Kameelah Janan Rasheed is a

from East Palo Alto, CA

(1) A quick note on chronology and time in my practice. This chronology applies to the public presentation of the work, not the sprawling and non-linear interior and sometimes immaterial research processes. The dates exist for bureaucratic clarity, but are not intended to signal the beginning or end of a process. For example, a work marked “2023” signifies the concretization of certain ideas for public engagement, but much came before that moment and much will come after. I imagine my work as a series of networks or even call-and-response. I may call in 2002, but may not have the material and immaterial wisdom or methods to respond until years later.

(2) I have divided my work into the sections below not because I believe in the distinctions between these practices; they leak into one another. I did this as I oscillate between modes of legibility as an artist. Sometimes, people are invested in the wandering. In other cases, directness is desired—the registers in my practice leak into one another. I want to offer leakiness as a liberatory technology--leakiness or the porous boundaries between rituals (syncretism); leakiness or the porous borders between bodies of text (intertextuality); leakiness or the porous boundaries between modes of communication (across language systems, across substrates, across species, across disciplines, across temporalities).

Leakiness is a politics of intimacy: an invitation to wander and wade in the wet; to touch and make anew what has not been made solid; to [un]know and [un]learn; to return to the scene of presumed certainty for revision. Leakiness is a kind of interdisciplinarity, or a yearning to move, to be alive in many ways - to be without the grasp of a body of knowledge or a narrative arc. It is to be imminent in ways that exceed the predictability of a singular discipline.

(3) This is powered by just a little bit of JavaScript. Much of my work is rooted in aleatoric activities.