Baseera Khan: I Am an Archive

“I Am an Archive“is a solo show of Baseera Khan. The artist uses their own body as an archive, often employing a variety of multimedia collage techniques to visualize the lived experiences of people at the intersections of Muslim and American identities, both today and throughout history.

The exhibition debuts eleven new artworks, in conversation with key works made since 2017, that explore Khan’s body as a site of accumulations of experiences, histories, and traumas.

On view are rich and multilayered sculptures, installations, collages, drawings, photographs, textiles, and a video in which Khan investigates othering, surveillance, cultural exploitation, anti-blackness, and xenophobia within our public and private spaces—and proposes avenues for protection and liberation.

The works express Khan’s interest in revealing the economics of goods and materials—such as oil, hair, architecture, and art—as commodities that create inequalities and otherness and that are historical and contemporary drivers of global change.