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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
Open from Tuesday to
Sunday 12 pm → 6 pm

Admission always free
ArchiveExhibition
28 Sep 18until24 Mar 19

Kameelah Janan Rasheed

An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations | How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette)

CAG Façade and offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station

Graphic black and white text-based prints scattered across a pink backdrop. The texts are short statements such as “PUDGY POWER,” “TEMPORAL TWERK,” “ANACHRONISTIC ANGER” and “QUARANTINED QUESTION.”

Image credit: Kameelah Janan Rasheed, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (detail), 2018. Photo: Etienne Frossard.

The Contemporary Art Gallery presents the first solo exhibition in Canada by Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator Kameelah Janan Rasheed. This project brings together two large-scale, text-based public installations: How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) presented offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Canada Line Station and An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations in CAG’s street level window spaces.

Language is the material through which Rasheed’s artistic practice takes shape and it does so across a variety of public environments: publications, performative lectures, gallery installations and large-scale outdoor works. Within these modes, she uses expressions of everyday vernaculars and experimental poetics to consider Black subjectivity and the relationships we craft between disputed pasts, a set of sprawling present conditions and contingent futures. Core to Rasheed’s work is a direct address and openness to exchange with her audiences: as an educator, she understands her installations as educational experiments where collaboration rather than spectatorship is the desired mode of engagement. She aims to interrupt the speed and care with which we normally encounter language in the context of the city street, an essay, a gallery exhibition or in other environments, encouraging us to actively make meaning alongside, through and with the works.

How To Suffer Politely (And Other Etiquette) at Yaletown-Roundhouse Canada Line Station is a series of safety-yellow vinyl prints that both invoke and satirize traditional etiquette guides. Created in direct response to the escalating visibility of violence against Black people across the United States, the work examines the resulting expectations placed on these communities to find ways to police their rage and pain and to maintain restraint and civility so as to ensure others are not made uncomfortable. More broadly, the work asks its viewers to consider how such self-monitoring of everything from emotional expression to physical movement is used as a tool to perpetuate the social order of oppressive systems. Previously exhibited across the USA, in the UK and in Zimbabwe, each time it is presented the project resonates with the specific social, political and economic conditions of Black communities in those particular locales. In Vancouver, How To Suffer Politely… asks viewers to scrutinize our own city’s history of racialized violence towards its Black communities, the willful erasures of Black visibility and over-simplified narratives rehearsed about such displacement that continues to this day.

Extending across CAG’s window spaces, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations is an evolving collection of succinct poetic gestures developed over a multi-year writing process. Comprising over one hundred alliterative pairings, a fraction of which are presented in this second large-scale iteration, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations maps Rasheed’s considerations of comfort, apathy and premature celebration. The seemingly absurd word pairings — such as lethargic / legislations, delicate / drone and uppity / uterus — are at once provocative and elliptical. These humorous and dystopic adages ask us to consider both routine abuses of power as well as the responses to said abuses.

The printed panels of poetry appear to punctuate the windows at intervals across the building’s facade behind which glows ‘Baker-Miller Pink,’ a paint colour applied in numerous penitentiaries, asylums and public schools in the 1970s with claims to notionally reduce hostile or aggressive behaviour. In this context, the colour might signal a contemporary weariness or indifference, but also the obsolescence of certain ways of being in the world, for organizing and articulating realities and for making change. In consideration of the thousands of pedestrians who pass by CAG’s façade day after day, Rasheed has designed these short aphorisms as a pedagogical intervention, as invitations for repeated reads. With each new engagement, she offers each viewer the chance to conjure fresh sets of connections, associations and queries.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips, with assistance from Julia Lamare

Work at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station is presented in partnership with the Canada Line Public Art Program, InTransit BC.

Biography

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b.1985) is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist, writer, and former public high school teacher from East Palo Alto, California. Rasheed’s work has been presented at the 2017 Venice Biennale, New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Printed Matter, Jack Shainman Gallery, Studio Museum in Harlem, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Pinchuk Art Centre, and others. Shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize in 2017, she is the recipient of several other awards and honors including the Denniston Hill Artist Residency (2017), The Laundromat Project Alumni Award for Art in Community (2017), Harpo Foundation Grant (2016), Magnum Foundation Grant (2016), Creative Exchange Lab at the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art Residency (2016), and Queens Museum Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship (2015). Rasheed is the founder of Mapping the Spirit, a digital archive that documents the textures and nuance of Black religious experience in the United States through long-form interviews, photography, video and ephemera. She is the author of a forthcoming artist book published by Printed Matter as well as An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations forthcoming from Endless Editions. Rasheed’s other writing has been published in Triple Canopy, Creative Time Reports, The New Inquiry, and Frieze, among others. Rasheed is on the faculty of the MFA Fine Arts program at the School of Visual Arts and also works full-time as a social studies curriculum developer for New York public schools. In 2018 and 2019 she will be an artist-in-residence at Pioneer Works as well as Triangle Arts.

An exterior image of CAG’s façade with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the windows. Each window has a pink backdrop with black and white text-based vinyl prints scattered across.
Four ground level façade windows at CAG installed with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Each window has a pink backdrop with black and white text-based vinyl prints scattered across.
Two ground level façade windows at CAG. They each have a pink backdrop and black and white text-based vinyl prints that read “Kind Killings,” “Regressive Rights” and “Homicidal Hemiline.”
The exterior of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the facade. There are large, safety-yellow vinyl prints with large black text on five window panels.
The exterior of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the facade. There are large, safety-yellow vinyl prints with large black text on five window panels.

Documents

Program guidepdf1mb

Talks & Events

The exterior of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the facade. There are large, safety-yellow vinyl prints with large black text on five window panels.EventTalkKameelah Janan Rasheed
27 Oct 18·3:00 PM
Two ground level façade windows at CAG. They each have a pink backdrop and black and white text-based vinyl prints that read “Kind Killings,” “Regressive Rights” and “Homicidal Hemiline.” EventWorkshopKameelah Janan Rasheed
16 Feb 19·3:00 PMuntil5:00 PM
Graphic black and white text-based prints scattered across a pink backdrop. The texts are short statements such as “PUDGY POWER,” “TEMPORAL TWERK,” “ANACHRONISTIC ANGER” and “QUARANTINED QUESTION.”
An exterior image of CAG’s façade with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the windows. Each window has a pink backdrop with black and white text-based vinyl prints scattered across.
Four ground level façade windows at CAG installed with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed. Each window has a pink backdrop with black and white text-based vinyl prints scattered across.
Two ground level façade windows at CAG. They each have a pink backdrop and black and white text-based vinyl prints that read “Kind Killings,” “Regressive Rights” and “Homicidal Hemiline.”
The exterior of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the facade. There are large, safety-yellow vinyl prints with large black text on five window panels.
The exterior of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station with the work of Kameelah Janan Rasheed installed on the facade. There are large, safety-yellow vinyl prints with large black text on five window panels.