image in such a way that the supposed “footnotes” serve as more than simple insertions of information; they are a key component of an installation that visitors can both walk through and read. Also featured in this central section of the exhibition are a number of small-format, undated black-and- white photographs. Entitled “Prayer” (2021), the series shows a selection of presumably twentieth-century photographs that were purchased at flea markets. In them we see church scenes, Christian rites such as baptism, but also everyday moments in the lives of Black people in the United States. Rasheed conceived the installation as a walkable, choreographed text-and-image environment that would be immersive for visitors and have neither a beginning nor an end in the classical sense; instead, continuous movement through the space points to a range of cross-references and meanings. The latter aspect is crucial to Rasheed’s way of thinking: the artist herself speaks of a physical rather than purely mental learning experience when she emphasizes that learning happens through and with one’s own body, and that confining learning to the mind obstructs that process.
At just under four minutes long, Rasheed’s video “Lucid Dreams: Draft 1” (2022) tackles the subject of so-called lucid dreams, a kind of self-aware dreaming that the artist herself has experienced since she was nine years old. The phenomenon refers to a dream state in which the dreamers are fully aware of the fact that they are dreaming and make decisions based on that awareness. Text fragments, abstract motifs, and natural landscapes are interspersed with scenes set to music showing people who have influenced the artist over the years, among them the American writers Octavia E. Butler and Lucille Clifton. Rasheed connects these diverse impressions with an array of artistic devices including film material that she paints and modifies, and its constant interruption with film scenes full of poetic power. Viewers encounter footage of Sufi whirling, for example, a form of meditative dance meant to put the person performing it into an ecstatic trance, thereby enabling their contact with God. While the artist made repeated attempts to speak about the phenomenon of lucid dreams in the past, she found that her explanations led to the temporary absence of said dreams, as though speaking of them had caused them to evaporate. The video work seen here is Rasheed’s artistic way of capturing these impressions without attempting a clear explanation, and she has said she views “Lucid Dreams: Draft 1” as a metaphor for her artistic work as a whole: “The video is an attempt to explain my artistic practice, which is just not clearly classifiable. People want clear explanations like a neat package, like a little box that fits in their pocket, and I couldn’t make a box into which everything fits.” The last exhibition space ties several of Rasheed’s areas of interest together: She transforms textual statements into mathematical formulas and juxtaposes them with archival, black-and-white photographs of American church congregations (“Prayer,” 2021) that schematically depict various different scenes from Black faith communities. Her work “And, who amongst us will circumambulate the beloved idols of perfect certainty. Also, 18:109. And we fall, dizzy.” (2019) similarly takes up the theme of faith, while also exploring the extent to which that very lack of certainty is to be accepted as part of human existence.